No time to celebrate: Utah Jazz have to focus on closing out the Denver Nuggets

SALT LAKE CITY — If the Utah Jazz thought that Game 4 was hard, look out.

The Denver Nuggets were not going to go down without a fight on Sunday. The Jazz knew what was coming. They knew that the Nuggets were going to make adjustments and come out of the gate swinging, and they did. The Jazz had just enough, again, to eke by with a 129-127 win thanks largely to the heroics of Donovan Mitchell.

“We worked hard to get to this point, but the job’s not finished. As good as this one feels, we won by two and we move on to Game 5.” — Donovan Mitchell

The victory gives the Jazz a 3-1 series lead, which is a powerful position to be in during the playoffs. But mentally it is a very dangerous position to be in because the close-out game will be even harder.

“I think it’s one of the hardest games to play mentally,” Mike Conley said. “You have to be at a certain mental level where you can look at it as the most important game, but at the same time be able to just bring yourself to what got you to that 3-1 lead. And those are the little things in between the lines.”

There’s no time for the Jazz to celebrate the fact that they’re one game away from upsetting the Western Conference’s third seed. There’s no time for Mitchell to think about his place in historic playoff stat lists after scoring 51 points on Sunday. There’s no time to enjoy a third straight victory.

The Jazz have to immediately turn their focus to the fact that those little things that Conley mentioned, the ones that got the Jazz to this point, were not perfect on Sunday and they were very nearly not enough.

“The way Denver played tonight that game could have gone either way,” Jazz coach Quin Snyder said.

Let us not forget that the last time Mitchell scored 50-plus points was in Game 1 of this series, a game that the Jazz lost.

Mitchell said it himself in his walk-off interview after the game. There’s nothing to celebrate yet. They still have to beat the Nuggets one more time. So, in the spirit of agreeing with Mitchell, here’s what the Jazz have to clean up, do differently, or do more of in order to finish off the Nuggets and advance to the Western Conference semifinals. 

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• Rebounding, rebounding, rebounding. It’s been talked about endlessly during this series, and for good reason. The Nuggets had 29 second-chance points generated from offensive rebounds in Game 4, and sometimes they were able to get multiple offensive rebounds in a single possession. The Jazz are going to want to clean that up.
• Joe Ingles took just four shots and had only one assist in this game. While the defensive coverage from the Nuggets was different in Game 4 than they had been the rest of the series, the Jazz have to find a way to get him involved in the offense. Part of that is him being more aggressive.

• The Jazz’s defense looked a little discombobulated in the first half of Game 4 and there were moments of unnecessary over-help and fouling. Those defensive lapses serve as momentum builders. The Nuggets were able to find open lanes and see the ball go through the hoop early and all of a sudden they were in a rhythm that was hard to shake for the rest of the night. “I don’t think the game ever got away from us,” Nuggets coach Mike Malone said. “Game 2 and 3 got away from us. Game 4 did not get away from us.” The Nuggets can take a whole lot of confidence from the fact that they could have won Game 4. Breaking that confidence with intense defense early on is imperative for the Jazz.
• The Nuggets moved Monte Morris and Jerami Grant into the starting lineup in place of Michael Porter Jr. and Torrey Craig for increased perimeter defense and speed. This allowed Denver to keep the Jazz from generating so many open looks from 3-point range. The Jazz, led by the example of Mitchell, took advantage of the opportunity and attacked the basket with a fervor that got them on the free-throw line often. They thrived there, which stuck in the craw of Malone and the Nuggets. The Jazz are served best when they read the defense and take what is given them. The Nuggets’ defense is not outstanding and they’re not going to be able to shut down every area of the game. The Jazz just need to stay patient and keep playing to whatever strength is most opportune.

I could very easily have spent my time tonight praising Mitchell and the Jazz for how far they have come, but I think Mitchell has the right idea here.

“We worked hard to get to this point, but the job’s not finished,” he said. “As good as this one feels, we won by two and we move on to Game 5.”