Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 134-126 loss to the Phoenix Suns from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.
1. A very entertaining game — thanks to rest?
That was actually a tremendous display of basketball. I think some people will see the score and figure that no defense was played in this game, and look, it wasn’t the best defensive performance I’ve seen.
But I think the biggest reason the scores were high was just some pretty terrific offensive execution. The old chestnut that the ball moves faster than the man was on display tonight, and both teams did a pretty nice job of whizzing the ball around the floor to get open shots, which they converted at an extremely high percentage. The Jazz shot 56% from deep, the Suns shot 49% too.
Watch some of this offense, though. I honestly love the passing here, it’s some of my favorite basketball to watch.
The two teams made 22 threes each, and the combined total of 44 makes tied an all-time NBA record in any game.
I do wonder how much of the solid play was due to rest. Thanks to the NBA Cup tournament, both teams had four days off before this game, including three consecutive days of practice.
We asked Jordan Clarkson if the rest played a role in the excitement of the game.
“We’re all just hungry to go back out there and hoop and play — so we come ready," he said.
So does that mean he’d prefer fewer games with more time off in between?
“I don’t know, because I’m not too big on practice. On a lot of practices. I would love to just show up at seven o’clock, throw my jersey on, get in layup lines, and start the game,” he said.
Touché. For me — I’d probably prefer fewer games and fewer duds, and more nights like this one.
2. Walker Kessler threes
Both teams showed off some wrinkles offensively we haven’t seen before, too — like the Jazz spacing Walker Kessler in the corner.
Kessler had zero 3-point attempts this season after 19 last year. Heck, I don’t think he’s even looked at the rim this year. And tonight, he made two consecutive threes to start the game, his first two 3-point shot attempts of the season.
Look, if the Jazz space the floor this way, teams aren’t going to guard Kessler. So theoretically, it could be a real weapon for them if he can make those shots. Last year, he didn’t, shooting just 21%.
But also, the Jazz did kind of treat it as a gimmick. Even after Kessler made the two threes, after the next timeout, they put him back in the dunker spot, and played that way for the next 42 minutes. Asked about it after the game, Will Hardy said that Kessler got the 3-point permission “because I’m sucking up to him.”
“Walker’s a player that we’re always going to be trying to develop. That’s an itch that we needed to scratch a little bit,” he said. “It’s not something that you know Walker and I have talked — this is not something that we want to like fully make a big part of his life. He does so many other things for us in terms of applying pressure on the rim, and I think our team is getting much better at looking for the lob."
I’d be curious if he can switch between the two, though. Last year, he tried, and it didn’t work at all. This year, though, he’s a lot stronger everywhere on the court. Some versatility might help, too.
3. Ryan Smith’s Smith’s appearance
On Wednesday, the Smith Entertainment Group had their third-annual “All In On Utah” day, where the Jazz and Utah Hockey Club did a bunch of charity appearances across the Salt Lake Valley.
I’ve been to a bunch of these charity appearances, both with the Smiths in charge and the Millers, and let’s be honest... a lot of the time, they’re pretty perfunctory. One of the first ones I went to was Trevor Booker’s “Booker’s Breakfast Assist” event, where Booker would give you an autograph or take a photo with you if you donated a box of cereal. I get that every little bit contributes to solving hunger — and also, doing it a box of cereal at a time is thinking pretty small about the problem. This isn’t Trevor Booker’s fault, really, but probably more of a symptom of the whole NBA charitable complex.
The event I went to on Wednesday had all of the trappings of that. Like Booker’s, the event was at a local Smith’s grocery store, this one in Rose Park. And I listened as the plan was described: Ryan and Ashley Smith were going to stand at the self-checkout register, and pay for groceries as people came through that line. I overheard that they would do so with a gift card preloaded with $800. Cameras would film every moment.
Ryan stepped in, though, and suggested a different plan. Instead of just paying for groceries at one set of registers, he asked his staff to man all of the registers at Smith’s, and at every register, they’d pay for groceries.
Staff scrambled to get enough gift cards to make that work, buying a bunch of gift cards at the front, and figuring out how to bill it within the Smith Entertainment Group’s expense systems. Elsewhere, other Jazz staff — and even random media covering the event — were told to give away extra cards to people just walking through the store. Gift cards were filled and refilled throughout the event.
It was, to be honest, chaos.
It also, to be honest, helped way more people than the original plan would have.
Overall, the estimate was that they ended up paying for over 200 people’s groceries. They also gave out dozens of gift cards to others. Ryan walked through the store and talked to fans, gave out hockey tickets, and all sorts of other stuff. As a media production, it didn’t really work, but as a charitable event, it was a success.
I know what you’re going to say, and I’m going to agree with you: this pales in comparison to the $900 million of taxpayer money he’s getting from Salt Lake City. That was a very bad thing, and I can’t emphasize enough how much the research says giving that money to the Smith Entertainment Group was wrong — let alone the ethics of taking money from everyday folks and giving it to a billionaire.
He’s said publicly before that he does consider the “move fast and iterate on your mistakes” tech model to be how he approaches things, and I thought this was an instance of that. Sometimes, that sucks, to be sure. Yellow jerseys.
Sometimes, though I think it pays dividends. And in this case, his willingness to step in and invent a new plan on the fly did work out better for random Rose Park grocery store shoppers on a Wednesday.
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