The Utah Jazz lost in embarrassing fashion to the Los Angeles Lakers, the best team in the league right now.
The Utah Jazz came out of the gates hot on Wednesday night, leading 11-3 early on. Within the first three minutes, the Jazz had already knocked down three treys and connected on a Rudy Gobert alley-oop dunk.
My initial thoughts were that the Jazz might be snapping out of their cold streak, but boy was I wrong. Throughout the rest of the game, the Jazz offense could not create very many good shots, especially within the paint.
Defensively, the Jazz were not on point as they allowed the Lakers to score more than 30 points in both the first and second quarters. Anthony Davis shot 81 percent from the field, getting to 26 points quite easily on only 11 shot attempts.
The Lakers raced out to a 20 point lead by halftime, and Utah hovered around a 20 point deficit from that point on. This is only the Jazz’s second loss at home this year, and it stung even more when you consider that LeBron James hadn’t won a game in Salt Lake City in nine years.
The Jazz have dropped five of their last six games by an average margin of 15.4 points, and may have hit rock bottom. Clearly they have a lot of things to work on in practice and film session before Saturday night’s home game against the Memphis Grizzlies. Here’s what Jeff Green said after the loss, via KSL Sports:
"“Right now, we’re low, to be honest with you… I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. We’re not who we want to be. The last six games to me, we kind of took a couple of steps back to the progress that we had. But the great thing about the NBA is we got a couple of games ahead of us that are games that we can win. We got two days to practice, which would be great for us to get back to our roots. And, you know, we’re going to go in tomorrow with a game plan to get better. We can’t get too down on ourselves. To me, it’s too early in the season.”"
Having said that, here are some takeaways from the blowout loss: