For the first six minutes and 33 seconds on Friday night, the Utah Jazz went completely scoreless at Madison Square Garden.
Inside of basketball’s most beloved building, the Jazz wouldn’t have been able to shoot fish at the bottom of a barrel as the New York Knicks sailed to a 23-0 start en route to a 146-112 win.
On paper, splitting a two-game trip would make most teams happy, but this was just about as predictable as it gets. The Jazz (a not very good team) beat a horrible team (Brooklyn) Thursday night and then they were absolutely rocked by the now 15-7 Knicks (a good team) on the second night of a back-to-back.
You probably could have written the results for these games into the schedule when it came out.
Speaking of schedule, I think it’s worth mentioning the strangeness of this trip. The Jazz played a back-to-back against the same team (already strange for that to happen) on Sunday and Monday, which included the rare Sunday 1 p.m. tipoff in their first game against Houston, and then flew all the way to the East Coast for a back-to-back against the New York-based teams and nothing else.
“Ten hours on a plane to play two games seems like a lot, but um, every team in the NBA has moments of their schedule that...it’s not always perfect,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said before Friday’s game.
“This one’s very unique though to come east and not go to another city, but yeah, all that’s way outside of my control.”
But it’s not so much the back-to-back in New York that worried Hardy. It was how the team would recover and respond to the trip.
“Those are the things that, as coaches, you feel probably more than anything,” Hardy said. “It’s not flying here and just playing two quick games.
“It’s what happens after the getting on the plane after the game tonight and then trying to pick up the pieces tomorrow.”
The players are sure to be a little worn out from the games and the travel, but they’ll also be mentally exhausted after the beating they took on the court at the hands of the Knicks.
A quick glance at the box score says the Jazz were just off to start the game, and the fact that they scored more than 100 points seems like a miracle considering they started the night 0 of 12 from the field.
But they also allowed 56 points in the paint despite having both Jusuf Nurkić and Kevin Love in the game, and were blown out in the third quarter, 47-30.
There were plays wherein the Jazz seemed to sleepwalking through possessions, forgetting that their nap would have to wait until they were actually on the plane on the way back to Utah.
And on a night when fatigue could have been predictable, it shouldn’t have stood out that Love, the 18-year NBA veteran, was one of the few players who was actually scrambling for loose balls, fighting for rebounds and putting his body on the line for the play.
The Jazz will arrive back home in the wee hours of the morning on Saturday, then have a short turnaround before they have to face another formidable opponent. Next up on the docket: The reigning NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder on Sunday at the Delta Center.
Hopefully they enjoy their day of rest.