The Utah Jazz had a chance to become the first team to clinch a playoff spot on Saturday night but instead blew a 17-point lead and lost to the Minnesota Timberwolves, 101-96, at Vivint Arena.
High Notes
- Nearly everything that the Jazz did well, they did in the first quarter when they scored 40 points. Royce O’Neale opened the game with a steal and a 3-pointer, Bojan Bogdanovic, Joe Ingles, Mike Conley and Jordan Clarkson were all moving, cutting, driving, shooting and it all looked great. Then the Jazz kind of stopped.
- There was a lot of criticism of Conley down the stretch with some missed shots and some iffy decision-making, but I don’t see it as something to criticize Conley about. He’d been trying everything he could to get the Jazz back to moving the ball and he was making mostly good decisions. Conley did have a rough shooting night but he was certainly not the reason the Jazz lost. The Jazz’s loss was collective and cumulative and Conley can’t win the game by himself.
- Niang was one of the few Jazz players that seemed like he had good shot selection and wasn’t hesitant when he got the ball. While a small high note, it’s probably not the one you want to see here and he only took six shots.
- Bogdanovic shot the ball well, leading the Jazz with 30 points.
- Anthony Edwards is so confident and so skilled. Once he has a couple years under his belt and is able to develop some of his skills and get the game to slow down and come to him a little more he’s going to be a star in this league.
- Donovan Mitchell’s floral sideline apparel was probably the highlight of this game. That’s not great.
- I’ve changed my mind, the highlight of this game was when it ended. Hopefully the Jazz will be able to move past this and play better when they see the Wolves again in Minnesota on Monday.
“This is one we need to watch. It’s a reoccurring situation with a lot of teams where they’re trying to crash the glass, trying to get extra possessions, trying to turn us over, to get easy opportunities in transition. Because nobody really wants to get into a half court situation with Rudy back there and our defense kind of set. So it’s another game where we have to learn from it and we have to learn from our mistakes.” — Mike Conley
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Low Notes
- I’m not going to sugarcoat this, the Jazz looked like they had this game in hand easily in the first quarter and then they looked like they nearly stopped playing midway through the second quarter.
- Where to begin? The Jazz were so hesitant and made so many bad offensive decisions that it started to impact them on the defensive end, and all the while the Timberwolves were gaining confidence.
- The Jazz played two, maybe three minutes of really good defense in the fourth quarter to get back into the game after surrendering the lead, but that wasn’t good enough and it certainly wasn’t impressive enough to make the Jazz look like they deserved to win the game. They lost the game and they absolutely deserved it.
- Minnesota was running so much on the baseline and didn’t seem to get any kind of resistance from the Jazz. Credit to the Wolves for going with a ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach. Zero credit to the Jazz for not fixing what was broken.
- The Jazz gave up too many offensive boards (11), with the Timberwolves scoring 20 points on second-chance opportunities.
- The Jazz turned the ball over too much. The Wolves had 23 points on 20 Jazz turnovers.
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“If we’re going to give them 40% of their points on the offensive glass and our turnovers, we’re gonna make it hard on ourselves. And, it impacts our offense too because it’s difficult for us to run.” — Jazz head coach Quin Snyder
- The Jazz weren’t getting back in transition, with Ingles at one point committing an obvious clear-path foul instead of the Jazz being anywhere near getting on their man.
- The Jazz were outplayed by the Timberwolves.
Flat Notes
- For the second time this season, official Bill Kennedy suffered an injury during a Jazz game at Vivint. Obviously hope that Kennedy is ok, especially considering that it’s his second injury here in Salt Lake City. Also, the lack of a third official makes the game harder to call for the two officials left on the court. Not great from any angle.
- Sloppy cross-court passes are horrible and the Jazz should not keep making them.
- I was recently informed that Hot Rod Hundley used to call Minnesota the ‘pesky Timberwolves’ because no matter how good or bad of a team they were, they would somehow always give the Jazz fits. The Wolves handed the Jazz one of their few home losses this season in the Jazz’s home opener this season and then made them look absolutely ridiculous on Saturday. The Jazz should not have lost this game and some history of losing to a team is absolutely no excuse for what we saw from the Jazz.