Portland, Ore. • After facing ice in Minnesota, the Jazz faced fire in Portland.
Portland’s guard tandem of Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum brought the heat in Wednesday’s ESPN-televised game, leading their team to a 132-105 victory over Utah.
Lillard had one of the very best games of his career, finishing with 36 points — on 12-of-21 shooting from the floor, plus 11 assists and eight rebounds, nearly finishing with his first career triple-double. McCollum didn’t quite have the secondary impact Lillard had, but when you can shoot like he did, it didn’t much matter: He scored 30 points on 12-of-17 shooting.
From the very beginning, the Blazers couldn’t be stopped. McCollum made his first nine shots of the game, scoring 20 points in the first quarter. Just one was a layup, the rest an impressive array of jumpers and floaters. Even McCollum’s passes were going in the basket: As the Jazz sent defensive resources to try to cool him off, McCollum tried to find Meyers Leonard on an over the top pass. The result: a swish, just like every other shot he tried in the quarter.
“I thought we came out very focused, and when we took off in transition, and guys were hitting shots,” Leonard, who scored 16, said. “It was a fun game tonight.”
It was Lillard’s turn to take over in the second quarter, with 15 points. Lillard relied on his shooting as well, but the Jazz helped him out by sending him to the line. The Jazz’s perimeter defenders struggled to stay connected to the superstars, and with all of the scoring coming from outside, Rudy Gobert struggled to make an impact defensively.
The second half began in a more promising fashion, as Donovan Mitchell started to make his presence known with an array of finishes. Eventually, the Jazz even cut the lead to 10.
But two ugly Ricky Rubio turnovers and iffy rebounding pushed the lead back up to 14. In response, Snyder subbed Grayson Allen into the game, but that didn’t stem the tide, and may have even made things worse when he committed a flagrant foul in the middle of the period. In the end, the Blazers lead re-ballooned to 27 in the third.
The fourth quarter, as a result, was simply garbage time, with the only drama coming from Lillard’s quest for a triple-double. In the end, Blazers guard Seth Curry will be glad Lillard finished with eight rebounds and not nine, as he ripped a rebound away from his star teammate early in the period, earning groans from the sold-out Moda Center.
In sum, it was a game that didn’t match the Jazz’s defensive standard. In fact, you could say it didn’t meet the league-worst Cavaliers’ defensive standard, as the Jazz allowed a defensive rating of 133.1 for the game.
That’s why Snyder seemed so furious throughout the contest. Snyder took three angry timeouts in the first half as the Jazz continued to make defensive mistakes, leaving Portland open from all over the court.
Mitchell ended up leading Utah with 22 points on 8-of-16 shooting from the floor, though he finished with a team-low minus-28 plus-minus. Gobert finished short of the double-double, with 15 points and nine rebounds in the loss.
It was a big game for Utah, too. With the loss, the season series with the Blazers concludes at 2-2, though the Jazz have a 5-6 record in the division, while the Blazers stand at 4-7 after the win. After head-to-head record, division record will determine the tiebreaker in a theoretical two-way tie between the two teams, which now seems more unlikely due to the three-game gap.
“We know it’s the time of year where every game is a playoff game,” Rubio said.
The Jazz will be glad it wasn’t.
