The Utah Jazz were in rare form on Wednesday, suffering one of the franchise’s all-time worst losses at the hands of the Dallas Mavericks.
History has been made in Jazzland…and not the good kind.
In the second game of a five-game roadie, the Utah Jazz took on Harrison Barnes and the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday. Spoiler alert: it was bad — after a ho-hum first half, the Jazz scored just 22 points in the second half and dropped the contest in epic fashion, 118-68.
For the math-challenged out there, that’s a 50-point loss. FIFTY.
That’s the franchise’s biggest margin of defeat since the New Orleans Jazz lost by 56 points to the Milwaukee Bucks in March of 1979. And if you’re looking for some kind of silver lining in the effort, you’re probably on the hunt for a Sasquatch.
No Jazzman scored more than Ricky Rubio‘s 11 (and he was just 3-for-11 from the field). As a team, the Jazz shot just 31 percent overall and missed 29 of their 35 3-point attempts. Meanwhile, the Mavs offense ran roughshod.
My advice to Jazz Nation in the wake of the team’s “big” night: embrace the suck. This game was just one of those anomalous, so-bad-it’s-almost-entertaining blips. It was an outlier, not the first big crack in a ship headed toward the ocean floor.
For me, it felt like the Jazz’s Game 3 road loss to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the 1998 NBA Finals. Utah only mustered 54 total points in that game and, as it was happening, myself and a small section of our watch party almost delighted in how bad things got.
You could almost make a drinking game or a bit of Jazz Bingo out of every brick, turnover and/or failed defensive rotation.
The reason we felt that way then, and the reason you should now, is because games like that aren’t real. After putting up that 54 spot, the ’98 Jazz fought hard in Game 4, then won Game 5 to send the series back to Salt Lake City, where it took multiple failed shot clock calls (resulting in a five-point swing) and MJ pushing off for the Jazz to lose.
As bad as the loss to the Mavs was, previous wins over the Boston Celtics and the Memphis Grizzlies are far closer to the team’s reality.
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Clearly, the Jazz have got some issues, but every goal the team had entering the 2018-19 campaign remains firmly in place. In an 82-game NBA season, patience is a virtue. You’d still do well to exercise a modicum of patience with the Jazz.
Until they round the corner, though, you can hang your hat on the fact that the Jazz have done something historic, something so bad that it was actually kind of great.
Like I said — embrace the suck.