Utah Jazz: Three takeaways from the seventh straight victory
By Caleb Manser
The Utah Jazz won their seventh straight on Wednesday night against the shorthanded New York Knicks.
If you missed the Utah Jazz game last night and just checked the box score, then you honestly didn’t miss much. The Knicks came into town just hours removed from a game in Los Angeles, and to make things worse for them they had several players on the injury report.
The Jazz took advantage and pummeled the Knicks, leading by as many as 14 points in the first quarter and never looking back. There were several pleasant things I noticed, but I take it with a grain of salt given the level of opponent the Jazz faced.
For example, the Joe Ingles and Rudy Gobert pick and roll looked unstoppable. One play down the court, Ingles did his classic fake-out where he doesn’t move all that fast, yet gets the easy layup. The next play down the court, the Knicks defenders were watching him closely making sure he didn’t do it again, so instead he just waited for an open passing lane to Gobert for a dunk.
To open the third quarter, the Jazz clamped down on defensive end of the court. The Knicks were held scoreless for the first three and a half minutes, and only scored their second bucket at the 7:05 mark. Georges Niang played some excellent defense, getting his hands on a few deflections and stripping players going up for a shot.
Tony Bradley looked good, he also had a couple dumb fouls that fortunately didn’t amount to anything in this blowout victory. Donovan Mitchell didn’t have the bounce back game I pegged him to have, but again it didn’t really matter because the Jazz got the easy victory.
In the first two quarters the Jazz starters really got the blender offense going nicely. My favorite play of the game was a long outlet pass from Mitchell to Bojan Bogdanovic, who nearly fumbled out of bounds on receiving the pass. He found a way to bounce it across the court to Royce O’Neale, who drove right to the rim for the fancy assist.
These are good things, but nothing really to take home from last night’s game exclusively. Here are three takeaways from the lopsided victory.