SALT LAKE CITY — Three thoughts on the Jazz's 88-79 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies from KSL.com's Utah Jazz beat writer, Andy Larsen.

1. The Jazz lose a "schedule loss"

There are a couple of games that, coming into the season, you know are going to be difficult to win, just because the NBA's schedule packs 82 games into under six months. Tonight's game was a perfect example of such a game: it was the Jazz's fifth game in seven nights, a back-to-back after a thousand-mile flight to Memphis last night, and against the most physical team in the league. In short, the resulting lack of sleep, as well as travel fatigue, makes players' reaction times slower, reduces their speed, and makes them more susceptible to mistakes on the court.

Want proof? Here's ESPN's article on the phenomena, from before the season. Ignoring the quality of the teams, sleep expert Cheri Mah could predict which team would win or lose based on their travel schedule alone 78 percent of the time. Indeed, she's even calculated her own metric, called a "Mah score," which puts the fatigue level on a 0-12 scale based on eight different factors. Here's the chart:

See that grey circle over this period in January? That's tonight's game against the Memphis Grizzlies. That's the second-most difficult game that the Jazz will face this season from a travel perspective.

And from a matchup perspective, it gets even worse. The Grizzlies are the league's most physical team. They foul more than any other team, but rank third defensively despite that. Why? Well, because they're just incredibly physical throughout: they grab and hold on nearly every play bump players off of their paths, and prevent solid offense. We definitely saw that tonight.

The usual thinking is that players' performances decline the most at the end of games too, in the fourth quarter where they're the most fatigued. That sort of happened tonight, though the team made a comeback at the very end. Really, it was the end of the third and beginning of the fourth that put the Jazz away.

I wonder if we also saw that fatigue in the Jazz's shooting strokes. Trey Lyles was the only Jazz player who shot over 50 percent from the floor, overall, the Jazz shot just 38 percent. And the free throw line shooting was iffy, too: only 60 percent from there.

Coming into the game, it was wise to expect a Jazz loss, and be pleasantly surprised if they found a way to win. The pleasant surprise didn't come. The good news is they have one solid night in their beds before facing the Cleveland Cavaliers Tuesday.

2. Is it all good in the Hood?

I worry that it is not. Rodney Hood's struggles since coming down with illness in Golden State on Dec. 21 have been very, very real. Here are the lines for his games coming into tonight:

There was the very good performance at home against Philadelphia, that personally led me to believe that Hood was back at 100 percent. But these last six games have been against harder competition, and he's been outplayed by Joe Ingles, frankly. That's not a sentence I thought I would ever write.

Here's his shot chart, too:

I think it's interesting that he's struggling so much close to the basket. I have no idea why it is, but it's curious. Hood's above the break 3-point shot is definitely off too.

The problem is that scoring is Hood's game, and if he's not scoring, he's not contributing much in other areas. He's not turning over the ball, I suppose, but he's not really playmaking right now either. And the defense has regressed too — he's just getting lost at times, and other times just getting beat running through screens and even just off the dribble.

It's entirely possible that this is just a slump, Hood will go 8-13 against Cleveland, and all of this will be behind us. But regardless of what his shot is doing on offense, I'd still like to see more consistent contribution from Hood on defense.

3. Drawing charges and fouls

I was listening to the Boston Celtics' broadcast of the Jazz game earlier in the week, and their play-by-play man Mike Gorman noted how the Jazz have only drawn six charges all season (last in the league), while the Celtics had drawn 39 charges (second in the league). They went on to talk about how that shows that the Celtics have toughness and hustle and whatever else.

A couple of things: first, charges are called rarely enough that I'm not convinced they're a good defensive strategy in general. I suspect that blocks on attempted charges are more frequently called, though really, neither are called that often. The team that leads the league in charges, the Dallas Mavericks, are 22nd right now defensively, the aforementioned Celtics are 20th. (Just so I'm not accused of cherry picking, the third-ranked team, the Atlanta Hawks, are fifth. Fourth: Indiana, 15th defensively. Fifth-most charges? Houston, 16th defensively. The point is, they're all over the map.)

The Jazz don't get charges because they generally have one to two very tall, very good shot-blocking men in the paint defending where other teams might consider taking a charge. Indeed, the Jazz generally coach that the guard should first just make sure that he doesn't foul a driving player in the paint, because Rudy Gobert and Derrick Favors will normally take care of the defense part.

I typed this in my game notes because three charges were called in the first quarter of tonight's game, a very high number. And then none were called for the rest of the game, because that makes more sense.

But this foul drawn, well, something should probably be done about this:

I just wanted a game camera view of the Gasol travel/foul call, so here it is: pic.twitter.com/NFIMb8IW8M — Andy Larsen (@andyblarsen) January 9, 2017

Marc Gasol travels here, probably twice. The biggest clue to the referees should be that Gasol somehow went from having no feet outside of the arc to both feet without dribbling the ball. But the thing that I'd actually like to see changed here is how much Gasol leans into Gobert, in a very unnatural shooting motion.

This just needs to be changed. Leaning in creates dangerous situations for players, it makes no sense, and is strictly being done now to trick the referees to send players to the line. It would be incredibly easy to change, and once the referees stopped calling fouls on plays like this, players would instantly stop doing it, because there's no other reason to do it.

ESPN's Kevin Pelton was also not amused:

The very next play, Trey Lyles did the same thing. Except this time, there was no contact, and they called the foul again!

Oh, and here's the Vince Carter no-contact foul on the next play: pic.twitter.com/Yc2bNf0t6O — Andy Larsen (@andyblarsen) January 9, 2017

Tonight's game doesn't qualify for a Last Two Minute report, because the deficit was eight points at the two-minute mark (it needs to be within five). IMO, that should also change, so that if a game is within five in the last two minutes, a report is given. Releasing the full 48-minute reports, as many teams want (including the Jazz) would also solve that problem. Right now, each team only gets to see its own report, which makes objective stat-keeping difficult. 

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