There’s no getting around it: the Jazz’s loss Thursday night to a bad Wizards team was pretty brutal.
So, too, though, were some of the exceedingly reactionary comments from a frustrated fanbase who are not handling well the team’s recent 5-6 swoon following its incendiary 24-5 start.
“Fire Bojan into the sun. Donovan too,” one fan tweeted in response to the pair’s mediocre play as the Jazz accumulated an 18-point halftime deficit.
After the Jazz got within eight points late in the third quarter, only to subsequently surrender a 12-2 run with yet more mistakes, another fan replied, “#FireSnyder.” When I accused him of trolling, he insisted he was serious:
“Adjustments are never made. It’s not trolling if it’s true. We signed [Ilyasova], he never gets playing time. Gobert plays like 30 minutes when he is one of the best centers in the game. Not to mention hero ball. You’ll win many titles with hero ball.”
Adjustments are never made? Have you watched a single third quarter this season? And you think Ersan Ilyasova — a guy that no other team wanted — is the savior, but that All-Star guard Donovan Mitchell should have the ball less? I … don’t know what to say to that.
At all.
For what it’s worth, Snyder gave some incredibly detailed insight into the Jazz’s woes with defense and effort in the aftermath:
“Well, you want [their shots] to be contested. Bradley Beal is one of the best midrange shooters in the league. Russell Westbrook has a midrange game. I thought with Westbrook, it was too easy for him to get us deep, particularly in a lot of the back-downs and the post-ups,” he said. “… When we cut [their] lead to seven, we gave up a free-throw rebound — fortunately, they didn’t score on that — [then] we gave up another offensive rebound. And more than them making shots — you’re going to expect Beal to make shots — it’s a lot of the other things that we didn’t do consistently enough. Taking care of the ball: six turnovers in the first quarter, those lead to baskets. You can’t give up four 30-point quarters.”
And he wasn’t done.
“When we started out the game, we were too casual getting back on a couple possessions. We got beat middle. We didn’t shift in from the weak side. We didn’t get back and hit somebody and get them off the glass,” Snyder added. “So it’s a collection of things — the urgency that we have on defense needs to improve.”
Now, if only he’d quit talking about it and actually do it, amiright?
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