DALLAS — It seems like this is kind of how it goes with this Utah Jazz team — they show you they are scrappy and underrated and there are flashes of extreme focus and determination, and then they remind you that they are a very, very, very young team that is loaded with players who are unproven and still have so far to go to be ready to really compete.
Unfortunately, Thursday night in Dallas was an example of the latter as the Jazz were unceremoniously blown out 144-122 by the Dallas Mavericks, who led by as many as 38 points.
“A pretty sloppy game all the way around,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “Early in the game, we did a poor job protecting the paint. They had 20 paint points in the first quarter.
“Then as the game went on, I felt like our reaction time defensively was just slow, like we were a beat and a half behind the music...It just felt like an overall sloppy game.”
With Lauri Markkanen (illness) sidelined, and Hardy electing to healthy scratch Kevin Love, Jusuf Nurkić and Svi Mykhailiuk, it meant that eight of the nine players who played on Thursday for the Jazz were either on their rookie contract or rookie scale contract.
That’s not a great setup for NBA success, though it’s not like the Jazz were facing a juggernaut on the other side.
The Mavericks sit at 12th in the Western Conference standings just one spot above the Jazz, and on Thursday they were so thin due to injury and illness that they played all three of their two-way players as well as Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, whom they signed to a 10-day contract from their G League team not long before Thursday’s game tipped off.
From the outside it seemed as though the Jazz saw the state of the Mavericks — nearly all of their All-Star players in street clothes along with rookie phenom Cooper Flagg, who tweaked his ankle on Wednesday — and thought that they would be able to get by easily.
Hardy, in defense of his team, said he hoped and believed that was not the case.
“I hope that we don’t have that level of arrogance to us that we’re not going to respect who we’re playing,” he said. “We as a group, we’re all fighting for legitimacy in this league, so I’m not going to say that it was a lack of respect. I would hope that’s not the reason for the being a little bit sluggish.”
The Mavericks were helped by an easy 26 points from Klay Thompson off the bench, as the Jazz defense allowed him to get off 13 3-point attempts on a night when it was loudly announced that he officially rose to fourth on the NBA’s all-time 3-pointers made list.
But it wasn’t just Thompson. The Jazz were outworked and outplayed by all of the Dallas players, and the Mavericks forced 17 turnovers, which they turned into 30 points.
They stole balls on inbound passes, blocked shots, got easy points in transition and dug out just about every 50-50 ball during the course of the game.
The silver lining? The Jazz aren’t leaving Dallas. They’ll be here to play the Mavericks again on Saturday for a rematch.
“Good thing about it is we get to play the same team in two days,” Keyonte George said, “so we’ve got to come with it.”