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SALT LAKE CITY — Donovan Mitchell didn't blame anyone for feeling a bit of deja vu midway through Utah's 134-125 win over Sacramento Saturday.
He could sense the uneasiness in the crowd after Utah's 16-point lead had been cut to 5. The Jazz said they didn't feel any of that as a team, though.
"We didn't feel rushed or nervous," Mitchell said. "We did what we were supposed to do."
Based on what's happened over the last couple weeks — let alone the season — that came as a bit of a surprise.
Saturday night's game was one that felt eerily similar to Friday's collapse in San Antonio. The Jazz, again, had a big early fourth quarter lead slashed in hardly any time at all, and Mitchell had just committed two head-scratching turnovers.
Even with Jordan Clarkson going en fuego on his way to a career-high 45 points, it seemed like the Jazz were on the brink of blowing another one. They didn't have Mike Conley or Rudy Gobert, and they had struggled to stop the Kings all night — everything was trending toward another late-game collapse.
"The crowd might have felt that way — rightfully so," Mitchell said. "But we were like, 'How do we execute? How do we get stops?'"
The answer: do the same thing they'd done all game, which was push in transition, keep shooting and don't foul; oh, and having Bojan Bogdanovic, who missed Friday's game, helped, too.
After the Kings cut Utah's lead to 5, the Jazz found Bogdanovic in the corner, where he buried the shot to restore order. Bogdanovic hit another 3-pointer a couple of minutes later to push the lead back to double-digits, which eased, if not the team, the crowd.
"We dug in. It was kind of a man-up type game," Jazz coach Quin Snyder said. "That was good for us to feel."
You can think of it as part of the evolution of the team. Just 24 hours prior, the Jazz allowed the Spurs to storm back from 15 down and win. After the game, the Jazz said they were at a loss as to why late leads kept evaporating this season. They didn't have a concrete answer but said it needed to change.
That didn't invoke much optimism; but on Saturday, things changed. The Jazz went on a 10-4 run to gain some breathing room and kept the Kings at arm's length the rest of the way.
"I thought the way we responded from that moment — I don't know what the score was after that but I just felt like my response was like, 'OK, dig in, get to the next play,'" Snyder said.
Bogdanovic had 26 points and four rebounds; Mitchell finished with 25 points, six assists and five rebounds; and Hassan Whiteside added 12 points and 21 rebounds in the win.
They all made big plays down the stretch, but it was Clarkson that kept things afloat at the beginning.
The Jazz dared De'Aaron Fox to shoot Saturday; and on almost every screen, Jazz players went under screens to give Fox a clean look; and early on, he made them.
Fox scored 20 points in the first quarter, 12 of which came on pull-up 3-pointers. The Jazz went under the screen — sometimes laughably under — and Fox went 4 of 5 from deep. Clarkson, though, hit four 3s of his own in the quarter to help the Jazz keep pace.
Even with Fox's scorching first quarter, the Jazz were down by just 5 points, which allowed Utah to not overreact to the hot quarter. Fox, who finished with 41 points, isn't a traditionally great shooter. He's shot 29% from 3-point range this season, and the percentage play is to let him have the shot and take away the driving lane. That's what the Jazz opted to do, and they kept doing that even after his hot start.
The result? In the final three quarters, Fox was 8 of 22 from the field, including 1 of 6 from behind the arc. He had 41 in the end, but his final 21 points came on 22 shots — the Jazz will live with that efficiency.
"I thought we didn't beat ourselves," Snyder said. "We did a better job making them finish and not fouling."
And they did a better job finishing the game.
"Thank God we got one tonight," Bogdanovic said.
