SACRAMENTO — Utah Jazz head coach Will Hardy recently said, “winning is boring.”
He didn’t say that winning isn’t fun, or that winning doesn’t feel good. His point was, the things that have to happen en route to winning — the hard work behind the scenes, the monotony of doing things the same way over and over and finding consistency in fundamentals, the need to focus on small things that won’t show up in the stat sheet — those things are boring, but necessary.
I would like to add to that by saying that winning is hard and it takes a long time of doing the boring things to build up to it.
After the Sacramento Kings beat the Jazz by a blistering 44 points on Sunday night, head coach Mike Brown drove that point home in a hilarious, but effective way.
“We just need to be methodical by stacking or playing the right way, possession after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession, after possession,” Brown said.
The Kings are a good example for the Jazz. Despite the fact that they’re 12th in the Western Conference, things in the West are tight and they’re just three games out of the 5th seed. They have good and even great players and in recent years have climbed out of the basement of the standings to become relevant at the end of the season and even into the postseason.
Even so, it’s still hard and the boring and monotonous things are still required of them. Once the Jazz are out of this current phase of the rebuilding process, once they have worked to develop some young players to be the core of the next era of Jazz basketball, things are still going to be difficult.
Importantly, defense has to be a point of emphasis. Hardy has noted multiple times that defense is what keeps players on the court. Brown on Sunday night noted that the Kings players need to realize that even though they have great shooters on their roster (who are recently breaking out of a slump) if they were more concerned with their defense, then they might be looking at a better record.
To his credit, second-year guard Keyonte George is willing to buy into that approach and has been more deliberate recently in trying to do the right things on a regular basis. After a great defensive showing on Friday against the Portland Trail Blazers, he was one of the very few bright spots on Sunday, finishing with 25 points, six assists, five rebounds, four steals and just two turnovers.
George, has started to make a more concerted effort on the defensive end and has said that he doesn’t want to be an NBA guard that is hunted as a good defensive matchup. He doesn’t want to be one dimensional. Instead, he’s trying to make it a priority to show that he is more effective on that side of the ball so that he can help create a contagious defensive energy for the Jazz.
“When I’m pressuring the ball and I’m locked in on that side of the ball it gets me in the flow of the game,” George said. “Defense, you can control that at the end of the day. That’s what I’m starting to realize...Obviously, I’m still a young player. I’ve got a lot to prove to the world, and even to Will. I’ve got to show that I can sit down and guard and he don’t have to take me out in the fourth when it’s time to get a stop — sub me out on defense and sub me back in on offense — I want to be in the game the whole time. So it’s just about continuing to build off these small wins.”
It’s kind of disappointing that on Sunday the Jazz as a whole didn’t feed off that energy the way that the did on Friday night in Portland, when the Jazz beat the Blazers by 41 points. But the Kings also have a different kind of personnel than the Blazers and recognizing that personnel is a part of the boring work.
It’s important to realize that the Kings have a number of players who historically shoot the ball upward of 40%, that they’re able to get hot and score in bunches and that they can make you pay from the perimeter even when you are keeping things pretty clean at the rim defensively.
And although George said that the urgency has to start with him as the point guard, that’s not completely true. It has to be a more cohesive effort. That’s one of the things that the Jazz are working toward.
From a coaching standpoint, the Jazz are trying to build the right habits on an individual level, in order to get players who are going to be ready and willing to do the boring things that equal winning, who are ready to play the right way, possession after possession. But at an organizational level, the Jazz are also building toward that, and part of the equation is figuring out who is going to be that kind of a player, and who is not.