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No. 9: Utah Jazz
Last Season: 38-44
11th place in West; missed playoffs
During the summer of 2013, the Utah Jazz decided to stop chasing the eighth seed with veterans and build something potentially bigger and better around their young core. The Jazz suffered for a season and a half after letting Al Jefferson and Paul Millsap walk as free agents, but midway through Quin Snyder's first year as head coach, a new Utah team coalesced around a talented starting frontcourt of Gordon Hayward, Derrick Favors and Rudy Gobert.
After trading Enes Kanter at the deadline and promoting Gobert in his place, the Jazz were the NBA's top defense by a wide margin in the second half of the season. That success has spurred hope that Utah could return to the playoffs this season. Though the loss of starting point guard Dante Exum to a torn ACL hurts the Jazz's chances of claiming the eighth seed, the future still looks bright in Salt Lake City.
The early stages of the 2014-15 season showed little indication Utah was on the verge of a breakthrough. A nine-game losing streak in late November and early December dropped the Jazz to 5-16, putting them on a 26-win pace. From there through the All-Star break, Utah was nearly a .500 team.
Things really turned around for the Jazz at the All-Star break. The day before the first game of the second half, Kanter was traded to Oklahoma City in a three-team deal that secured Utah a future first-round pick and the rights to German center Tibor Pleiss.
The move made Gobert the team's starting center. With his 7-foot-1 presence alongside versatile defender Favors, teams found the Jazz defense nearly impenetrable the rest of the season. In fact, the gap between Utah and the second-place Memphis Grizzlies after the break was larger than the difference between Memphis and the New Orleans Pelicans, who ranked 18th. The Jazz's defensive improvement was the largest from the first half to the second half by any team since 1996-97, excluding lockout-shortened seasons:
Although Utah's offense was slightly weaker with less floor spacing, its defense powered the Jazz to a 19-10 record after the break with a plus-5.0 point differential, which was the NBA's sixth-best in that span.