With 3:46 left in the third quarter Tuesday night, the Jazz led visiting Orlando by 18. With 4:44 remaining in the fourth, the Magic led Utah by seven.
Rather than lamenting what had just happened, though, the Jazz got busy with the matter of what would come next — and that proved enough.
Bojan Bogdanovic scored 12 of his 30 points in the fourth quarter, and Donovan Mitchell added 10 of his 30 in the final period as well, as the Jazz closed the game on a ferocious 19-5 run to salvage a 109-102 victory.
Utah’s third straight victory bolstered the team’s record to 16-11.
“We’ve got competitors. We know that. We know we’ve got a lot of pride, and we know we want to be one of the best teams in the world,” said center Rudy Gobert.
For most of this latest game at Vivint Smart Home Arena, they looked the part. Still, it took some scoring histrionics from their top two offensive options for a pretty solid night to ultimately yield a positive result.
Mitchell and Bogdanovic became the first Jazz teammates to score 30-plus points in the same game since Deron Williams and Carlos Boozer managed the feat all the way back on March 28, 2008.
“He found me, I found him,” Mitchell said simply. “… He makes my life a lot easier. Having a guy where you can run actions through him, making decisions in the clutch … you get to 6 minutes in the game and under, he doesn’t miss.”
Of course, for much of this matchup, it didn’t seem like any late-game heroics would be necessary.
With Mike Conley back in the lineup after missing five games with hamstring tightness, and with Joe Ingles starting in place of Royce O’Neale (“Yeah, I’ve been reading all the blogs. … I filled up my car at the service station today, and they told me too,” coach Quin Snyder quipped), the Jazz greatly improved their spacing, ball movement, and catch-and-shoot 3-point productivity — the areas of improvement Snyder cited pregame as being most necessary for goosing what has been a tepid offense to this point in the season.
It helped build an 11-point halftime lead. And it was on full display for a four-minute stretch in the third, when a 14-2 blitz expanded the advantage to 18 and appeared to blow the game open.
The highlight was a sequence in which Mitchell drove deep into the lane, looking for all the world like he would wind up attempting either a midrange floater or a contested layup. Except, at the last minute, he fastballed a wraparound pass to a wide-open Bogdanovic in the far left corner. Bogey himself passed up a shot and whipped it to an equally open Royce O’Neale … who fired it to an open Ingles … who again eschewed the shot by moving it to the right corner, this time back to a wide-open Mitchell, who finally launched and buried the triple.
Utah finished with 27 assists on its 42 made baskets, and hit 15 of 36 tries (41.7%) from deep.
Meanwhile, they were disrupting the Magic’s offensive schemes and limiting them to one-and-out possessions by controlling the boards to the tune of 58 rebounds to 41.
“I felt something I haven’t felt in a while, defensively. As a team, we’re back doing the little things that are gonna help us be a good defensive team,” Gobert said. “… From the beginning, you saw that the communication was there, boxing out, rebounds — we were doing all the little details that we haven’t done lately and [which] hurt us. And tonight we did that.”
That seemed like it would settle things. Orlando had other ideas.
First came the 11-4 run to end the third. That was followed by a 26-8 streak to start the fourth (when Conley exited again with another hamstring injury) — a blitz that gave them a 97-90 lead, prompting boos from the fans.
Mitchell quickly transformed the boos into hopeful and raucous cheers by flying down an open lane for a cocked-back right-handed throwdown that began the comeback.
Bogdanovic put the Jazz back in front for good by hitting a 3, stealing the ball on the other, then taking it all the way down and converting a contested layup.
Mitchell sealed the deal moments later when he drilled a turnaround jumper and, after a Magic miss, followed by hitting a driving floater.
Gobert contributed 12 points, 19 rebounds, and five assists for the game. Ingles buried all four of his triples, in totaling 16 points and 12 rebounds.
“We knew that they were a good team and that they were going to have their runs. It was unfortunate that they had it in the last quarter, but once again, we closed the game in the right way,” Bogdanovic said. “We controlled the boards, our ball movement was pretty relevant this game and it was a well-deserved win.”
