Analysis: It was a foul-laden slog against the Pacers, but the Jazz came out on top comfortably

The Utah Jazz beat the Indiana Pacers on Friday night, and this game had it all.

There were 63 fouls — the most in an NBA game in more than two years — there were foul reviews, clock malfunctions, numerous travel and double-dribble calls, blood on the court and possibly the longest third quarter of a basketball game.

If you’re thinking to yourself that does not sound like an exciting game, you would be correct.

The officials are going to have to take time off just to relax their face muscles with how much they were blowing the whistle on Friday night. There were even inadvertent whistles!

“Yeah, it was a weird weird game, especially that third quarter. I feel like that third quarter was like 45 minutes,” Walker Kessler said after the debacle was over.

“Definitely was interesting, but we did a good job of sticking to it and got the win.”

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Indeed, the Jazz walked away with a 139-119 win, and Kessler had the best game of his young NBA career, finishing with 20 points and 11 rebounds, but it was hard getting to that point.

I could absolutely write about how Kessler achieved those 20 points, or how Lauri Markkanen had another standout game leading the Jazz and how he took the time to talk to reporters after the game despite having a kid at home with a fever (we told him he didn’t have to but he did anyway).

But the flow of an NBA game really matters. It matters to the players, it matters to the coaching staff, and most importantly to you, the fans.

I get that the officials have a job to do and I understand that most of the calls they made on Friday were probably legitimate, but there also didn’t seem to be continuity in the calls.

While seemingly every single player was issued a foul for hand-checking or a bad screen, there were some pretty clear shooting fouls that occurred without a peep from the officiating crew.

It seemed that the ticky-tack fouls held greater importance than anything else in this game, and that led to the crowd at Vivint Arena getting restless and booing the officials.

To be clear, the crowd was not upset that one side was getting a more favorable call. They just wanted to watch a basketball game that felt like it had any kind of momentum.

When Jazz head coach Will Hardy walked up to the postgame podium, the first thing he mentioned was how weird the game was, and the officiating was absolutely a huge part of that.

“A good team win, but a pretty disjointed game for a variety of reasons,” he said. “When there’s a lot of fouling going on, that can lead to some of that disjointed feeling...It was an odd night.

“This happens a couple times during a season where you have a game just a little bit clunky, but I think it’s better to win these games than to lose them, for sure.”

It also completely changes the way that a team can play. If a player is worried about getting into foul trouble or if they’re worried about the way the officials are calling the game, they are going to adjust.

Take Collin Sexton for example. Hardy really wants him to be physical as an on-ball defender and get up into the ball handler so that he’s harder to screen, but that changes in a game like Friday’s.

“I had to pick and choose when to be into the ball, when to use my physicality because I know that how tight they were calling it,” Sexton said.

“It’s definitely tough, just because it’s messing up the flow of the game.”

It’s not every night that games are officiated with such zeal, and it’s certainly not the norm. There’s a reason it’s the most fouls in a Jazz game since 2015.

But when it does happen, it’s hard to really evaluate anything else other than the fact that one team was able to deal with it better.

And if you’re left wondering what some of the fouling records are in the NBA, I’ll leave you with a couple of fun facts.

According to Basketball Reference, the record for the most combined fouls in a regular season game is 112.

On Nov. 24, 1949, the Syracuse Nationals beat the Anderson Packers 125-123 in a game that had five overtime periods. The Packers committed 66 fouls and the Nationals committed 56.

But, if you want a modern-era record, that one belongs to the Jazz. On April 9, 1990 the Jazz committed 52 fouls, the most fouls committed by one team in an NBA game since 1952.

The Jazz lost to the Phoenix Suns that night, 119-115 in overtime.