Yesterday, my latest Clipboard post at Basketball Prospectus went up, looking at the Jazz’s poor help defense:

When the Utah Jazz left for a five-game road trip, Utah was coming off five wins in the last seven games. The Jazz was unable to keep their momentum going, losing all five games and then dropping their return game against San Antonio. That leaves Utah with a six-game losing streak, zapping all the confidence out of both the fans and players. he problem isn’t that the Jazz has lost six games; teams go through slow stretches all the time. It isn’t even that Utah lost to a lot of poor teams (including Washington, New Jersey, and Philadelphia during this trip). What is troublesome is these games have been highlighting what has been a problem all year for the Jazz, the inability to defend spot-up jumpers.

Utah is 29th in the NBA when it comes to points per possession allowed in spot-up situations, giving up 1.06 PPP on 41.7 percent shooting in 970 possessions (accounting for 20.4 percent of the Jazz’s total possessions on defense).

The biggest problem that I have seen is with Utah’s off-ball defense. The Jazz simply doesn’t play disciplined team defense, often times helping too late, overhelping, showing help when it isn’t needed or just being lazy on closeouts. This all leads to open jumpers for opponents.

Head on over and check it out!