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SALT LAKE CITY — Zions Bank Basketball Campus was quiet on Saturday. Almost eerily quiet.
The Utah Jazz never took the court for practice. Instead, coach Will Hardy chose to spend the entire practice time in the film room having the team watch all of their 41-point loss to the Warriors the night before.
Coaches didn't cut plays or put segments into buckets; the team sat down and watched the game from beginning to end, pausing to get each other's feedback.
"It was kind of an open discussion," rookie Cody Williams said. "Instead of just Will yelling at us what we did wrong, it was us saying what we see and how we can fix it."
Hardy believes "lecture-style" coaching, as he put it, grows stale, and it's often difficult to determine if players are truly engaged. He wanted to avoid that on Saturday, turning the practice into a place where everyone spoke and provided feedback.
"Nobody makes excuses, nobody is pointing fingers at their teammates. I think it was a really healthy day of everybody, myself included, sort of taking their piece of responsibility for (Friday) night," Hardy said.
The dialogue-filled film session may have been especially beneficial for a Jazz team full of natural introverts. It helped crack some guys out of their shells and learn how to communicate. If they can talk about things off the court, they should be able do to the same on it.
"Conversation always starts a little bit slow. People are sort of tiptoeing, and I think for us to get where we want to go, we've got to strip some of that down and have the ability to openly communicate with each other where we don't feel like we have to make every message neat and tidy," Hardy said. "It's definitely good for the introverts of the group to speak up in front of their teammates and to see that speaking up is OK and you don't get cracked for doing it."
As one can deduce from the final score, there was plenty to discuss. Hardy chose to have the team watch the full game instead of having coaches splice together clips because he didn't want context to be lost. A decision to take a bad shot is made worse when it's preluded by two turnovers, and not picking up Buddy Hield in transition is even egregious after he's just made two 3-pointers in a row.
"When you watch the game in flow, the guys can see and feel how a game can get away from you," Hardy said.
That was evident in the third quarter when the Jazz gave up 38 points without committing a single foul.
"That's almost impossible," Hardy said. "Like, we didn't bump into one person, we didn't chop one person's arm. That's really hard to do in a 12-minute stretch, especially when they score 38 points."
That stretch helped highlight what Hardy saw were the biggest issues from Friday's game: competitiveness, urgency, and body language.
"Scheme doesn't matter if you don't play hard," he said. "Nothing's going to work if you go half speed, and the games are way too long and the season is way too long to overreact to everything that doesn't go our way."
He doesn't want the Jazz to be a team that complains or begs for calls. Hardy noted the NBA is a league here teams and players have to "go out and take it." He's trying to get his players to have that mindset.
When young teams talk about building habits it's often play-based — setting screens, making reads, dribbling, shooting, etc. — but here are also habits of competition. Those were severely lacking on Friday.
"We need to be able to navigate the hard moments because, ultimately, to go where we want to go as a team and as an organization is ugly," Hardy said. "The playoffs are nasty, and nobody feels good physically, and you're tired and you're emotionally drained, and the stress goes up when you're physically exhausted. So how are we going to deal with the tough moments? This is very small scale. In the middle of the second quarter, we have two turnovers, and it looks like the world's ending. We need to adjust our body language as a team, and so we're trying to address that now."
He felt the best way to do that was to watch every second of a 41-point loss.
