If the Utah Jazz had been able to secure the ball, they would be looking at a 2-0 start to their 2025-26 season.
If Walker Kessler had been stronger with the ball in his hands and if Lauri Markkanen had been more intentional about boxing out Domantas Sabonis, the Jazz would have had the lead and forced the Sacramento Kings to play the free throw game til the final buzzer.
If.
Instead, with less than 10 seconds to play Friday night in Sacramento and the Jazz up 104-103, after a really solid defensive possession that included a deflection of the ball into the backcourt, forcing the Kings to scramble for a good shot, Malik Monk tossed up a rushed floater.
And despite the Jazz having two 7-footers at the basket, Sabonis grabbed the rebound and put in the game-winning bucket. Kings 105, Jazz 104.
“We need to grab that,” Markkanen said. “We lose it, and we can all talk about the last play — what kind of shot we get up — but I think that’s the rebound that we’ve gotta get...just try to come up with that, no matter how you get it, just try to go get the ball. I can do a better job on that."
The Jazz ended up with the ball for the final possession with a chance to win, but failed to get the ball into the right hands. The final out-of-bounds play had Kyle Filipowski inbounding and was meant to get Markkanen open as the first option.
What ended up happening, with just 6.4 seconds left, was a little bit of panic, disorganization and a bad shot.
But for young players who have not been in these situations very often, they need to go through it. The end-of-game ATOs and late-clock situations are ones that have to be lived and repeated in order to clean them up.
In the more than 47 minutes that preceded those final moments, the Jazz played through a tough shooting night and some incredible shotmaking from both Monk and Zach LaVine.
They were grittier defensively than we saw in many of their games last season and they clawed through the night to bring the game down to the wire.
“Ultimately, there’s two reasons why we didn’t win the game. One is turnovers,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “The other reason why we lost the game is we didn’t get a loose ball at the end. Those are things that we have to face.
“Analytics wants to judge the full scope of a game, and I understand that, but competitors shouldn’t. We lost the game because we couldn’t get a loose ball. We did all the things in that possession needed to generate a miss. We had the ball in our hands, and we didn’t come up with it.”
No matter how young and scrappy and energetic the Jazz are, they’ll have to learn the hard way that in order to secure wins, it’s the details — the little things — that end up mattering the most.
Sometimes, it comes down to just one rebound.
The Jazz are now 1-1 on the young season and will return home for games against the Phoenix Suns and Portland Trail Blazers.