Utah Jazz are explosive in victory over Hornets, but say they need to get better at slamming the door

On Tuesday night, the Utah Jazz let a 28-point advantage vs. the Pistons slip all the way down to four before finally pulling away.

On Thursday night, they let a Hawks team that was undermanned and should have been overwhelmed hang around for a half before finally asserting control.

And on Friday night, they let a 25-point lead vs. the Charlotte Hornets get trimmed to nine points on multiple occasions in the fourth quarter, before a closing blitz of their own expanded the final advantage to a more eye-catching 138-121.

So, on the positive side of the ledger: Yet another new franchise-record for 3-pointers made (26) produced a season-high in points, which yielded a third consecutive victory, which prolonged their run with the NBA’s best record (18-5).

On the flip side, though, they now have a slight three-game trend of allowing inferior competition to hang around far longer than they ought to.

No alarm bells are ringing, no klaxons are blaring, and no neon-lit “Danger!” signs are flashing just yet, as far as the Jazz are concerned. But they do recognize there is a little something there to keep a wary eye on.

“We don’t have to be much concerned. They’re all great teams in this league — of course they’re going to have their runs, as well. We were on a back-to-back, so it was not an easy game for us. At the end of the day, we won the game. I mean, let’s keep this train going,” said Bojan Bogdanovic, who had another stellar night, finishing with a team-high 31 points on 10-for-15 shooting, including 7 of 10 from deep. “We’ve got to be a little bit better because we cannot permit those teams to have 10-nothing or 12-nothing runs on us. But overall, we’re playing well.”

Fair enough.

As Bogey alluded to, there were plenty of reasons for their uneven performance against the Hornets, one which saw the Jazz manage at least 30 points in every quarter, but in which they also allowed at least 31 in three of the four periods.

Second night of a back-to-back. Third game in four days. Early foul trouble for Rudy Gobert. Late foul trouble for Donovan Mitchell. Mike Conley going out in the second half with right hamstring tightness. LaMelo Ball having the best night of his nascent professional career.

Mitchell, though, has seen a few too many of such stretches lately to just shrug them off so easily.

“We have to stop doing that. That has to stop. With this stretch coming up — it’s a tough stretch with opponents coming from the East — I think that’s going to be one of the biggest things,” said the fourth-year guard, who bounced back from a scoreless first quarter to notch 30 points on 10-for-18 shooting. “Yeah we’re in first, but the team that we want to be ultimately, it doesn’t let the [opponent] back in to a nine-point game. We need to take a 20-point lead and get it to 25, 30.”

There’s nothing significantly awry, he explained, but an assortment of small details that need a bit of extra attention — excessive turnovers, missed block-outs, not getting into plays and initiating the offense early enough, sllowing opponents dictate the flow of the game too much.

“That’s got to be one of our biggest things going forward — just continuing to keep our foot on the gas. We’ve done a solid job of it; tonight was a little bit of a letdown,” Mitchell added. “We won the game and all, but we realized what we can improve on — just continuing to take it to the next level.”

Coach Quin Snyder said he didn’t want to make any sweeping pronouncements before watching the film, but conceded that there were, indeed, little issues bubbling up everywhere throughout the night: “We lost our focus a little bit, to be honest, particularly on the offensive end,” he said, while defensively, “we did some good things, but there was a stretch there where I thought they they got too many things at the rim.”

Charlotte last got within single digits at 128-119, with 2:22 left to play. The Jazz then responded with a Joe Ingles layup, a Bogdanovic 3, an Ingles 3, and a pair of Mitchell free throws for a 10-0 run, a 19-point lead with less than a minute to go, and another victory all sewn up.

Ingles, who got some extra minutes in a crucial fourth-quarter stretch owing to Conley’s injury and Mitchell’s foul trouble, finished with 10 points, 11 assists and four rebounds. He also pretty well summed up both the late-game foibles and the Jazz’s broader situation.

“We gave up the lead a little bit and were lucky to finish it off by making some shots. We can’t really let that happen,” Ingles said. “But we’ll take the win and we’ll learn from it and move on to the next one.”