SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Jazz were already aware that Saturday’s loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder wasn’t their best outing, but that didn’t stop them from watching it again and analyzing.
“It obviously wasn’t super pretty from our point of view,” Joe Ingles said Monday morning.
The thing that stood out the most to Ingles was the lack of aggression in general from the Jazz. Meanwhile, the Thunder seemed to have a higher level of intensity from the first jump ball.
Slow starts are a problem that has been harped on for years with the Jazz, whether it be slow starts in individual games, to the season or after an All-Star break.
In the bubble, there’s no break or stretch of days off for the teams to regroup. The hits just keep coming with games every other day. At the same time, though, fatigue is not an excuse that the players can rely on now that traveling and other outside responsibilities have been taken out of the equation.
A lack of aggression is a player problem, so if the Jazz are going to match a team’s aggression, it’s on the players to find what they need within themselves. In an effort to see where they went wrong, the team is relying heavily on game film driving the point home.
“In a situation like this where you’re playing every second day, the best thing you can do is watch and learn from film,” Ingles said.
On Monday, ahead of the Jazz’s third seeding game, against the Los Angeles Lakers, Ingles pointed to what the team had been saying during the Orlando practices, before the games began.
“It’s going to be a process over eight games,” he said. “By the eighth game, heading into the playoffs, we want to be playing our best basketball.”
It seems like a huge leap between what the Jazz were doing on Saturday to playing as the best version of themselves in two weeks when the playoffs start, but it’s not impossible and there’s no other choice but for that to be the goal.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the court, the Lakers have been pretty satisfied with the way they’ve performed in the bubble.
A loss to the Toronto Raptors on Saturday hasn’t deterred the LeBron James-led team, and after watching film, the team consensus was that the Lakers were containing well on defense and getting the shots they wanted. If not for a large number of missed shots and a few careless mistakes at the end of the game, they were pleased with what they saw.
So, that’s what the Jazz are up against Monday night. They’re contending with their lack of aggressiveness and cleaning up a slew of other problem areas, and the Western Conference-leading Lakers are confident that a handful of minor tweaks will get the job done.