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SALT LAKE CITY — Donovan Mitchell was hopping and pointing, trying to get his teammates to cross match to stop a Detroit Pistons fast break. It was all in vain, though as Detroit's Jermai Grant received a bounce pass above the 3-point line and drove unimpeded to the hoop for a dunk.
Royce O'Neale didn't pick Grant up at the perimeter and Rudy Gobert wasn't in position to meet him at the rim. It was a lackadaisical display of transition defense.
Later, Mitchell casually walked the ball up the court and allowed Detroit to get set before he attempted to dribble into the paint. He was soon surrounded by Pistons players and his pass out of the paint was intercepted — that was lazy offense.
It turns out that when a team gets up by 28 points with relatively little resistance, some complacency might kick in. That was the story of Utah's 117-105 win over the Pistons Tuesday. The Jazz saw a 28-point lead slip away to just a 4-point advantage late in the contest, and Detroit could have pulled even closer if Delon Wright's open three would have found its way in.
Utah built its lead by doing what they do best: playing in transition. The Jazz have the No. 1 transition offense in the league, scoring 141.8 points per 100 possessions, according to Cleaning The Glass. That number drops to 99.4 in the half-court (still among the league's best, but just not as lethal). So the best thing the Jazz can do to help their opponents is slow things down.
"I think the biggest thing is it's a lot to be able to run like the way we do," Mitchell said, who had 32 points in a superb performance coming off two games where he was sidelined due to concussion protocols. "We got old guys on the team. I make fun of them all the time. We got Mike (Conley), we got Joe (Ingles). It's a lot and it's a credit to everybody on the team for their willingness to run.
"It creates not only the passing lanes but the driving lanes," he added. "(It's the) reason we get our threes. And there are times where you get tired. You're running all the way and then if we miss, you got to run back and run again. It gets tiring after a while."
And when the lead is large, the urgency to run and run and run falls; that's how Detroit got 15 fast break points and 8 points off turnovers in the second half.
But any worry about how Utah played in the second half is really much ado about nothing. The Jazz knew why the comeback happened, and they corrected it in time so that it didn't end up mattering in the end. Conley's push in transition set up the first of Bojan Bogdanovic's game-clinching threes and the Jazz didn't allow the Pistons to score in the final two minutes of the game.
This was an early February game against the Pistons. No one is going to care about Detroit making things a little interesting down the stretch come playoff time.
"Sometimes when you build a big lead like that, the narrative becomes, 'What happened?' because you didn't win by 30," Jazz coach Quin Snyder said. "These are NBA teams. They're good teams — there's going to be runs."
The Pistons didn't stop playing when Utah jumped on them early; the Jazz got a bit complacent, which is a recipe for a comeback. Conley said it's often taken for granted just how difficult it is to sustain leads. Sure, when the Jazz went up by 28 they wanted to push it to 40 or higher, but that doesn't always happen.
"These teams play with pride and they play free," Conley said. "And tonight, we let them back into the game."
Any hand-wringing about how Tuesday's game played out might be simply due to how dominant the Jazz have been lately. All but one of the wins during their 11-game winning streak was by double digits and none of those got close late. Tuesday's game, at least right now, appears to be an outlier.
Utah hasn't made a habit out of letting teams back into games. That's why there wasn't much worry coming out of the Jazz locker room following the game. In fact, you could say they were overall pleased with the performance.
"I think sometimes, the expectation is that if you're up by a lot, you win by a lot," Snyder said. "Sometimes being up 20 is hard, and there's a lot of NBA games when teams are up early and they lose the game."
And if you need a reminder, the Jazz didn't lose.
