Utah Jazz fail to surpass .500 record with loss in San Antonio

The Utah Jazz put up a lackluster performance in San Antonio on Sunday, causing them to slip back below .500 once again.

After winning two straight home games in impressive fashion over both the San Antonio Spurs and Houston Rockets, it appeared as if the Utah Jazz were finally beginning to turn the corner on what has otherwise been a slow start to the season. Unfortunately, it didn’t take them long to revert back to their former ways as they fell flat in Sunday’s contest in San Antonio.

The Spurs have had their share of problems this season with an over-reliance on mid-range shooting and a surprisingly lackluster defense, however, they were able to overcome both those issues in this most recent bout against Utah. In fact, the Spurs actually feasted from mid-range by taking advantage of a Jazz defense that often forces, and struggles to cope with, those kind of shots.

Meanwhile, San Antonio’s defense wasn’t overly dominant, as the Jazz got open look after open look, but simply couldn’t knock them down. For the contest, Utah went just 31 percent from deep on 29 attempts. This combination of issues led to the Jazz falling 110-97, just a few days after punishing San Antonio within Vivint Smart Home Arena earlier in the week.

The real issue for the Jazz was their second quarter performance where they were outscored by a whopping mark of 31-18. During that time, the Spurs went on a 17-0 run, which was put up principally against Utah’s reserves. It wasn’t long ago that the Jazz bench allowed Miami to go on a 20-0 run, which would eventually cost the Jazz the game, so Utah has to look at those two stretches as issues that resulted in two losses which could have otherwise been wins.

After taking that dramatic second quarter run, the Spurs built their biggest lead early in the third quarter by going up by 21. Utah managed to fight back and close the gap to just five late in the game, but ultimately ran out of gas. Their sloppy start ended up being too much to handle and they simply couldn’t complete the comeback as San Antonio quickly took control once again to close out the game.

Had Utah won, they would have finally broken above. 500 with a record of 14-13. Instead, they’ve fallen back below .500 once again as they now sit at 13-14. And unfortunately, they’re in for a tough back-to-back this evening as they’re headed straight to Oklahoma City where they’ll play a consecutive contest.

When looking at individual performances in this most recent contest, the Jazz were thoroughly outplayed up and down the roster as well. San Antonio’s stars LaMarcus Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan played well, and Rudy Gay particularly punished the Jazz with 23 points on 10-of-16 shooting which included some big buckets to thwart Utah’s comeback attempt.

Meanwhile, I mentioned the putrid run the Jazz bench gave up, and that was quite indicative of how poorly the Jazz reserves played. Aside from Thabo Sefolosha, who went for nine points on 4-of-4 shooting, Utah’s bench had a forgettable outing. Jae Crowder went 1-of-6 from the field and continued his ill-advised 3-point chucking ways with an 0-of-4 night. He also had issues rebounding and on defense that were costly for Utah and he ended the night a minus-21.

Royce O’Neale and Kyle Korver each finished with a meager five points apiece on poor shooting splits, and Dante Exum went an appalling minus-seven with zero points in two minutes of mistake-riddled play, which led to him being quickly pulled from the contest.

Despite the bench being the ones responsible for San Antonio’s big run that would ultimately be game-clinching, the starters weren’t much better either. Joe Ingles was the only one who finished with a positive plus/minus, but only chipped in five points. Rudy Gobert had a quiet night with just 12 points and eight boards on 5-of-9 shooting, and though Donovan Mitchell had a huge second half in which he went off for all 27 of his points, he was a team-worst minus-22 on the night, shooting just 38.1 percent from the field and committing several defensive mistakes.

Ricky Rubio had himself a decent night with 26 points on 47.8 percent shooting, but he was still a minus-eight. Then there was Derrick Favors who, one game removed from a scintillating performance against Houston, put up a meager two points.

The Jazz were outmatched across the board by a San Antonio team that’s been struggling lately but came out and played one heck of a game on both ends of the floor. Hopefully the Jazz show some resilience and bounce back quickly, because they’ll be in for a major challenge when they visit OKC on Monday night.

The last time the Jazz were at Chesapeake Energy Arena, they allowed the Thunder to overcome a huge deficit in Game 5 of the playoffs, which would later spur Mitchell to say, “We’ll see y’all next year” after the contest, insinuating that the Jazz would win Game 6 to close out the series. His words proved prophetic, but it will be interesting to see how Utah fares in its first return to OKC since then.

They’ll need to find their shot and play much better defense than they did against San Antonio on Sunday. Otherwise, they’ll be in danger of falling to two games below .500 and at risk of slipping back to 14th in the treacherously deep Western Conference.