The Triple Team: Utah Jazz‘s 41-point loss to Golden State wasn’t pretty. What went wrong?

Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 127-86 loss to the Golden State Warriors from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.

1. A completely lifeless offense

“That wasn’t pretty,” head coach Will Hardy said to open tonight’s press conference.

Yeah, it wasn’t. Scoring 86 points (with an 83 offensive rating) is just about as bad as offense gets in the modern NBA era. Hardy reported that his players felt that it was “just one of those nights” — missed free throws from Lauri Markkanen, missed 3-point shots from Taylor Hendricks, Jordan Clarkson, Cody Williams, and Collin Sexton, and even three missed dunks.

But Hardy wasn’t willing to accept that explanation, which is good — I don’t think it fit the description of what happened tonight well. The Jazz got absolutely outworked, out-physicaled, and outsmarted tonight, especially at the point of attack. When the Warriors brought their toughness to this game, the Jazz wilted. You can accept the Jazz losing to a Warriors team due to a lower skill level. Due to simply being too soft? It’s harder to handle.

“Our team has got to continue to find the mental piece of this, to push through the hard moments and not back off,” Hardy said.

On Wednesday, the Jazz did, turning a 17-point deficit into a lead in the fourth quarter before ultimately succumbing to missed free throws. Letting go of the rope completely in this one, though, was a worse sign.

Of course, mental strength isn’t enough: you also have to know how to react when the physicality occurs. Take this play when Jordan Clarkson is trapped up top: he’s got to pass the ball quickly, and, critically, his teammates have to come help him out to start the 4-on-3 that should result in points behind the trap.

We all expect the Jazz to lose a lot this year — but losses like Wednesday’s are acceptable, positive steps towards being a better team someday. Losses like Friday’s? They’re steps backward. We have 80 games left to determine whether the Jazz are a fun team without enough skill and experience, or a bad team requiring roster-wide changes in the rebuild.

Things were going reasonably well for the Jazz through the first rotation of the game — then the subs came in. Six minutes in, the Jazz put in Cody Williams and Brice Sensabaugh, and just over a minute later, in came John Collins and Jordan Clarkson.

That lineup gave up 10 points in just over two minutes. The next 2:53 featured another six-point Warrior run. All of a sudden, a promising start turned into a self-dug hole impossibly quickly.

Yes, it’s just two games. But even on paper, I have nearly zero reason to hope for positive things from that second lineup. The defensive dropoff from Walker Kessler to Collins simply can’t get any bigger, and he shares the floor with three or four other defense-last guys — Brice Sensabaugh, Jordan Clarkson, and Keyonte George — out there.

While you’d hope to be able to outscore teams with that lineup, the problem is that all of those players are score-first, too — so you get none of the ball movement synergy of the NBA’s best offensive lineups. The result? Big losses.

Given the Jazz’s roster, I might try to make things a bit more diverse in the second group. While Collin Sexton isn’t a very good defensive player, he at least brings more sparkplug energy than anyone off the bench right now. I also wonder what playing Kyle Filipowski and his ball movement would do; at the very least, it’d help “Flip” develop.

That lineup only plays a few minutes at a time, though. Then, thanks to the stagger substitution of Lauri Markkanen, there’s a third unit that should be a lot better and plays alongside the quarter breaks. It was largely that lineup that brought the Jazz back against the Grizzlies in the second half on Wednesday, for example.

Look — it’s possible in this topsy-turvy season that the bad lineups are the point, and outright punting a few minutes per half might be the best way to lose games while still giving developmental possessions for the rest of the roster in the other 36ish minutes. But if going for wins is the point, I don’t think this current setup is ideal.

“It just tells me how the game was going,” George said.

Did it ever. This missed dunk is absolutely making the first Shaqtin’ highlight reel of the season.

We all know that these kinds of plays happen — they’re frustrating, but at least it couldn’t have come in a situation that mattered any less.

But what I’m a little worried about with George is his ability to bounce back from bad plays. We saw him compound his mistakes in the Jazz’s first game against the Grizzlies by following bad shots with other bad shots, just forcing them rather than correcting them.

“I don’t think emotion is bad. I don’t think frustration is bad. That’s very real, especially in young athletes, but I do think there’s times where your emotions are — they’re running the show, and that’s not what we want,” Hardy said after George’s game one. “We can’t get so wrapped up in what’s already happened, or the frustration or the anger, and my responsibility in that is to maybe point that out at different times, to give a perspective from the outside.”

George’s reaction to the missed dunk was another point there: yes, the dunk was missed — but Kyle Filipowski was right behind him to get the two points anyway, so long as George got his mind back into the play! Instead, he lingered on his mistake, hung on the rim, and got a goaltending call.

He’s being hard on himself right now, with some of the same perfectionism that hurt Walker Kessler last year. Hopefully, he can turn it around well before Kessler did.

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