The Utah Jazz took the wrong approach on Friday night. Instead of giving the Phoenix Suns a Halloween fright, they ended up feeding their own coach nightmare fuel.
After a 118-96 loss to the Suns, Jazz head coach Will Hardy left no question about how he was feeling, calling out the players’ desire to play and play hard.
“The game was decided in the first quarter,” Hardy said. “I thought our effort and intensity to start the game was pathetic, and I think that we didn’t have enough humility and hunger as a team.”
The game was slow and sloppy in the opening minutes but completely got away from the Jazz by the time the first period was over.
Within the last five minutes of the first quarter, the Suns went on a 23-2 run that the Jazz were never able to recover from.
Hardy reached deep into his rotation in the second quarter, trying to find the kind of spark that he got from the likes of Cody Williams and Elijah Harkless during the fourth quarter comeback of the team’s loss to Portland on Wednesday.
“I will poke and prod and dig and sub and flip the team upside down until I find people that want to play hard,” Hardy said. “That’s my responsibility.”
Veteran Kyle Anderson even made his Jazz debut on Friday as Hardy continued to throw everything at the wall in hopes that something would stick.
Brice Sensabaugh and Taylor Hendricks were benched in the second half and Kyle Filipowski played just two minutes after halftime.
“There’s going to be a lot of questions asked about, ‘Oh, why did this guy play? And — because you can’t lose a five-minute segment of the game by 20 points, throwing the ball over the gym, not executing the defense at all, and thinking that that’s OK," Hardy said.
“This is our profession. This is my profession, and this is their profession, and we have to find people who want to compete every single night.”
Hardy had been extremely complimentary of the players after the season-opening blowout over the Los Angeles Clippers and even the effort of the team in the two games that followed opening night, but he’s wary of letting the players’ heads get big just because they had one really good win.
“It feels in certain moments, like the first game of the year, warped our brains into us thinking that we’re something that we’re not,” Hardy said.
“I’m not someone to overreact as it relates to what we’re going to do moving forward, but I refuse for our team to look like it looked in the first quarter.”
This was the first game of a five-game road trip for the Jazz. After falling to 2-3 on the season, the team now travels to Charlotte, Boston, Detroit and Minnesota before returning home.