Young Jazz stun veteran Clippers on opening night

The Utah Jazz made the Los Angeles Clippers look old on Wednesday night.

The accolades on the Clippers roster are nothing to turn your nose up at. The starting lineup alone boasts Kawhi Leonard, a two-time NBA champion and two-time Defensive Player of the Year winner, James Harden, a former NBA MVP and three-time scoring champion and Bradley Beal, who is a three-time All-Star, bringing that trio’s total of All-Star appearances to 20.

And that’s to say nothing of the Clippers bench, which includes players like Chris Paul, Nicolas Batum and Brook Lopez.

But, there is one thing that the Clippers do not have an abundance of — youth. It just so happens that’s the one thing the 2025-26 Jazz roster has in spades, so the Jazz went into the regular season opener with a very simple gameplan: Run the wheels off the old guys, and that they did to the tune of a 129-108 victory.

“If we’re a little short on experience, we can still be high on energy,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “We should be a team looking to just try to wear you down. And there’s no pacing, there’s no, ‘Oh, I’m going to play this long run, and I’m going to ease into it.’... It can be a real strength that we’re going to play 10 people and that we’re going to play really, really hard while we’re learning.”

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If everyone is going to keep talking about the Jazz in terms of how many young players are on the roster, which is a fair assessment of the situation (nine from the last three drafts and 14 players that are 28 or younger), then Hardy wants the players to reframe the narrative in their minds to find the positive aspects, not the negative.

“Will tells us all the time that we definitely have speed as an advantage,” Keyonte George said. “Obviously we got the altitude here, so teams coming in the day before, it might take them a while to get a second wind. But we’ve been here for a minute, we’ve got to use our conditioning to our advantage as well.”

Playing to their strengths, the Jazz ran out to a 43-19 lead in the opening quarter. They forced eight Clippers turnovers in that first quarter and shot 50% from 3-point land. And, they didn’t let up as the game went on.

The Jazz pushed the ball and sped past the Hall-of-Fame-destined players, they slashed and cut and moved the ball as well, if not better than they have in the last three years. They finished the night with 38 assists on 48 made shots.

Most importantly, the team defended well from top to bottom.

“They kicked our butt tonight,” Clippers coach Tyronn Lue said.

Though that’s an understatement. The Jazz made the Clippers look like a washed up team that isn’t prepared for the 2025-26 season. The league’s reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder are an extremely young team and the younger teams around the league are showing how much pace, energy and effort are valuable in sustaining success throughout the 82-game calendar and into the postseason.

If opening night is any indication at all of what the Clippers are capable of, they have a hard road ahead of them as a team that is supposed to be accomplishing something big.

As for the Jazz, if Wednesday night’s win is any indication of what the players on this roster are capable of, the future feels bright and the sky is the limit.

But it’s just the first game of an incredibly long season. The goal is to bring the same energy and intensity to every game. If youth is going to be their weapon, they have to fight with it consistently.

With Walker Kessler leading the way with 22 points, the Jazz had six players in double figures and five players with four-or-more assists.