The Triple Team: the Jazz passes the dubious Kings, Rudy Gobert helping and Grayson Allen scoring again

We are on the verge of the season that a major factor, perhaps the major factor, in some of these games is whether the teams that the Jazz plays play or not. Tonight, the Jazz faced the Kings for the second consecutive night, already guaranteed to miss the playoffs, without their starting center and their best player, De'Aaron Fox, who made three fouls in four minutes.

So, Donovan Mitchell puts the ball in the corner, pumps fake and runs the bottom line. All of a sudden, he realizes: "Hey, wait, no one stops me from scoring here, we score!" And gets the easy lay-up.

Next piece, the Jazz Run Spain pick and roll. Normally, success on this game means a command or a pass, but watch what Marvin Bagley, # 35, does on the game. Rudy Gobert tunes the screen to force Joe Ingles to the left – the Jazz is still trying to Forcing Ingles to go left – but for some reason, Bagley is hanging on the right side of the screen. What? Why do you do that? (The answer is that he is a beginner and that beginners are generally bad at defense, but anyway.)

So, the Kings call time, down 10-0. It's their chance to try to sort out their defense and call their next piece. They run pick and pop for Bagley, who sees Rudy Gobert on him and says to himself, "Now is the time to isolate the defensive player of the year. Neither have succeeded.

For Bagley's defense: this is the time of year when promising young recruits simply throw things against the wall and see if they stick. Random wild isos against Gobert are not going to stick, but hey, maybe he should learn that first hand. But in terms of competitive play, that does not mean much.

There is no chance of this being counted in Rudy Gobert's screen help totals, as indicated by ESPN, but I think they matter as much. Dave Joerger tries to move to zone defense. Thus, the Jazz does what you do against the zones: you swing the ball around the perimeter until you have enough space to shoot or attack.

But I like what Gobert does next: he prevents Bagley from making the rotation in time to stop Mitchell in the paint with a screen. This means that by the time he gets around Gobert, Mitchell is already in the air to make things go well. Anyway, everyone could not finish around him, but obviously, Donovan Mitchell is very good.

That's the problem at Gobert: he does so many little things so well. (I know very well that the phrase "little things" makes me sound like an ex-player in the color comment.) There are a lot of shooting blockers in this league who are secretly terrible in a lot of these things. Hassan Whiteside loves jumping for blocks that he has no chance, just like Mitchell Robinson. Tons of great just like to slide the screens, all the better to stand out with.

Gobert wants recognition, yes, but he wants to win more. He will help Mitchell in this kind of game, knowing that it will help his team. He will trade his rebounds with his teammates, knowing that he will not be credited for that. And yes, he will be there almost every time in defense when his teammates rely on him.

He is really very good. I'm talking about it all the time and it's still not enough. This is the main reason why the Jazz are very likely to have 50 wins this year.

Wait, did not he reach a career high on Wednesday? Yes, so he scored 14 points and it was pretty good. But now he scored 23 points, and it was even better.

Allen left the field 10-14 in 26:22 on Friday night to get those 23 points. Yes, he also had six turnovers, also a new career high, so it's bad. But I'm starting to be a little intrigued by the number of different ways he can score the ball.

So there are the talented finals in transition where he divides the defenders – who, it is true, do not succeed in staying straight and making Allen's job difficult. There is the third step after a close, a hard shot to master. There are two very difficult finishes in traffic, one very wide at the top of the panel, the other in contact power sheet. And there is the snake pick and roll we saw in the last game. It's quite the toolbox!

The defense has also gone from horrible to playable, at least against the bad teams. It's a big leap.

And here's the warning: there are a lot of young players doing it at the end of their rookie season. Trey Lyles, who had not played a role in his fourth year, played very well at the end of the 2015-16 season. Trey Burke scored 32 points in the final game of his rookie season, after averaging 16 per game in April. Eric Maynor scored 15 goals on eight shots, Dee Brown had 13 out of seven.

There are, however, some positive examples of Jazz: Gordon Hayward scored 34 points on the last night of his rookie season, which allowed a dramatic improvement in the end. So it could still turn out for Allen, and we have to look at that as a positive sign.