Denver • Second night of a back-to-back on the road? Against the team with the best record in the Western Conference, and the best home record in the league? And with no healthy point guard available?
No problem, said the Utah Jazz on Thursday night, as they pulled out a nationally-televised 111-104 win over the Denver Nuggets at the Pepsi Center.
With Ricky Rubio, Dante Exum and Raul Neto all out, the Jazz’s offense didn’t exactly get out to a bright start, with the team scoring only nine points in the game’s first nine minutes. Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell struggled to convert inside against Denver’s length.
But just like Wednesday’s game against the Clippers, the bench came in, and the Jazz started rolling. Or maybe more accurately, they stopped the Nuggets from rolling. The Nuggets scored only 19 points in the last 15 minutes of the first half. Royce O’Neale absolutely shut down Nuggets bench guard Isaiah Thomas, while none of the other Nuggets were able to get anything going either. They shot just 1 of 13 from deep in the first half.
Meanwhile, the ball kept moving for the Jazz. The Joe Ingles and Derrick Favors pick-and-roll tandem worked like a machine, and the ball was flying all over the court in a positive way. On three possessions in the middle of the second, it ended up in the hands of Thabo Sefolosha, who hit three consecutive threes as part of a 26-9 Jazz run. All in all, the second may have been one of the best quarters of the season for Utah.
And then there was the game’s second half, which was a seesaw affair that saw the Jazz push their lead to near 20 at three points, only to get it cut to two or three possessions.
The third quarter featured a more familiar 3-point threat: Kyle Korver, whose markmanship got the Jazz’s lead all the way up to 18 in the middle of the quarter. But the Nuggets came back after their star, Nikola Jokic, ended up in foul trouble, eventually cutting the Jazz lead to seven. But at the end of the quarter, Mitchell walked Denver’s Will Barton down and hit a tough three over him at the buzzer, salvaging the period and sending the Jazz to the fourth with an 11-point lead.
“When we lose we give up a lot of threes, and not only percentage but a large volume of threes,” Nuggets coach Mike Malone said. “The last time we lost to them in Utah, they made 19 threes.” This time, it was the 16 threes that brought the end to Denver.
It wasn’t over there, though. The Nuggets cut the Jazz lead to five, but that’s when Ingles re-entered the game. His pick-and-roll partnership with Favors resulted in a Korver three, then a massive dunk over Mason Plumlee that would be on the posters in childrens’ rooms everywhere, if kids bought Derrick Favors posters. All of a sudden, the Jazz lead ballooned to 18 again.
Denver had one last comeback in them, even getting the lead all the way down to three points with a minute remaining. But Gobert picked up a final block with 50 seconds left that was so sky-high that even the referees called it a goaltend at first, before video review reversed the decision. From there, solid-enough free-throw shooting sealed the win.
In the end, Mitchell scored 24 points and added eight rebounds and five assists to lead the Jazz, while Korver’s six threes eventually led to a total of 22 points. Jamal Murray and Barton both paced the Nuggets with 21-point performances. Gobert limited Nuggets star Jokic to just 16 points on 5 of 15 shooting, while scoring 16 on offense.
