At what point do troubling concerns become troubling trends?
Donovan Mitchell suggested after the loss in Denver on Saturday that Game 9 of the season was too early to panic about the Jazz’s lackluster defense, but that they couldn’t have that same attitude by Game 20.
Perhaps Game 10 should be the wake-up call, considering it saw Utah allow a Toronto team missing Kawhi Leonard to shoot 57 percent from the floor en route to a 124-111 victory on Monday night at Vivint Smart Home Arena.
The loss was the Jazz’s fourth in a row, and dropped the team to 0-4 at home this season and 4-6 overall.
It seemed to spark a sense of urgency from some of the players afterward.
“You don’t wanna get to the point where we were last year, where we have to be 10 or 11 games under [.500] to flip it around. We wanna do it now,” said Joe Ingles, who suffered a finger injury late in the game and shot just 3 for 13. “It’s obviously frustrating — we haven’t won at home, we haven’t played to where we think we can. It’s frustrating, but we’ve got too good a group; the guys in this locker room are too high-character to let it go and not save the season.”
It looked initially as though this might the game the team broke out of its defensive funk, forcing the Raptors into a turnover on each of their first three possessions and racking up four steals in the game’s opening minutes.
But, as has been the trend for much of this season, a leaky defense that simply allows the opponent too many wide-open looks undid the solid start. Toronto committed seven turnovers in the first quarter, but trailed by only one point by virtue of shooting 68.4 percent from the field.
And while Toronto couldn’t quite maintain that kind of pace, the Jazz simply couldn’t keep up at all.
“I thought we came out of the gate with good energy. And [then] we made a lot of mistakes,” Quin Snyder said. “When you’re passive — and really, as much as anything, we were passive, not communicating with each other — that results in breakdowns.”
Rudy Gobert got an earful from Snyder after failing to challenge a Jonas Valanciunas 3-pointer. The reigning Defensive Player of the Year was later subbed out after failing to challenge Serge Ibaka on a short floater in the lane.
His teammates weren’t having much more success getting stops.
Toronto’s lead was 11 by halftime (thanks to 63.4 percent shooting) and 22 by the end of the third (with its field-goal percentage down to a positively mortal 61.9).
Meanwhile, the Jazz continued to have issues on the other end of the floor, too.
The team has shown itself capable of scoring points — even with Mitchell sitting out Monday with a sprained ankle — but continues to leave many more out there. Utah’s outside shooting touch remains inexplicably absent (the team was 1 for 6 from deep after the first quarter, 1 for 12 at halftime, 2 for 17 after three, and 8 for 31 overall — 25.8 percent — after a relatively hot fourth quarter and the game out of hand.
“Obviously, shooting covers up a lot of sins,” Snyder said. “And when you don’t shoot well, you have to be even more committed to the defensive end.”
The Jazz also failed to properly capitalize on their huge free-throw advantage. Toronto didn’t even get its first freebie until 20 minutes of action had passed, and Utah went into the break with a 21-5 margin in attempts. However, they converted only 13 of them (61.9 percent). Utah finished 27 of 41 at the line for the game (65.9 percent).
Still, in the end, the team knows that the biggest reason for its struggles thus far has been its inability to consistently stop other teams from scoring.
“We know that we’re a defensive team, we know that a big part of the reason we’ve been successful in the past is our defense. It’s frustrating to watch teams come here and score 130 points. That’s what hurts the most,” Gobert said. “As a defensive team, we have a lot of pride, and the goal is to get better every day individually and mostly collectively.”
That pride means that, even if frustration is setting in, there’s still a belief that things can and will get turned around.
“We know the team we can be, and I still believe in everyone in this room, and the coaching staff, the game plans that we have,” Ingles said. “But we haven’t executed it at all.”
RAPTORS 124, JAZZ 111
• Toronto shoots 57 percent from the field and 39.4 percent from the 3-point line in sending Utah to its fourth straight defeat and an 0-4 record at home.
• Utah's struggles from the 3-point and free-throw lines continue, as they shoot just 8 of 31 (25.8 percent) from the former and 27 of 41 (65.9 percent) from the latter.
• Alec Burks leads all scorers with 22 points off Utah’s bench. Serge Ibaka went 8 for 8 from the field for 17 points for Toronto.
