Jazz thinking about the future in loss to Nuggets

Utah Jazz head coach Will Hardy is excited when the team is able to put together a game where it plays above its current station, as was the case on Monday night in a 128-125 loss to the Denver Nuggets.

“Coach Will even said it when he came in the locker room,” Kyle Filipowski said. “If we keep playing hard like this, keep playing together, then we’re gonna get where we want to in the future.”

There are glimpses of what is possible when Filipowski shows his strength and his versatility; when Keyonte George continues to prove that he is one of the up-and-coming guards of the NBA; and when Ace Bailey shows that he isn’t afraid of the moment when the game is on the line.

Those are the things the Jazz can point to and get excited about.

And, to be perfectly honest, Monday’s result was the perfect outcome for all involved, even when the two teams have such different goals and approaches to the rest of the 2025-26 campaign.

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The Nuggets are trying to reintegrate all of their players and ramp up for the playoffs as the season winds down, while still maintaining a record that will keep them above the play-in tournament spots. The Jazz are trying to maintain some semblance of competition even when everyone on and around the team knows that the results don’t matter.

The one thing that is fighting against both teams is time.

With 21 games left in the season, the Jazz are swimming in time and would probably love to speed the clock up, take away a few of those games and just get to the offseason, the lottery, the draft and then look toward the 2026-27 season — the one where they get to actually try to win games.

With 20 games remaining for the Nuggets, the worry is that they are running out of time. With so many injuries to key rotational and star players on the roster, notably and most recently Nikola Jokic, they need time to prepare for what is ahead. But they don’t have much.

“This group this year has been really special and they’ve taken on whatever I’ve asked of them,” head coach David Adelman said. “But my concern would be time. ... When you go to the playoffs, you want to be going up, and you want to feel like you understand who you are. So we do need time, and we need those guys to come back ... And you need time to go through that and see what actually fits."

But that’s a good problem to have because the Jazz would love nothing more than to be in a position where they were ramping up for a postseason push.

Actually, that’s what George, who scored 36 points, said he tries to think about, even now, when the results are not important.

“We can play mind games a little bit,” George said. “Try to trick ourselves into thinking that these last few games we’re trying to find our rhythm as a team maybe going into the postseason.”

That’s what you want to hear from George if you’re a Jazz fan.

Instead of going through the last stretch of games not caring, not worrying about the future because it’s still so far away, the best player the Jazz have available (not on the injury report) is pretending that these games do matter.

When they do, he’ll be ready, and the hope is that the rest of the team will be ready too.