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SALT LAKE CITY — One by one, the Utah Jazz took the podium trying to explain their most recent collapse.
"It's all about where is our focus," Rudy Gobert said.
"We weren't as locked in and focused on our execution defensively in every capacity," added coach Quin Snyder
"There were possessions where we were communicating and talking and scrambling and it felt good out there," Joe Ingles said. "And there were other positions that were, I guess, a complete opposite of that."
You'd be forgiven for finding the answers all too familiar.
The Jazz have another contender for worst loss of the year. The Houston Rockets rolled into Vivint Arena and stunned the Jazz 116-111 Wednesday. Actually, they are starting to be less and less stunning.
Utah has now dropped six of its last seven games, with each one seemingly worse than the last.
Just in the recent stretch, the Jazz have lost games to the Detroit Pistons, Indiana Pacers, a struggling Los Angeles Lakers team and now the Rockets. That's a bad list.
So what went wrong Wednesday? There were long portions of the game where Utah didn't defend the 3-point line. The Jazz take the most 3s of any team in the league; and if there is a squad that should know they benefits of the long ball, it's them. Yet, there were lazy closeouts, miscommunications on switches and times where players were forgotten about in the corner.
Houston went 22 of 48 from 3-point range with a large number of those being uncontested.
"What are we thinking about when they have two guys that can shoot the ball on the floor and we give frequent shots to those guys?" Gobert said.
He asked the question, but he didn't give the answer.
Houston's Garrison Mathews went 5 of 9 from deep on his way to 23 points; Kevin Porter Jr. was 3 of 6 from deep, including a dagger with 22 seconds left in regulation that put the Rockets up by 5 points.
Bojan Bogdanovic finished with 29 points on 11-for-27 shooting to lead the Jazz, and Gobert finished with 23 points and nine rebounds.
Houston's hot night from deep allowed them to quickly erase a 13-point Jazz lead in the third quarter with a 15-0 run. The undermanned Jazz — Utah was without Donovan Mitchell (concussion protocols) and Hassan Whiteside (COVID-19 protocols) — were forced to roll out little used center Udoka Azubuike at center during that stretch.
It was disastrous with players often being confused about what to do on the defensive side of the ball. Switch? Help? Rotate? A number of possessions ended with the Jazz all looking at each other confused about where the mix up was. It left shooters wide open, and the Rockets made them pay.
"They made the shots but they were getting clean looks because we either didn't communicate or made a mistake as far as what we were trying to do in a given coverage," Snyder said.
Those mistakes, though, continued once Gobert, Royce O'Neale, Mike Conley and the Jazz stars returned to the game. Houston extended its lead to 9 points before the Jazz mounted a minor rally that ended with Porter's 3-point dagger.
And it left the Jazz in the now-familiar situation: trying to explain why they had lost to a sub-par team.
"There is not a guy on this team that doesn't want to win and tries to play hard, you know, as hard as he can," Gobert said. "I just think that we were playing great defense in the third and it's almost like something shifted and we had a lot of breakdowns. We gave some of the shooters like wide open 3s a few times in a row — talking about Mathews and the other guard that's a really good 3-point shooter — and we just brought them back in the game."
The other guard. The fact Gobert couldn't immediately recall his name (assuming Porter) seemed to just hammer home how bad of a loss it was.
