The Utah Jazz made easy work of beating the Chicago Bulls, improving to 31-11 on the season with a 120-95 win on Monday night.
High Notes
- I know that the Jazz have played pretty excellent basketball this season and that there are other things to have been excited about, but the anticipation of Rudy Gobert possibly getting a blocks-rebounds-points triple-double was the most exciting thing that has happened this season and I don’t care how hyperbolic that sounds. Unfortunately, Gobert finished the night with a measly career-high nine blocks to go with 21 points and 10 rebounds. So close.
“Derrick (Favors), that was coming in for me, he told me that I had nine blocks. And he was really happy to tell me that and that’s just the way we are as a team. Everyone is happy for one another everyone’s lifting each other up. So it’s just fun. It is fun to be part of a group that cares about one another.” — Rudy Gobert
- It’s been a while since I can remember watching Joe Ingles pass up an open 3-pointer and that’s something that I’m pretty happy to be typing out. Ingles has reached a level of quick release and quick trigger shooting that is really impressive, to the delight of all Jazz fans. Now if we could just get Royce O’Neale to play the same way.
- Derrick Favors came out on Monday with a little bit of pep in his step. He’s actually strung together a handful of pretty good games after having a bit of a rough stretch. It’s nice to see him have some success on defense and on the glass in a way that’s really impactful.
“We got great minutes from Fave tonight too. You know, he was on the offensive glass and loose balls. He did a really good job defensively.” — Jazz head coach Quin Snyder
- The blowout win that Ersan Ilyasova finally got a couple minutes on the court for the Jazz. Quin Snyder recently said that with the lack of practice time during the second half of the season that Ilyasova would just have to get up to speed by being “thrown into the fire,” but it’s hard to justify doing that in close games. Hopefully the Jazz can put together a few of these wins so that he can get a little more acclimated to the team and not just in garbage time.
Low Notes
- The Jazz committed four fouls by the 10 minute mark in the fourth quarter. There’s a couple of bad things with this. First, it makes the Jazz play with less physicality on defense, and it also gives the opportunity for a very slow quarter dominated by free throws. Luckily the Jazz made it to the 4:42 mark before getting their fifth foul of the quarter, but that means there was just under five minutes of tentative defense and no one likes to watch bonus basketball in a blowout game.
- The Bulls inability to run a 4-on-2 or 2-on-1 fast break successfully was just sad.
- The lowest point of the game was the moment that Gobert had to check out with just under two minutes left to play without getting his 10th rebound. Sure, there are other things that we could be talking about, but why? That triple-double would have made an otherwise kind of boring blowout a little more exciting.
Flat notes
- Before the game started the Chicago broadcasters pointed out the following stat: the Bulls have an 0-8 record against teams above .500 and have a 10-0 record against teams below .500. They used it as a way to say that the Bulls are doing what they should be doing and beating the teams that are bad. But, the way it came across was just as the most obvious way to say that the Bulls are a middling team with no way of being anything other than that.