Analysis: Jazz clinch playoff berth with OT win over Grizzlies

The Utah Jazz beat the Memphis Grizzlies, 121-115, in an overtime game that was one of the most important and most exciting games of the season.

The night started with Jazz head coach Quin Snyder in attack mode, using the pregame press conference to try to put some of the recent narratives surrounding the team to bed. He pushed back on the idea that the Jazz can’t close games and that Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert have trust issues on the court by talking for more than 20 minutes on the two subjects with reporters.

The night ended with the Jazz winning an overtime game that guaranteed them a top-6 finish in the Western Conference.

High notes

• There are definitely games where you can point to one player or a couple of players who really control what happens. Sometimes I feel like that happens more often than not and that it’s more rare to find a game where it feels like the meaningful contributions come from all over the place. On Tuesday night it felt like more of a team effort than we’ve seen from the Jazz in a long time and not just in small ‘x player had a good game’ ways.
• Jordan Clarkson was spectacular. He was smart with the ball and was hitting big shots, creating for his teammates, making highlight reel moves in the paint and staying glued on the defensive end.
  “It’s good for us confidence-wise to win this game, moving forward into the playoffs, knowing that we clinched already. But I think for the morale, us talking, us figuring it out us continuing to communicate, it’s good for us to pull this one out.” — Jordan Clarkson
• Danuel House Jr. was a defensive juggernaut for the Jazz on Tuesday. When he wasn’t rejecting screens, denying passing lanes, deflecting the ball and grabbing steals, he was knocking down huge, enormous shots for the Jazz.
  “All I’m just trying to do is just just give the team whatever (they need). One of the things that we try to tell each other is ‘don’t get hit on a screen’, navigate through the screens so we can stay in our coverage and play the way that we need to play and keep the matchups.” — Danuel House Jr.
• Hassan Whiteside had some really impactful and impressive minutes for the Jazz and he also provided some much needed grit in moments when the Jazz looked like they were just about to let up and relax a little.
• Mike Conley had another game where he showed a ton of emotion and got hyped up with the crowd in big moments all the while putting on an impressive performance on both sides of the ball. When Conley is getting rebounds in traffic against a long and rangey team like the Grizzlies, it definitely makes a huge difference.

• Donovan Mitchell had a pretty slow start to his game on the offensive end, but he never let that get to him the way that he has in the past. He dug in deeper on the defensive side of things and allowed that to dictate the way that the offense would move.
• The Jazz ran like crazy and they pushed really hard to make sure that even if they didn’t get a transition bucket that they at least were going to make Memphis think that they were looking to score. That kind of urgency with the ball really disrupts defenses and makes them overthink or sometimes just out right miss things.
• While the game against the Grizzlies did include some crazy plays from players on both teams and there were ooh and ahh moments along the way in an overtime thriller, the most important thing is that the Jazz won the game and they clinched a playoff berth with the win. Now that they know that they aren’t going to fall into the Play-In Tournament, they can be a little more deliberate with things in the last three games. They can tank them if they want to stay in 6th and try to get a series against the 3rd seed, which right now would be Golden State, or they could try to win out and get home court advantage with the 4th seed no matter who the 5th seed is. They could just choose to play their best down the stretch and let the chips fall where they may. Again, the most important thing is that the Jazz are playoff bound and don’t need to worry about playing another game between the April 10 final regular-season game in Portland and the first game of the first round of the playoffs.

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Low notes

• Well we thought we knew what was going on with Rudy Gay and Juancho Hernangomez, but it turns out that we don’t 100% have that nailed down. Gay had two consecutive DNP-CDs and then Hernangomez was the one who didn’t see the floor on Tuesday. Maybe Snyder wasn’t just paying lip service when he said that it was going to depend on matchups and different situations. I guess that we’ll see.
• Every time that I see a team in the NBA execute a perfect back cut, the first thing that I think is, “somewhere there is a defender that was ball-watching and lost his man.” That was the Jazz on Tuesday with some of the Grizzlies cuts and it seemed like more often than not it was Royce O’Neale who was losing a man.

Flat notes

• I don’t want to take too much away from the Jazz’s win over the Grizzlies because it was well fought and it did show a mentally tough side of the team that we haven’t often seen this season, but it’s also important to note that this is a Grizzlies team that took the Jazz to overtime with Ja Morant and Dillon Brooks watching in street clothes while injured.