Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY — A single voice was heard from the Utah Jazz crowd.
“Play some D!”
It was the voice of a fan base; a desperate plea to a once-proud defensive team. A plea, though, that fell on deaf ears.
Jazz guard Donovan Mitchell scored 38 points on Monday, but all offensive stats felt pretty meaningless. That’s what happens when you allow a team to shoot 56.3% from the field and 60% from the 3-point line — and we do mean allow.
The Suns did whatever they wanted against the Jazz. Phoenix was the latest team to walk into Vivint Arena and embarrass Utah with a 131-111 victory over the Jazz on Monday. The Jazz fell to 36-21 on the season.
There have been games where the Jazz haven’t played well — times when the execution wasn’t there, when the shots didn’t fall — that wasn’t the case against the Suns. This loss cut deeper because it revealed a team whose effort was lacking.
“There's other games that when you look at are low-point type games, those usually involve more than lack of execution, but the lack of commitment to the things you need to do to win,” Snyder said.
Monday’s game was a low-point type game.
The Suns bench stood for the majority of the second half, celebrating play after play. There was Ricky Rubio’s fadeaway 3 in the corner. There was Kelly Oubre Jr.’s tomahawk slam over Rudy Gobert. There was Deandre Ayton’s alley-oop dunk. And plenty more.
The Suns had 66 points in the paint as they mostly walked into the lane unimpeded. Rubio feasted in his first trip back to Salt Lake City, scoring 22 points and dishing out 11 assists in the win. Oh, and he had seven steals, showing the active defense that his former team didn’t have.
Mitchell ran off a list of all the things he missed on the defensive end: Letting guys by him, missing back cuts, not contesting at the end. And he was far from the only one that could make a lengthy list.
It was an embarrassing defensive effort from Utah — especially on the heels of two other embarrassing defensive efforts. The Jazz have lost three straight games, all at home, since the All-Star break. They had lost just five games at home before the break.
“Teams just come in here ready to play,” Mitchell said. “We match their intensity for maybe a quarter or a half and then, it’s like the pipe burst. They just get whatever they want. As a collective unit, we gotta come together.”
During Monday’s shootaround, Bojan Bogdanovic, who scored 16 points on Monday, spoke bluntly about the team’s defensive performances.
“Sometimes we are worrying about the wrong (stuff),” he said. “We gotta start with our defense, and everything we do offensively will be fine because we’ve got a talented group always on the court. The defensive end is what we have to take care of.”
Nothing changed, though, come game time.
That’s been the biggest red flag during the recent hard-to-watch slump. The players have said the right things, have said they were committed to having urgency, to putting the effort on the defensive end, only to put on performances like Monday’s.
“It’s not like we haven’t seen what we could be, we haven’t seen the chemistry and all that,” Mitchell said. "Having losses like the past three especially are just like, ‘What are we doing?’ We gotta go out there and we gotta compete. There’s not one person to blame. It’s all of us.”
The Jazz allowed 69 points in the second half, including 37 in the third quarter, where the Suns turned a halftime tie into a double-digit lead. Rubio went off, Booker was great (24 points and 10 assists) and the Suns shot lights out — but the Jazz didn’t do much to stop them.
“We’re gonna keep getting the same result, if we don’t focus and execute on the defensive end,” Snyder said. “This is a group that’s done that. But that doesn’t matter right now. What that should tell us is that we’re capable, at least on some level. But right now that’s not who we are. Who you are is who you are now, not who you’ve been or what you’re gonna do or what you can do. It’s what you do. What we did tonight wasn’t good, obviously. That’s an understatement on a lot of levels.”
