Sometimes you just have to tip your cap to greatness, which is exactly what the Utah Jazz had to do on Saturday night after being absolutely walloped 142-121 by the Denver Nuggets at Ball Arena in Denver.
It’s not that the Jazz were horrible, it’s just that they aren’t the Nuggets and didn’t have an out-of-this-world offensive night the way the Nuggets did.
The Jazz got some great defensive moments from Walker Kessler in his return after missing four games, Keyonte George scored 29 points and fellow rookie Brice Sensabaugh showed some really savvy moves.
The Jazz even outscored the Nuggets in the third quarter, but it was all for naught.
The Nuggets were incredible on Saturday. They closed out the first half shooting 65.9% overall and 70% from 3-point land, obliterating any hopes the Jazz might have had pretty quickly.
“Fourteen for 20 from 3 in the first half is pretty spectacular,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “They’re a championship level team. When a team shoots the ball from the perimeter like that it’s a hard game to win, especially when you put that up against what we shot from 3 in the first half...It’s just a it’s a hard game mathematically to win...But that’s a special team we played, and credit to them.”
Yes, that is a special team. They are the reigning NBA champions led by Nikola Jokic, who is likely to win his third NBA Most Valuable Player award, and Jamal Murray, who compliments and makes up the best one-two punch in the league. And it’s a team on a mission to try and repeat last year’s postseason success.
Meanwhile, the Jazz are...well...not that.
Even with a fully healthy roster the Jazz are not near what the Nuggets are, and even if the Jazz played as perfectly as they could with a fully healthy roster, the Nuggets were, as Hardy said, special on Saturday.
But the Jazz weren’t perfect — they trailed by as many as 39 points — and they aren’t healthy (their best player, Lauri Markkanen, was watching from the sideline as he nurses a quad contusion).
The good news is that the NBA forces you to move on quickly, so the Jazz will get another chance to prove their mettle on Tuesday night.
The bad news is that they’ll be pitted against this season’s winningest team, the Boston Celtics, who have lost just 11 road games all season.