Even something you feel you can be good at (like defense), if you’re not attentive to it and don’t honor it you won’t be good at it. – Quin Snyder
SALT LAKE CITY — This one wasn’t so much about the score or the outcome, which was pretty much a foregone conclusion before the game even started.
Monday night’s game at Vivint Arena was a chance for the Utah Jazz to play against someone other than themselves for the first time all year and to give an Australian professional team a rare chance to come to America and play against a team from the best league in the world.
The Jazz won as expected 108-83 over the Sydney Kings, although the Kings made them work for it perhaps a little more than they’d hoped, staying within 10 points until late in the third quarter.
Jazz coach Quin Snyder was pleased on the whole with his team’s opener, although he called the second quarter, when his team blew a 20-point lead and gave up 31 points, “awful.”
“Even something you feel you can be good at (like defense), if you’re not attentive to it and don’t honor it you won’t be good at it,” Snyder said. “They got a couple of open looks that we didn’t contest and they got a couple of offensive rebounds, where we didn’t defensive rebound and suddenly they get confidence.”
However, Snyder did have good things to say about his team’s unselfishness on offense and the overall play of newcomers such as Ricky Rubio, Donovan Mitchell and Thabo Sefolosha.
Snyder had talked about his team’s passing and defense a lot during the first week of practice and that was evident in the first 90 seconds of the game as Rodney Hood hit Derrick Favors with a nice pass for an easy bucket, Rubio made a long bounce pass to Hood off a steal and then Joe Ingles found Rudy Gobert going down the lane for a dipsy-doodle layup.
Gobert was the recipient of a couple of more lobs from Rubio and Hood and afterward, causing Snyder to say, “I think Rudy got more lobs tonight than the number of games put together last year.”
Hood looked good in his first game as Utah’s heir apparent to Gordon Hayward as the team’s best scoring threat as he finished with 18 points.
Rookie Donovan Mitchell, who the Jazz traded up to get in last summer’s NBA draft, showed some flashes of great play as well as some rookie mistakes, but on the whole it was a nice debut.
Mitchell was the second man off the bench, entering the game midway through the first quarter to perhaps the loudest ovation of the night.
Early on, he grabbed a rebound and dribbled all the way down the court and had his shot blocked. But soon after he faked a pass inside and stepped back for a 3-pointer and later made a nice no-look pass to Sefolosha in the lane.
In the third quarter, Mitchell backed his man down, spun around and fired a strike to Epke Udoh under the basket for an easy layup. Then just as he had three days earlier in a scrimmage at Hill Air Force Base, he sank a 3-pointer at the buzzer. On the night he finished with 11 points on 4-of-8 shooting.
Snyder had said before the game that he would be looking at different combinations.
“We want to see some guys play together. We’ve got depth. There’s a lot of guys that would like to get in the game.”
The Jazz started Gobert, Favors, Ingles, Hood and Rubio as expected and it was no surprise that Joe Johnson was the first sub off the bench.
After that, it was a little surprising that rookie Mitchell was the next man in followed by Dante Exum, Sefolosha and Jonas Jerebko.
Alec Burks, who has been plagued by injuries the past three years since being a starter and the team’s leading scorer didn’t enter the game until the 9:50 mark of the last quarter.
Second-year forward Joel Bolomboy, who played collegiately at Weber State was impressive in his fourth-quarter stint. In just half the quarter, he came up with nine points, including a 3-pointer, three rebounds and a blocked shot that went 10 rows up in the stands.
The Jazz will come back Wednesday night for a game against Maccabi Haifa of Israel and then will take on their first NBA opponent Friday night when Phoenix comes to town.