Houston • Look … the young Houston Rockets team that took the Toyota Center court on Thursday night was bad enough that it was no real surprise the undefeated Utah Jazz pretty much toyed with them all game long.
In the end, the Jazz left town with a 122-91 victory.
Bojan Bogdanovic scored 19 points and seven Utah Jazz players reached double figures in a 122-91 win over the Houston Rockets on Thursday night.
Utah is off to its first 4-0 start since the 2006-07 season.
Joining Bogdanovic, Rudy Gobert, Donovan Mitchell, Eric Paschall, Hassan Whiteside, Jordan Clarkson and Joe Ingles also scored in double figures for the Jazz.
Christian Wood led Houston with 16 points and Jalen Green had 13 points on 3 of 16 shooting. He missed all eight of his 3-point attempts. Rockets rookie Alperen Sengun had 14 points.
The Jazz did most of the work early.
Paschall was a frenetic ball of energy. Joe Ingles was bombing away from 3 and talking about it to anyone within earshot. Gobert was making the star rookie Green think twice, then thrice, about going to the rim. Bogdanovic was unleashing his patented post-up bully-ball. Whiteside elicited raised eyebrows everywhere with a where-did-that-come-from dribble/spin/throwdown sequence.
It was all looking too easy.
And as a result, it suddenly got unexpectedly hard.
The precipitous, extended lapse at the end of the third quarter was not quite enough to make this Jazz team sweat, but it was enough to make Quin Snyder perturbed.
Utah went up by 36 and then pretty much stopped trying hard for a bit. Houston didn’t.
The Rockets’ ensuing 18-2 run to close the period trimmed their deficit down to “only” 20, which is saying something. But you can rest assured Snyder & Co. will utilize the power outage as lesson to be learned for down the road.
“First of all, we want to finish quarters. We held them to 20-point quarters for three of those quarters. And then that spurt, we didn’t defensive rebound … we started [having to] take the ball out of the net, and I thought they turned it up defensively and got more physical with us,” Snyder said. “It took us a little bit to react to that. Anytime you get a lead, you can probably let up — at the end of possessions, on the boards. And you’re just not quite as precise. And that usually ends up with mistakes or a turnover, or a tougher shot.
“Those are things that we talked about — maintaining that mindset regardless of the score,” he added. “Realistically, that’s something you’ve got to fight. But I liked how we bounced back.”
Houston couldn’t ultimately do anything with the momentum swing, lacking both the weaponry and the know-how to transform it into a game-changing run. A better opponent, however, might be able to capitalize on the premature cooldown.
In the end, Thursday, it didn’t matter. Didn’t come close to mattering. Gobert and Mitchell and Jordan Clarkson asserted their collective superiority. Easy baskets again became the order of the day. Defensive shutdowns reappeared. And by midway through the fourth quarter, they’d put the hammer down, expanded the advantage back to 36, and enabled Snyder to empty his bench and give some minutes to Jared Butler, Trent Forrest, Elijah Hughes … even Malik Fitts.
After allowing 32 points in the third, they yielded just 17 in the fourth.
“They’re a young team, and regardless of the score, they’re gonna play hard every possession — their coach has them doing that. … At the end of the day, they’re all NBA players, and if you let your guard down or take a relaxing thought process or whatever’s going on, anyone in this league can score and play well,” Ingles said. “They picked it up a notch. We had some turnovers, a couple missed shots — if we make a couple of those shots, you probably don’t ask that question. … But we did a good job of circling back in, and our guys did a good job of just controlling the game for the last few minutes.”
As a result, the Jazz started their three-game road trip off with a big victory, and improved to 4-0 on the season in the process.
Chances are, those passive few minutes will be all but forgotten soon enough. Especially if they can avoid them happening too often again.
— The Associated Press contributed to this report
