Utah Jazz: Top 8 most disappointing aspects of first-round loss to Houston

Several disappointing aspects of the Utah Jazz’s first-round loss to the Houston Rockets added up to make it one of the more painful playoff exits in recent memory.

Although few suspected that the Utah Jazz would be able to get out of the first-round once it became solidified that they’d be facing the Houston Rockets, a team that has long been a difficult matchup for them, there’s still no denying that losing the series in five games was a disappointing occurrence. No matter the expectations or the outcomes, a loss would have been tough to swallow for the Utah faithful, regardless of if it’d been in four games or seven games.

However, the overall way that things went down in this particular series made the loss to the Rockets even more difficult to bear than one might have otherwise presumed. This wasn’t just an unfortunate first-round loss. It was a much more discouraging affair than that for several reasons.

As painful as it is to revisit the series, that’s exactly what I intend to do here, largely because it helps us understand what happened and why things went so frustratingly wrong. While there certainly were a lot of factors that resulted in the five-game series loss, these following eight are far and above the aspects of the series that stand out as the most disappointing for Utah Jazz fans.