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Don't look now, but Utah is 12-2 in its past 14 games; the only losses were to the Spurs and Thunder. The list of victims is impressive, too: Already, the Jazz have beaten the defending champion Lakers, Miami, Orlando, New Orleans, Atlanta and Oklahoma City. If they beat Dallas on Friday night they'll have beaten three of the other top four teams in each conference, and they a have a good excuse for not beating Boston -- they don't play the Celtics until January.


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Jerry Sloan continues to get the most out of his squad. Will he finally win Coach of the Year?
The question remains, however: How exactly are they doing this? Minus Boozer, Okur, Kyle Korver and Wesley Matthews, Utah figured to lack the depth and size to hang with the West's upper crust, even after trading for Al Jefferson.

Here's the funny part: They actually don't have the size. The Jazz are just 28th in the NBA in defensive rebound rate, pulling down a meager 69.8 percent of opponent missed shots. This is even worse than it sounds, given how often the Jazz send opponents to the free throw line -- missed foul shots are generally easier for the defense to rebound than missed field goals.

The fouling, of course, is a long-term staple of coach Jerry Sloan's teams. They annually either lead the league in fouls and opponent free throws or come very close, so the fact they've surrendered .297 free throw attempts per field goal attempt -- tied for 28th -- comes as no surprise. Unless, that is, you're surprised that their mark is slightly less awful than usual.

Before we go further, look at those last two items again. If I told you about an undersized team that can't control the boards and fouls with abandon, you'd presume that this team was horrid defensively. Bottom five, for sure.

Amazingly, Utah has been good despite those shortcomings. The Jazz rank 10th in the NBA in defensive efficiency, almost entirely because nobody can make a shot against them.

Utah ranks first in both opponent field goal percentage and opponent 3-point percentage, with the latter mark being particularly notable given that the Jazz allow more 3-point attempts than the average team.

Even if one assumes the law of averages will even out the 3-point shooting (it's hard to imagine Jazz opponents making just 30.7 percent all season), the 42.5 percent opponent shooting mark overall is harder to dismiss so breezily. We have a sample of 1,585 shots saying the Jazz, despite their short frontcourt and rampant fouling, are really difficult to convert against.

In particular, Utah has enjoyed tremendous defensive success with a bench that looked very weak on paper entering the season. Earl Watson and Ronnie Price won't contend for the scoring title, but they have been absolute pests as a small, quick backcourt tandem. Meanwhile, Francisco Elson has proved surprisingly competent at backup center, Kyrylo Fesenko impacts games with his sheer size and C.J. Miles has given the group enough scoring to survive.

While Williams' exploits, and to a lesser extent those of Paul Millsap, get all the attention, it's the bench that has been the real catalyst. Each member has a shockingly good plus-minus (a team-leading plus-19.5 points per 40 minutes for Watson, plus-16.3 for Miles, plus-15.1 for Fesenko, plus-13.0 for Price and plus-9.2 for Elson; all numbers from basketballvalue.com), and the second unit has sparked most of Utah's comeback wins. Statistically, Utah has played better with the bench on the floor than the starters.

Of course, with any successful team, health is an unstated factor, too. Utah's rotation players have missed just one game to injury (Watson also had two early DNP-CDs), helping keep the groove going and keeping the offensively limited bench players in roles they can handle.

Nonetheless, the biggest factor here is likely the one I mentioned at the top of the story. Utah is overachieving on defense because Sloan demands nothing less, particularly from the subs who aren't expected to contribute heavily on offense. Essentially, the overt physicality on D is a means to an end: The Jazz will give up lots of free throws, but you'll never see what we saw in Cleveland on Thursday night.

d-will8 wrote:I know Hollinger's praising the Jazz, but I find it a little annoying that the national media's explanation of the Jazz's success so often boils down to something like "the Jazz overacheive because Jerry Sloan gets so much out of his players" (not entirely untrue, but a little overly simplistic) and that people still say we're undersized. It's true that we struggle with defensive rebounding and that, with Millsap playing so much, we're often undersized at the 4, but we're really not a small team anymore, at least not to anywhere near the extent we were the past few years.

Having legitimate big guys with size and length (Jefferson, Elson and Fesenko) and tough perimeter guys (Bell and Watson) has a lot more to do with our newfound success defending against the shot than Sloan demanding "nothing less." I'm not saying that Sloan has nothing to do with our defensive success, but if that's all it boiled down to, we'd have been a lot better defending the shot the past few years. I had hoped Hollinger's breakdown would be a little more detailed and less generic.