It took 1 game for Keyonte George's red flags to show up

Plenty of eyes will be on how Keyonte George will do with the Utah Jazz in Year 2. Before their season opener against the Memphis Grizzlies, he made it sound like he was aware of the challenge ahead. Last night was probably not how he wanted things to start for him.

There were plenty of positive takeaways from the Jazz's opening night loss against Memphis, but George's performance was not one of them. If there were three words to describe George's performance against the Grizzlies, they would be yikes, yikes, YIKES.

In 31 minutes of action, George scored 12 points, but on three-for-18 shooting from the field, which included one-for-six shooting from three. The seven assists were plenty encouraging, but for someone expected to take a leap as a scorer, that was about as nightmarish of a start as George could have anticipated. Making it worse is that he played 31 minutes, which was more than everyone else except Lauri Markkanen.

Now, we need to be completely fair about this. George may have just had jitters, as his second half was demonstrably better than his first half. After starting zero-for-nine in the first half, he went three-for-nine in the second. That's a massive step up but an improvement is an improvement no matter what.

Nonetheless, the red flags here are not so much that fans should expect George to play that badly night in and night out because that's not going to happen. The red flags from him stem from the growing pains he will likely go through in his sophomore year.

Don't expect him to shoot as badly as he did against the Grizzlies, but don't be surprised if he has plenty of inefficient statlines as the season continues. George going through massive struggles was one of the Jazz's realistic expectations for a reason.

There's no reason to fret about that because this is part of the process for young and promising players. They hit a wall that they will eventually break through, even if it may take a while for them to do so.

George knows he has to play better

After the game, George understood that he didn't have the best performance. He kept it simple about what has to be done while talking with reporters.

With Game 1 of 82 in the books, George has plenty of time to sort out what went wrong on opening night. Even though his scoring was pretty flat, the Jazz clearly trust him knowing how many minutes he played.

It won't be right away, or it may not even be this season, but the Jazz clearly believe George has what it takes to get to the next level despite the red flags he's shown.