‘There’s going to be adjustments’: Jazz don’t need to get fancy, they just need to play better

In Sunday night’s Game 1 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies, the Utah Jazz looked bad. By their own standards they were substandard, ineffectual, unsatisfactory and lamentable, with their mistakes seeming to mount unpropitiously.

“You can put whatever fancy 10-letter word on there that you want to make it sound cool in a story,” Joe Ingles said Wednesday morning. “But for us, it’s like, we’ve just got to go out and play better. We’ve got to play better and focus on the things that have gotten us to where we were at the end of the regular season.”

Ingles is right. You can dress it up however you want, but at the end of the day, the Jazz did not play up to their potential and know that they can do better.

In the playoff opener the Jazz shot 25.5% from 3-point range, their second lowest mark of the 2020-21 season, they gave up turnovers in live situations to a team that notoriously makes the most of those opportunities in transition, they got into foul trouble and they allowed too many offensive rebounds, giving the Grizzlies ample second-chance shots.

The way the Jazz see it, all those mistakes are ones they can control with effort and more precise execution.

Whether it was nerves, excitement, uneasiness caused by the surprise of Donovan Mitchell not playing in Game 1, or just being thrown off by the Grizzlies’ intensity, the Jazz didn’t go into the first game with the right level of focus. They aren’t worried about a repeat performance in Game 2 on Wednesday night.

“Going into Game 2, everybody will be a little bit more clearheaded and be a little bit more focused,” Derrick Favors said Tuesday. “I’m not saying we wasn’t ready to play in Game 1. Memphis, they played good and they did a great job. But I think for us, we’ve just got to come out focused and be ready to play.”

Obviously the Grizzlies will be looking to make adjustments to prevent the Jazz from getting so many wide-open looks, but they’ll also have another threat to worry about as Mitchell makes his series debut.

The Grizzlies will be ready for Mitchell, having game-planned for him prior to the series opener and with two days in between games. But, adjustments and planning are what the playoffs are all about, and the Jazz will have made their own changes.

“There’s going to be adjustments as we go on through X amount of games,” Ingles said. “We’ve obviously made some from Game 1 to Game 2, which we’ll execute and iron out and then we’ll, I’m sure whether we win or whatever tonight, there’s still going to be things that have to change for Games 3 and 4.”

The bottom line is that through the scheming and planning, the Jazz expect to play better and avoid making the same mistakes they made in the first game.

Game 2 tips off at Vivint Arena at 8 p.m. MDT on TNT.

Jazz vs. Grizzlies Round 1 Schedule