It's easy to list the positives, from a Utah Jazz standpoint, in Thursday's 104-84 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers.
To wit:1. Jeff Hornacek, the only Jazz starter not to leave his shot in Salt Lake City, went nine for 14 from the field for a game-high 26 points.
2. Center Greg Ostertag, who had to be helped off the court in the third quarter, suffered a mild knee sprain and should be back for Game 4.
End of list.
Everything else about the Jazz's game stunk. The L.A. crowd, hipsters that they are, started chanting "Utah (siphons)" in the second quarter, and who could argue? It may not have been chic, but it was accurate.
How bad did they stink? This bad: John Stockton missed all six of his field-goal attempts. Ostertag missed all three of his shots. Bryon Russell made two of 11. The Jazz bench made 10 of 26, and that's only because Stephen Howard proved that yes, the Lakers can be scored on, by pouring in nine points in the last nine minutes of the game.
Oh, yeah, and Karl Malone had perhaps the worst playoff game of his career, making two of 20 shots. That is not a typo. Your eyes have not crossed. The MVP was AWOL.
"Karl played as bad as he's played as a professional athlete," Malone said. "The shots I was missing, it was almost hilarious."
The guess here is no one is laughing back in Utah.
The Jazz set a whole bunch of franchise playoff records, including: fewest field goals, half fewest field goals, quarter lowest field-goal percentage, half (13.6); lowest field-goal percentage, quarter (9.1); fewest assists, half and fewest assists, quarter Actually, that last one was a tie, but hey, let's not take anything away from this effort. It deserves everything it gets.
"We got beat every way you can get beat," said Jazz coach Jerry Sloan. "They came out and annihilated us. They took us out of everything we did. They came out and stroked us and put us right in the locker room."
"They pretty much did what they wanted with us," Stockton said. "It wasn't even a contest."
As a whole, the Jazz never did play well. Not in a single stretch of the game. They opened by missing their first 11 shots, and ended the first quarter two of 22 from the field. Incredibly, they were only down by eight at that point, because the Lakers failed to recognize their good fortune. Interpreting an injunction from coach Harris to be more aggressive as an edict to commit more fouls, they hacked with abandon in the opening period, in the process putting their chief big guys - Shaquille O'Neal and Elden Campbell - on the bench.
(And by the way, has anyone noticed that the Lakers have played their best basketball against the Jazz when O'Neal is occupying his two seats on the bench? They made their big third-quarter comeback in Game 2 when O'Neal sat down in foul trouble, and in Game 3 he was limited by foul problems to 18 minutes before referee Bill Oakes tossed him for whining midway through the fourth quarter.)
At halftime the Jazz had made six of 44 shots, a fact that prompted Hornacek to say, "You'd think you could throw up hook shots from halfcourt and make six of 44."
It wasn't until the fourth quarter that the Lakers finally accepted what was being handed them and put the Jazz away, after Utah (actually, Hornacek) had mounted a comeback and pulled the visitors within six midway through the third period. Hornacek at one stretch scored six straight Jazz baskets, and he made eight of nine shots in the quarter.
Ostertag's departure - which elicited a chorus of boos and a flurry of towel-waving from the cultivated Laker fans, who also spent much of the evening chanting a certain bovine-related obscenity at the officials, much as you might hear in cosmopolitan Laramie, Wyo. - signaled the end of the Jazz. What little defensive presence they'd had inside evaporated, and the Lakers ended up posting a staggering 56-20 scoring advantage in the paint. The Lakers also outrebounded the Jazz by 10.
Before the Jazz had even left the once-Fabulous Forum, they were promising a better performance on Saturday.
"We've played our worst," Russell said. "We'll get it back."