The Utah Jazz’s front office group is acutely aware of the team’s shortcomings.
The Jazz used to be a team characterized by their defensive prowess, but they’ve lost some of that identity, and part of that was by design.
After being walloped by sharp-shooting juggernauts year after year in the playoffs — most notably the Golden State Warriors and then the Houston Rockets in back-to-back seasons — the Jazz purposefully sacrificed some of their defensive players in order to punch back offensively.
“We made a conscious decision,” Dennis Lindsey, Jazz executive vice president of basketball operations, said Friday.