Miami • They were two plays, both run in the final eight seconds: One counted on Donovan Mitchell making a mistake. The other held the aspiration that he could make the game-winning play.
On both, Mitchell proved himself a rookie.
It’s not quite right to lay down the Jazz’s latest defeat, a 103-102 loss to the Miami Heat, at the feet of Mitchell, who has been an injection of life in his first year in Utah. But these are the facts: Mitchell factored heavily into both of the final two plays of the game Sunday afternoon, and despite a 27-point outing that continued to raise the bar on what the 21-year-old budding star can be, the Jazz (16-24) couldn’t win a game they were in position to clinch.
Whether deserving of the blame or not, Mitchell took it.
“I made some defensive lapses, and the last play was on me, too,” he said. “I’ve just got to improve.”
It was Josh Richardson, the third-year forward of the Heat, who was able to get Mitchell, his defender, caught on a screen and score the game-winning layup against Derrick Favors (hampered by a late fall in the game) with 5.1 seconds left.
It stayed the game-winning layup when the Jazz inbounded to Mitchell, who wound up on the wrong side of the court and had to come back over the timeline with limited clock to spare. He tried a running 20-footer against a Heat double-team as time expired — it bounced away.
Mitchell later lamented that he didn’t pass to Rodney Hood, alone at the top of the key. Coach Quin Snyder said he thought the last play could’ve won the game, but the Jazz just couldn’t execute.
“Donovan downhill with a head of steam, and Rodney peeling out to the 3-point line,” Snyder said. “Those are our two best offensive players.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t have come to the last 8 seconds of play.
The Jazz opened up a small lead at the start of the fourth quarter thanks to Hood, who hit three straight shots to flip a two-point deficit into a six-point lead. From there, the Heat had trouble catching up to the Jazz, who seemed to have an answer for every bucket from the home team.
That lasted until the final two minutes of play: Richardson found a lane for a layup to bring the head within three points. After a turnover in which Mitchell lost the ball out of bounds, he fouled a driving Goran Dragic on the other end, leading to two free throws.
From there, it was a one-possession game. Mitchell Euro-stepped into the lane for a floater, but then fouled Kelly Olynyk, who hit two more free throws to bring it to within a point.
Hood (17 points) got the ball on the inbounds with 37 seconds left. No one else on the Jazz touched the ball as he brought it up the court, and then called for an isolation play resulting in a missed 3-pointer against Tyler Johnson. Miami got the rebound and called timeout, setting up Richardson’s game-winner.
Afterward, Hood said while he “mishandled the ball” on that attempt, he still would have taken it. Johnson’s hands were down, and more often than not, it’s a shot he’s comfortable with.
“That’s a shot I hit all the time,” Hood said. “Everytime you miss, you feel like you could’ve did something different. At the end of the day, I’ll take it.”
For much of the game, the Jazz looked poised to break through for their first win on the road after six straight losses away from Vivint Smart Home Arena. Mitchell, in particular, had a dominant stretch to start the third quarter — Utah’s statistically most challenging period this season — when he hit 6 of his first 7 attempts and capped a personal 13-point run with a one-handed flush off a Thabo Sefolosha pass.
“Pretty easy,” Sefolosha said of the play. “You just throw it up there, he finds a way to get it. Impressive young man.”
But Utah’s rim defense wasn’t just a problem at the beginning of the game. In the first half, the Jazz allowed nine layups and dunks — clearly missing the rim-protecting presence of Rudy Gobert, who has now missed nearly a month with his second knee injury. By the same token, it took the Jazz a while on offense to adjust to the length of Hassan Whiteside, who had three blocks in the first six minutes of the game.
Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said afterward that “in many ways, Utah deserved to win this one,” but winning the close ones are familiar territory for Miami. The Heat are 8-2 in games decided by five points or less this season.
Snyder said there were positives to take for a Jazz team that’s struggled on the road (now just 3-17), but “it just doesn’t feel like it right now.”
That sentiment was echoed in the locker room. Fielding a question about his alley-oop, yet another surefire “SportsCenter” clip, Mitchell didn’t spend a lot of his breath talking about it.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but that stuff doesn’t really mean a lot to me right now,” he said. “I’m just upset about the last play.”
.
