SALT LAKE CITY — Give Joe Ingles credit.
While the Utah Jazz struggled to put away the lowly New York Knicks on Tuesday night, the rookie was making key plays at key moments.
"I think Joe, he was dialed in," Jazz head coach Quin Snyder said after his team escaped with an 87-82 victory over the 12-win Knicks at EnergySolutions Arena. "He did (come up big). It was important."
With just six minutes remaining in the game and the Jazz clutching to a 73-73 tie, the 6-foot-8 guard hit a 23-foot jumper from the wing. Just 30 seconds later, following a New York miss, a Trey Burke rebound, and a Dante Exum pass, Ingles drilled a 25-foot 3-pointer from the same wing.
The back-to-back buckets provided a momentum-swinging series for the Jazz, giving the team a five-point lead and an edge it would never give up again.
Just 90 seconds later, Ingles hit a driving layup, scoring seven of the team's final 14 points. The final score pushed his fourth-quarter total to nine points, including 1-for-1 from the 3-point line. Ingles totaled 12 points in the game.
"Give our guys credit, and I do," Snyder said. "They made plays when they needed to."
The coach, along with his team, was frustrated by how the Jazz played against the struggling Knicks. He felt his players had a lack of focus and game-plan execution, and that they should not have been in a position to need game-saving plays.
"We got in early foul trouble with Elijah (Millsap), we had a different starting lineup, there was a lot of things that provided a lack of continuity," Snyder said. "We put ourselves in a position where we needed to make plays and make shots in order to win the game."
Ingles added that, whether it was the absence of Gordon Hayward or something else altogether, there was something in the air that affected the team's performance against New York.
"I can't pinpoint it," he said, "but it was just one of those things that we hadn't planned for and we didn't execute."
But the missing concentration early in the game set up the opportunity for game-saving heroics.
"I liked how we finished the game. We finished with energy and aggressiveness and we communicated better," Snyder said. "I thought we executed offensively. We got shots."
sthomas@desnews.com
Sarah Thomas earned a degree in Mathematics from the University of Utah and is currently pursuing an MBA at Westminster College. She has been covering sports for the Deseret News since 2008.