Analysis: Jazz late rally not enough to make up for bad performance against the Heat

The Utah Jazz mounted a late fourth-quarter rally at Vivint Arena on Saturday, but it was too little, too late against the Miami Heat. The Jazz lost, 111-105, and fell to 8-5 on the season

High Notes

• The Jazz were playing very, very poorly, and it was looking like they might not even get double digits on the scoreboard before the first quarter was over. Well, Jordan Clarkson wasn’t going to have that. He scored 14 of the Jazz’s final 17 points of the quarter in a span of less than four minutes. He was absolutely the only reason the Jazz weren’t being blown out by the start of the second period.
• Donovan Mitchell’s defense deserves some praise. There was a play midway through the first quarter when the Heat were running in transition with a 3-on-1 chance and Mitchell was the only one standing in their way. Somehow, with patience and perfect timing, Mitchell came up with a steal. Unfortunately the Heat ended up getting the ball back and then scoring after an inbound play, but Mitchell continue to hound as much as he could and finished the first half with three steals and then finished the game with four.

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Low Notes

• At one point, Rudy Gobert left the game limping off the floor. He eventually came back in, but that’s going to be something to keep an eye on. Never good when the defensive anchor is not feeling great.
• Gobert wasn’t the only one that seemed shook up. Right about the same time, Kyle Lowry took a charge from Mitchell and it looked like Lowry took a knee to his...ahem...lower half, as well as an elbow to the face. Lowry was on the ground for a while before going back to the locker room. Mitchell looked like he was shaken up a bit after that play too. Lowry eventually returned, so it at least seems like there wasn’t any serious injury suffered. But Royce O’Neale also ended up on the court for an extended period later in the game after a shove from Bam Adebayo. No one left the game for good but that’s a lot of scary moments for one game, and that was all before the halftime intermission.
• Gobert was assessed another technical foul on Saturday when he got into it a little bit with Adebayo, the techs are mounting for the Jazz.
• Once again the Jazz were embarrassed by offensive rebounding. They got it together a little bit better in the second half than they did in the first, but by then they were so far behind that it didn’t matter.
  “We’re consistently making the same mistakes and lot of it at times involves making the simple play.” —Jazz head coach Quin Snyder

Flat Notes

• When the Jazz were clearly not playing well at all in the first quarter, I thought that maybe this was just another game where they were going to get it together in the second half. I was wrong. The Jazz played a ton of bad basketball on Saturday. Honestly the worst part about all of it was that there were too many plays where they looked just disinterested and out of it.
• The Jazz’s shooting was so inconsistent that I don’t know how to properly analyze what was wrong. Even on the wide open looks, a player would hit a couple and then have a wildly off-target airball. It seemed like they were never in any kind of a rhythm.
• The Heat are one of the teams that deploy a zone defense fairly frequently and you’d think that the Jazz would be ready for that, but they looked completely bamboozled by the Heat’s zone. 
• The fourth-quarter push that the Jazz made was honestly only mildly impressive because it looked like the Heat let up quite a bit on the defensive end. Also, if you’re only going to lock in for the last couple of minutes of a game, then you don’t really deserve to win it.
  “Where the hell was that (the rest of the game)? We can’t be a team that has to get down to lock it. We’ve gotten to that point a few times especially against a team like this.” —Donovan Mitchell