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SALT LAKE CITY — Joe Ingles turned around to see a horde of reporters hovering near him.
“Are you that eager to talk to me?” Ingles said.
The reporters were just eager to talk to anyone. Jae Crowder and Ricky Rubio had quickly left, Alec Burks had declined to comment, and most of the Utah players didn't want to speak.
It’s understandable why the Jazz players were reluctant to talk about their 124-111 loss to Toronto in a game that wasn't nearly as close as the final score.
It was a contest that extended their losing streak to four games, dropped their home record to 0-4 and left many fans, coaches and players visibly frustrated. They simply didn’t want to relive it.
The target
The Utah Jazz are a marked team. They knew that coming into the season, but they are feeling it more with each passing game.
“Teams come here with the mindset of attacking us,” Rudy Gobert said. “We can feel it. We can feel that we are not the Utah Jazz of last year. They know what we are trying to do defensively and they counter that with being even more aggressive.”
That was the start of Toronto's blowout.
The Raptors knew how they wanted to attack the Jazz and they did it effectively. Toronto was the aggressor all night with their guards finding ways to get inside and setting up easy buckets for just about everybody. Four Raptors scored 17 points and two more were in double digits as the whole team feasted.
Whether it was pick and rolls, taking advantage of over-aggressive closeouts or just beating their man, Toronto penetrated effectively all night and the Jazz never found a way to counter. Kyle Lowry had 17 points and 11 assists, regularly getting deep into the Utah defense and setting up himself or everyone around him. Toronto scored 58 points in the paint on 29-of-44 shooting.
“It's on us to go past that and be the aggressor,” Gobert said. “When we set the tone defensively, things will go back to how they should be.”
Struggling in transition
But it’s hard to set the tone defensively when you are scrambling.
At the start of the second half, Gobert dribbled the baseline and threw the ball away. This led to a wide-open Toronto 3-pointer in transition.
Bad offense leads to bad defense, and that was visible on Monday. Rubio was 1-of-10, Crowder was 3-of-11, Ingles was 3-of-13, and Toronto pounced on many of those missed shots.
“When you are missing, you are in transition defense and you've got to have more,” head coach Quin Snyder said. “You have to have more effort. You've got to sprint harder to set your defense. … Our team cares, we just aren't caring about the right things.”
The Raptors scored 22 points in transition on 9-of-10 shooting. And Utah's struggle wasn’t just in transition defense, it was offensively, too. The Jazz shot just 8-of-17 on its fast break chances.
Doing the right thing
After a nice start that saw the Jazz go up by as many as 9 points in the first quarter, the Raptors were able to completely take control of the game.
“Shooting covers up a lot of sins,” Snyder said. “When you don’t shoot well, you have to be even more committed to the defensive end.”
Shooting wasn’t covering up anything on Monday, though. Utah hit just 44 percent from the field and a chilly 26 percent from deep. So the defensive struggles took center stage.
Yes, rule changes have had an effect on Utah’s defense and there has been an adjustment period, but the Jazz simply aren’t doing the things it did a year ago that made them the top defensive unit in the league in the second half of the season.
“I wish I could say it would be easy,” said Ingles, who injured his right middle finger late in the game. “We’ve watched so much (film) over the last how many games, the whole year, really, even through preseason. There are things we need to get better at — the little things that made us so good last year.
"We haven't really done any of them to this point. We’ve played quarters, we’ve played minutes. The runs teams have had against us — 20-0, 28-0 — it’s not like it’s 8-0 and we can get a stop and kind of regroup. It kind of just falls apart. We need to fix it quickly.”
