Utah Jazz remind people in road-weary victory that there’s more to them than just 3-point shooting

This season, the Utah Jazz have been racking up victories by bludgeoning opponents into submission with a prolific and efficient 3-point attack.

On Sunday afternoon, with tired legs short-circuiting their efforts beyond the arc, they picked up a 103-95 win over the Indiana Pacers with some slightly-less-sexy but no-less-effective defense and rebounding.

And so it was that they swept their three-game road trip, won their fourth straight game, improved to 19-5 overall on the season, and demonstrated that there’s a lot more to them than merely their record-setting deep shooting.

“We locked in. And I think that’s what’s different about this team this year, and this is one of the things that shouldn’t go unnoticed. It’s very impressive, what we did, being able to do the little things, to turn up our energy — kind of getting hit in the mouth and [being] like, ‘This is how we’re going to have to play the rest of the game. We’re going to have to pick up our intensity,’ and we did that,” said Donovan Mitchell, who just missed out on a triple-double with 27 points, 11 assists and nine rebounds. “There were times when we were tired, there were times we had to dig deep, and we did it all — collectively.”

Yeah, there was definitely some digging deep required on this occasion.

With the Jazz playing their third game in four days, and Sunday’s tipoff coming about 6 hours earlier than usual on account of Super Bowl Sunday, and being short-handed due to Mike Conley’s hamstring injury, there were bound to be some tiredness issues and heavy legs.

And it showed.

Indiana raced out to a quick 12-6 lead by exploiting some lax defense and burying four of their first five 3-point attempts.

As for Utah’s 3-point looks, they were pretty tightly contested early, but even as the Jazz began to better discern Indiana’s rotations and work their way into increasingly open looks as the game progressed, those long-range shots still came up short on the rim pretty consistently.

In the end, Utah shot just 40.9% from the field and only 13 of 42 (31.0%) from deep.

Their formula to make up for it? Controlling the boards (a 61-45 advantage in total, including a whopping 17 notches on the offensive glass), and tightening up on the defensive end (after that 4-for-5 start, the Pacers went just 4 of 24 from deep the rest of the game, while also shooting just 39.8% from the field overall).

Rudy Gobert was particularly instrumental there, finishing with 16 rebounds and three blocked shots, to go along with 16 points on 7-for-9 from the field.

“These are the types of games that you talk about, as far as you don’t have your best shooting night [and are dealing with] some of the other things that the road provides, whether it be [coming] off a back-to-back, an early start, all those types of things. And that’s when your defense has to carry it,” said coach Quin Snyder. “And I thought we had some excellent individual performances — Royce [O’Neale] on [Malcolm] Brogdon, Rudy on [Domantas] Sabonis. I thought we did a good job in those matchup situations.

“And then, the glass was big for us,” Snyder added. “When you’re dragging a little bit, those are the times it becomes even more important to try to generate some easy stuff. And the offensive boards were big for us tonight — I was kidding Joe Ingles that even he got one. So those extra possessions really help in situations like this.”

Indeed, Brogdon and Sabonis — the Pacers’ two All-Star candidates — shot 7 for 20 and 7 of 19, respectively. As for the rebounds, Gobert gave the Jazz’s ball-handling trio of Mitchell, Ingles and Jordan Clarkson credit for switching gears and beginning to increasingly drive the paint and put some additional pressure on Indiana’s big-man tandem of Sabonis and Myles Turner.

“When our guards are able to get in the lane and get to the rim and make whoever’s guarding the big help, it puts us in a position where we can rebound,” the Frenchman explained.

Bojan Bogdanovic, who hit only 5 of 14 attempts Sunday following some sizzling shooting of late, but who made up for it in part by grabbing five rebounds of his own, summed it up pretty succinctly in the end.

“Even if we are not shooting well,” he said, “there is another way to win the game.”