Donovan Mitchell’s message after a second straight loss on Wednesday night was the right one.
“I’m not worried,” he said.
The Utah Jazz had just blown an 18-point lead against the New York Knicks on the second night of a back-to-back set, the first of which they completely fell apart in a blowout against the Brooklyn Nets. But, it’s Mitchell’s job, as a leader of this team, to be optimistic at this point of the season and to express confidence in his teammates and their abilities.
“During my four years we’ve had stretches like this and if we continue to sit here and feel depressed and upset it’s not going to change,” he said. “I’m not saying we’re expecting this to just click at some point, we’ve got to do the work.”
Mitchell also made note of how early in the season it is. The Jazz have played just eight of 72 games and are 4-4. It’s not like the sky is falling. And, he wasn’t the only one.
“I feel like we haven’t had a full game where we’ve played well together,” Jordan Clarkson said. “I don’t know where it is, where we get the disconnect, but it’s early right now. We’ll continue to chip away and keep laying the foundation down and figure it out over these next games and hopefully put a bunch of wins together.”
Great. That’s the right attitude to have ... for now.
As Mitchell was explaining that it’s imperative for the players to keep their minds focused on the next task, and to not get too high or too low based on any one game, he also cautioned Jazz fans from putting too much stock in early season losses.
“We have a tendency as a fan base to kind of go crazy during a 4-4 start,” he said. “I go back to my rookie year, we started off really, really bad. We’ll be fine. At the end of the day we’re going to do this, it’s just a matter of when.”
It’s true that fans tend to put a lot of weight on every single game and every misstep, and fans of any team in any sport often have the reputation as a group ready to doomsday prep after one bad loss. But the truth is fans are familiar with the ebbs and flows of the season and the patterns of the teams that they follow.
“We’ll be fine. At the end of the day we’re going to do this, it’s just a matter of when.” — Jazz guard Donovan Mitchell
In Mitchell’s rookie season, the Jazz started out 5-5 on the year before racking up quite a few losses and then bouncing back at the end of the season and finishing off the year with a 29-6 run. They were bounced in the second round of the playoffs.
In Mitchell’s second year, the Jazz started with a 4-6 record and played pretty up and down throughout the season before they were knocked out of the playoffs in the first round.
Last season, the Jazz started out with a 6-4 record and racked up most of their losses toward the end of the season. Again, they only survived a single playoff round.
The one consistency through it all has been the Jazz’s inconsistency. They’ve started out looking like a .500 team and eventually string together enough good games that give the fans hope but then aren’t able to sustain a deep playoff run.
For this season to be different, the Jazz need to prove that they can be consistently good or, at the very least, consistently competitive.
Though I agree that eight games into the season is too early to start hitting the panic button, there’s more to this story.
It’s not so much the four losses that look bad for the Jazz, it’s how the Jazz have played in those losses. It’s blowing leads and losing composure, racking up stretches of sloppy turnovers and forced shots, and moving farther away from the principles they want to be defined by.
Also, eight games in the 2020-21 season carry more weight than eight games in any of the prior seasons. Not only are there less games to be played with the shortened season, but there is less time to play them, meaning less time for practice and less time for film sessions and refining.
If the Jazz had even played remotely well against the Nets and made it a competitive game, or put pressure on the Knicks, we’d be having a different conversation. But they weren’t really in those games at the end.
Mitchell is correct not to be worried, yet. The Jazz absolutely have the personnel and the talent to be better, and there’s a chance they will iron out the wrinkles and prove their mettle. But, as a team that to this point has not proven that they are anything other than a middle-tier playoff team that’s bound to lose early in the postseason, they need to figure things out quicker than they have in the past and play at a higher level. Otherwise, there’s no reason for the fans to think that this season will be any different from the ones that came before.