After a brilliant weekend of basketball, the Utah Jazz came crashing violently back to Earth against the New Orleans Pelicans.
On Saturday, the Utah Jazz looked like a club on the fast track to elite status in the Association. After trailing by 17 early in the fourth quarter, Donovan Mitchell and company miraculously stormed back in epic fashion to steal one from the best team in the NBA, the Milwaukee Bucks. In doing so, they extended their win streak to four games and moved to within two games of the No. 3 seed in the West.
Two days later, the shoe hit the other foot and man, was it ugly.
Despite playing relatively well offensively — five Jazzmen scored 16 or more points and the team knocked down 14 triples — the Jazz would eventually stand idle as a 14-point fourth-quarter lead devolved into an ugly loss to one of the most beleaguered squads in the Association (recent success notwithstanding).
The team’s bread and butter, a vaunted defense anchored by reigning DPOY Rudy Gobert, was ripped to shreds by a NOLA attack that was plus-14 in the paint and plus-eight on second-chance points. And they managed those feats with soon-to-be ex-Pelican Anthony Davis playing just 22 ho-hum minutes.
Now, they face the prospect of hitting the road to take on a team that just demoralized them in crunch time, in front of their own fans.
To say that these are bad developments in Jazzland is putting it mildly.
Much has been made of the fact that the Jazz have a favorable closing schedule. Including Monday night’s debacle, 18 of the team’s final 20 games come against teams with worse records than Utah’s. People have been banking on this stretch to get the team back to the top half of the West’s table.
But in the NBA, anyone can beat you. And if the Jazz continue to sleepwalk through games, the big run we’ve all been anticipating is going to be a lot less impressive than it ought to be.
After the Jazz dropped the first of their home-and-home series with the Pels, Gobert chalked the loss up to a lack of energy. “From the beginning of the game, I feel like we didn’t have enough energy,” he said. “We gave them a lot of confidence early.”
Clearly, that’s not what you want to see from a team that needs to lock-in ahead of postseason play. Because regardless of who the Jazz get paired with, they’ll be in for a fight. Strong forward momentum and favorable seeding/home-court advantage could be musts if the Jazz want to see Round 2.
Coming out flat and playing down to inferior competition are major no-nos. Energy should be a given.
With impressive wins over the Bucks and, earlier, the Denver Nuggets, the Jazz got ahead of schedule in a big, bad way over the weekend. Monday night brought them back to Earth and, if they continue to roll in cruise control, things could go sideways in a hurry.