Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 114-111 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.
1. A classic moral victory
For just the sixth time all season, the Sixers were able to start their big three of Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, and Paul George. As bad as the Sixers have been this season, they’ve been at least decent when those three guys are healthy, to the tune of a 4-2 record.
And the Jazz hung with them. Okay, sure, the turnovers were once again embarrassing. 22 is too many, 15 live-ball turnovers doubly so. But in all other aspects of this game, the Jazz were competitive or better.
If you’re keeping track, that’s really five reasonable performances in a row: a reasonably close loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the league’s best team, a buzzer beater loss to the Blazers, and then the two wins to Brooklyn and Detroit before that. All of a sudden, this Jazz team has gone from unwatchable dreck to really pretty reasonable basketball.
Why?
“The cohesion of the group on both sides of the ball has grown a lot in the last couple of weeks. I think the the way that our team is communicating with each other has continued to grow,” head coach Will Hardy said. And his best player, Lauri Markkanen agreed:
“I think we’ve been playing together and just sharing the ball, and we’re getting everybody’s looks, and I think just togetherness is good. We’ve stayed together, even though it hasn’t been the best year. But like, we’re just sticking with it, having a good energy and really trying to play together.”
That’s mostly true offensively — the Jazz have been actually an above-average offensive team recently, while the defense continues to disappoint. But that formula leads to close games, and I think that’ll help with player development.
I’ll also add this: I think the offensive continuity has probably been helped with Keyonte George’s absence. He played a really good game in Detroit — but does take a lot of shots and has the ball in his hands a great deal. Him being off the court probably means the ball finds other players who are statistically much more efficient.
2. Brice Sensabaugh’s 20-point night
Brice Sensabaugh had the best game of his 2024-25 season and perhaps the best night of his NBA career tonight: 20 points on 6-9 shooting, 3-5 from deep, plus five rebounds and two assists in 24:33 minutes.
Sensabaugh’s intriguing because he has two things that none of the other Jazz young players really have: patience, and a sense of how to use his body to create space. Both of them were on display in this alley-oop to Kessler:
That’s really nice work: snaking the pick and roll, forcing the big man to come up, waiting for the right amount of time for Walker Kessler to get to the rim, then making an accurate lob pass. Four skills come together for an easy two points.
“This game, I was able to slow down a little bit and and kind of read what’s going on, and just let it unfold in front of me,” Sensabaugh said “And I think I’m pretty good at that, but I kind of lose it sometimes. So it was good for it to come back to me today.”
There are also times when the patience can hurt a little bit. I’d probably rather he attack this closeout immediately, rather than jab a few times before beginning the drive. Still, Sensabaugh is a talented shotmaker, and makes it anyway.
Among the Jazz’s six young players, I’m probably picking Sensabaugh in a shooting contest — at least, an isolation shooting contest.
As always, the question with him is whether or not the offense is elite enough when compared to other NBA players to make up for the defensive deficiencies, which are large. If so, he can be a nice “accent” player, as Sensabaugh put it — probably not a primary ballhandler in a starting lineup or off the bench, but a secondary scorer who can catch the ball up top and put the ball in the basket at a league-average level.
Nights like tonight push that outcome to become more likely, but he’ll need more of them to truly stick.
3. Defensive versatility with a young team
Sixers coach Nick Nurse won a surprise title with the Raptors in 2019, in his first year as an NBA head coach. Obviously, a good deal of that was Kawhi Leonard’s shotmaking brilliance, but they were also a tremendous defensive team as a unit. Most impressively, they shut down Embiid and the Sixers, Giannis and the Bucks, and Steph Curry and the Warriors in three consecutive series.
A lot of that was because of the way those teams could defend in multiple ways, adapting their identity to their opponent. That’s really impressive to do, as it requires players to learn new habits on the fly and immediately implement them. The Raptors' mix of experience (Leonard, Kyle Lowry) and youth (Pascal Siakam, Fred Van Vleet) proved to be the perfect unit to do that.
Will Hardy’s been on record that defensive versatility is important to him in the playoffs as well, but whether or not the Jazz have actually been able to put that in practice has been, at best, up-and-down.
Tonight, though, I thought they did a good job showing Embiid and Maxey different looks. They mostly played straight up, but had a couple of zone possessions, and then late in the game, they switched and threatened to double at times. Maxey and Embiid were good, but didn’t go off or anything.
Given Nurse’s history of success, I wanted to ask him when he decides his team should try to put in place a new defensive strategy — especially with a new or young team.
“I would do a lot of experimenting, probably sometimes knowing that some of those experiments are bit of a long shot, right? But you still need to go through with it and and see,” Nurse said. “What I do is I try to crumple up the stuff that isn’t working and throw it in the garbage can pretty quick, right?”
To Hardy’s credit, he’s done that. The zone worked last season, but hasn’t looked brilliant this year, and he’s only pulled it out once or twice since.
Still, I’d be interested to see how different it might be with a veteran team that was more adept at defense overall, or just adept with learning new schemes. I think we’re still seeing a somewhat handicapped Hardy.
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