The Utah Jazz were absolutely walloped by the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday night.
Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland did enough early on that they didn’t even need to play in the fourth quarter. The Cavs shot the air out of the ball, torched the Jazz in transition and outplayed the Jazz on both ends of the floor.
“Credit to the Cavs, they kicked our [expletive],” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “They shot the ball unbelievably well from all three levels of the court, they played with great tempo and they bothered us with their physicality.”
The Jazz were already out of this game by the time the halftime buzzer sounded.
It’s a make or miss league
We’ve all heard the NBA idiom many times. The Jazz had a horrible shooting night. They missed layups, floaters, 3-pointers, and they missed a lot of shots that they would normally make.
The shooting issues got me thinking about whether or not a team can actually overcome a night when they are just off on that side of things.
Now, to be completely honest, the Jazz’s defense wasn’t nearly good enough for them to win the game either way. When Hardy was asked after the game what he thought of the team’s defensive effort he paused for a moment before finding a response that felt right.
“Objection. Leading the witness,” he said. “It was terrible.”
But let’s pretend that the Jazz were a little better on defense.
If you get a stop and you run out for a transition 3 that doesn’t go in or get a defensive rebound and run your offense perfectly, but miss the open shot, or if layups just slowly roll of the side of the rim and floaters pop in and out of the bucket, can you still win a game when the bounce isn’t on your side?
“I’m not gonna say no, because I think there’s different ways that you can win, but there’s also some nights that just go that way,” Hardy said. “There was that play in the first half where we got a steal, we had a four-on-one fastbreak and Nickeil got to one foot and just missed a layup. I’ll take Nickeil shooting a one-footer every possession for the rest of the season.
“There’s a lot of different things you could look at on the box score that you would say are abnormal. Beas (Malik Beasley) goes 1-for-9 from 3. I remember a lot of open looks that he got and they just didn’t go in. I think the one he made was a bank … But you do have to convert in those moments in order to withstand some momentum in an NBA game, especially when you’re playing a team that is the quality of the Cavs.”
That’s all true. The Jazz had a really weird offensive night, and sometimes it really is a make or miss league. I think the true answer is that you can have a night like that, but your defense needs to be perfect. And this all brings me to my second point.
The Cavaliers are really good
Like Hardy said, you can not have a night like that against the best teams in the league and I really think the Cavs are one of the best.
They have the kind of continuity that the Jazz had for a while. There are guys that have been here for a few years and they all know each other really well. They have the veteran and championship leadership of Kevin Love, they have young players that are on the rise and coming into their own, they have a balanced attack whenever anyone is one the court and they plugged in Donovan Mitchell while he’s in his prime, playing the best basketball of his career. They’re long, athletic, strong, dynamic and just flat out a tough matchup for anyone.
It’s impressive how the Cavs have put things together, and that they have been able to make a trade like they did for Mitchell without losing a ton of their identity.
Look at the Rudy Gobert trade. The Timberwolves lost a lot of their edge by losing guys like Patrick Beverley and Jarred Vanderbilt. They still haven’t been able to replicate the spacing they had with Beasley on the court. They’re playing totally different basketball, and it’s not quite working out the way they’d hoped.
On the flip side, the Cavs lost a great player in Lauri Markkanen, a good player in Collin Sexton and they didn’t have to change everything. They’ve made some tweaks but they’ve stayed really good. That’s an impressive thing to do and it’s looking like giving up picks in the upcoming years isn’t going to hurt them quite as much because of what they’ve built.
That is the blueprint that a lot of teams wish they could follow. It’s very rare and it’ll be really interesting to see what they accomplish in the near future.
Kelly Olynyk’s importance
A lot of people did not view the Jazz’s trade for Kelly Olynyk as a good one. I think that viewing it through the lens of not getting good value for Bojan Bogdanovic is fair. But, I do think that Olynyk is more important to the Jazz than people might be willing to admit.
On Monday night, in the first game that he missed for the Jazz (sprained left ankle), it was incredibly evident where the Jazz were missing him.
On offense, he helps space the floor, sets screens to get things moving, moves really well without the ball and puts pressure on the rim, even as one of the less crafty or quick players. On defense, he really helps the Jazz when they’re dealing with physical players. He knows the game really well and he’s smart about where to put his body and how to force players into making tough decisions.
I’m not here to say that Olynyk is the Jazz’s best player or even that he’s the best defender, but this team isn’t the kind of team that can lose integral pieces and still operate the same way.
“Kelly is a big part of our team,” Hardy said. “He’s a very versatile player that presents a matchup problem in a lot of ways because small guys struggle with his size and the bigger guys tend to struggle with the fact that he can space the floor and he’s very skilled.”
The Jazz don’t want to use not having Olynyk on the floor as an excuse. They’d like to think they have a team in which the next man can step up and fill in the holes when someone is injured, but the Jazz are not that team, and Olynyk has been incredible for them this season.