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SALT LAKE CITY — The Jazz invited the press back for the second time in coach Quin Snyder's tenure for a media training camp to kick off the new season. About 25 media members who will cover the Utah Jazz during the 2015-16 season participated, including yours truly.

Let's begin with an admission: Despite covering basketball pretty decently for years, I am quite bad at actually playing it. I haven't played basketball on a regular basis since middle school, where I was the world's first sub-5-foot power forward. This is evidenced in the following clip, where I completely blow an easy layup.

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We started by learning about how the Jazz defend "floppy" sets, one of the most common sets in the NBA, by rotating all five men depending on where the ball is and how the offense moves. In short, the idea is to flood the strong side. After all, only the ball can score, and cross-court passes generally give the defense enough time to recover.

Then we worked on stretching with the Jazz's strength and conditioning coach, Isaiah Wright, before moving into a series of station drills. The drills:

A defensive rotation drill where the Jazz practice how the team "moves on a string" when the offense swings the ball from side to side. We had this one down by the end.

A finishing drill: basically, practicing different types of finishes around the rim, from a floater to a Eurostep move to a reverse layup. Bonus points for finishing over the oar:

A one-on-one zig-zag drill, where the offensive player dribbles in a zig-zag while the defender follows. Pretty simple.

A post-entry drill, working on quick post-entry passes, and just as importantly, quick post-exit passes, to get the defense off balance.

Tony Jones, from the Salt Lake Tribune, has much more talk than he has game. It's clear he played basketball: He moves like a good basketball player in a way the rest of the group really didn't. But the finishing was off, the defensive effort wasn't there, and ultimately, he wasn't a major factor. Sorry, Tony.

Bill Lea and Tony Parks do have game. Both have decent jump shots and deserve to be included on the fictional all-media-training-camp team.

Jody Genessy, of the Deseret News, had a unique style of play. He ended up on the floor entirely too often, and apparently shared a close romance with Hans Olsen on the surface of the playing court. He also spent much of the time playing only offense while his team had to play defense down a man. This strategy was not effective. (Paging Vivek Ranadive.)

Speaking of Hans Olsen, Hans Olsen is a monstrously strong man. I especially know this because he slammed into me while setting a screen to free up his teammate. This was incredibly jarring, like when a bird hits a window and twitches its way to the ground. My glasses were a casualty.

"I think we gotta see. I think certainly Trey is the guy that has proven himself over the first couple of years of his career, he's been there and done that. Bryce [Cotton] had some good minutes at the end of the season last year, Raul Neto has played at a high level in Europe, although he's a rookie."

Snyder continued, "I liken it to a quarterback situation where we've got a returning starter, a redshirt freshman, and then a freshman, and then we've got a couple of running backs over there in Rodney and Alec that have played a little point in their careers. We're going to take a look at it, and it's not going to be a decision that's set in stone at one point in the year."

Last season, the Jazz's willingness to be fluid at the point guard spot allowed them to move Dante Exum into the starting lineup to great effect, giving them 24 wins in the 41 games he started, compared to just 15 wins for the rest of the team. It looks like they'll have that same flexibility this year, though without Exum to step into that role.

The Jazz's season-finishing run also brought a lot of optimism to the team, which Snyder also felt was important to manage.

"Maybe that's the biggest thing right now, is managing what we all feel: excitement. And what we want to feel in that respect, and then the realism of the West." Snyder continued, "I do feel that our team, in that sense, is fragile. We really haven't accomplished anything."

But there's definitely excitement and optimism around the team right now, something that even translated into passionate performances at the media training camp. We'll hear from the real players on Monday for the team's media day.

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