At the end, Donovan Mitchell tilted his head from side to side and clenched a fist. He accepted some congratulatory hugs, and then kind of shook them off, dutifully, knowing there is still work ahead. Somewhere deep, though, he admitted feeling a sense of redemption that had been nine months, almost to the day, in the coming.
Yes, he and his teammates had said all the right things in the run-up to Game 5, preparing this time to blast through a barrier that last time stirred and extended their misery before crushing them and their intentions for something bigger, something better in the playoffs.
Said. Said. Said them.
And now, they did them.
Did them in a dramatic, dominating way, exorcising devilish defeat itself with every dance of the net, every defensive stop, every roar of the crowd.
Normally, being ahead 3-1 in a playoff series would be a source of confidence for a team. For the Jazz, it was a source of motivation, so much so that they played as though it were them facing elimination, not the Memphis Grizzlies.
It was a manifestation of lessons learned from that playoff collapse in the bubble last fall, a collapse from a lopsided advantage that was never finished, never realized. At least not immediately.
It is now.
The Jazz thrashed Memphis, 126-110, for their fourth straight series win on Wednesday night at Vivint Arena, taking their first-round spoils, turning their attention to whatever business comes next — defeating the Clippers or the Mavericks.
Whoever. Whatever.
If there’s anyone who doesn’t remember the crater the Jazz fell into, the disappointment they suffered, at the start of September, losing to Denver when they themselves had assumed victory would be their reward, that someone isn’t on this team.
“It’s as important to forget as it is to remember,” Quin Snyder said, afterward.
It was Mitchell who dropped to the floor seconds after the Jazz were eliminated by the Nuggets, saying thereafter: “I didn’t know what else to do.”
Those moments, days, weeks, months in defeat’s wake not only stayed with Mitchell, and all the Jazz, they served as a collective pivot point for everything that has taken place since. All the focus, all the force, all the work, all the winning.
Including Wednesday night’s result.
Mitchell said exactly that: “That fueled a lot of this season.”
Before the season even started, Mitchell and Rudy Gobert declared they had had enough of the Jazz’s first-round playoff ousters, that such shortcomings were a thing of the past.
“We started something,” Gobert said back then. “Now we have to finish it.”
Said Mitchell: “We’re just scratching the surface.”
They took a steam shovel to it here.
And in Wednesday’s postgame, the star guard summed up the performance thusly: “We stayed locked in. … That’s what championship teams do.”
The substantiation of all those declarations, as mentioned, was evident in the sending off of the young Grizzlies, a team learning its own lessons from playoff defeat. This time, they could do their own remembering.
The Jazz already had fully matriculated.
“Tonight was good,” Mitchell said. “We did what we were supposed to do.”
They fired out from the opening tip, hitting 15 of their first 19 shots, scoring what was for them a playoff record 47 first-quarter points. What a preposterous beginning. A 20-point lead was whittled a bit by Memphis, briefly aided as it was by Jazz turnovers.
But Utah screamed back, steeled by Mitchell, who demonstrated his determination with every kind of sweet shot imaginable. He went for 30 points, 26 of those coming in the initial half, and rang up 10 assists.
He wasn’t alone, bolstered by Gobert’s 23 points and 15 rebounds, Bojan Bogdanovic’s 17, Jordan Clarkson’s 24 and Royce O’Neale’s 17.
“We really moved the ball,” Snyder said, having noted that the Jazz got proper spacing and good looks by way of 27 assists. The Jazz also pounded the boards, out-rebounding the Grizz, 51-39.
“The key for us to generate some of those looks is to get stops,” said Snyder. “… That’s what we were trying to do, continue to attack.”
Attack they did.
The Jazz’s largest lead grew to 35 points. They yabba-dabba-doo’ed their way home from there.
Frame of reference or no, achieving what they did against the Grizz was no easy task, the visitors already having faced what amounted to two elimination situations in their play-in games against the Spurs and the Warriors, the second of those wins coming on Golden State’s home court.
No matter. The Jazz had zero plans to return to Memphis for any subsequent work, regardless of how fierce the competition might have been.
Might have been.
The Jazz went throttle up, and the Grizzlies, bewildered early by what hit them, acquiesced. The biggest question in the second half was when Snyder should take his regulars off the court for their own protection.
Already, in the second quarter, Mike Conley left the game with a sore right hamstring, handing the Jazz their only bad news of an otherwise sensational night.
Mitchell was pleased, but far from satisfied.
“For me, this one was huge,” he said. “[But] it’s not the end goal. The job’s not done.”
He added, rather greedily: “This series is over, we didn’t come this far to win just one. … We’ve got to go out there and do it again, and again and again.”
Because, yeah. That’s what championship teams do.
GORDON MONSON hosts “The Big Show” with Jake Scott weekdays from 2-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone, which is owned by the parent company that owns the Utah Jazz.
