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SALT LAKE CITY — It wasn't hard to conjure up the memory of nine months ago as the Utah Jazz made their way through the tunnels of Crypto.com Arena ahead of Tuesday's game.
It was, after all, the scene of last season's great collapse — when they lost a 25-point second-half lead to lose Game 6 of the playoffs to the LA Clippers and end their season.
It wasn't too hard to think of that during Tuesday night's game, either.
Utah had a 25-point lead in the third quarter, and with 3:24 left in the fourth quarter it was gone. Deja vu doesn't begin to describe it — the same court, the same team, and the same lead.
Oh, it was the same result, too.
There weren't any demons exorcized in LA Tuesday, just another reminder of how little things have changed (if not gotten worse) since June. Utah continued its slump toward the playoffs by dropping its fifth straight game in a 121-115 loss to the Clippers.
At the 8:07 mark of the third quarter, Rudy Gobert finished a layup that put the Jazz up 76-51. If you were watching, you probably had the same thought and made the same joke: A 25-point third-quarter lead against the Clippers, where have we seen this before?
It was a joke because, of course, it wouldn't happen again, right? That would be too ridiculous.
Mike Conley had dominated the Clippers like he was back in a Memphis Grizzlies jersey, Donovan Mitchell had showed he only needed one-and-a-half good ankles, and Gobert had one of his best defensive outings of the season.
That all couldn't go south together, right?
At least the Jazz stayed on brand.
In a season of lows, the Jazz hit another. The freshly returned Paul George scored 20 points in the third quarter to get the Clippers into striking distance; and in the fourth, the Jazz wilted. The Clippers went on a 25-6 run to add to Utah's season-long woes.
"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's the same (stuff)," Mitchell said.
The Jazz had seven turnovers in the fourth quarter and attempted just three shots from deep, all of them a miss. They stopped running their offense — the one that got them the big lead — and went to isolation, pound-the-rock basketball. At one point, Utah had 22 assists on 34 made baskets; the team finished with 23 assists on 43 made baskets.
Mitchell was right: it's the same type of stuff that's happened all season long. The mirrored result from last playoffs, notwithstanding, the Jazz have now lost 14 games where they've had a double-digit lead this season.
"I didn't see us as emotionally fragile," Quin Snyder said. "I saw a team that didn't execute on the things that it needed to."
Snyder might fight that narrative, but if a team isn't executing down the stretch over and over and over again, doesn't there have to be a reason?
Why can the Jazz play excellent defense for a quarter — as they did in the first quarter on Tuesday, holding the Clippers to just 14 points — and then be powerless to stop anybody late? And why can they find ways to get 27 3-point attempts up through three quarters and then only put up three in the final 12 minutes?
The ability to play at a higher level is clearly there, it just leaves when things get tough — like when Mitchell got the ball stolen from him with less than a minute to go, or when Jordan Clarkson took an ill-advised contested floater with 17 seconds left, or when Mitchell called a timeout that the team didn't have in the closing seconds.
"We lose the values of this team, which is moving the ball," Gobert said. "And that really affects our defense. It's like everything flows, and then it flows the wrong way and we get disconnected more and more and more. And good teams know how to get us to that point."
That last part might be the most damning quote of the night: Good teams know how to frustrate the Jazz and get under their skin; they know how to win against Utah.
"I get beat up every night — as I should," Gobert said. "Basketball's a physical game. We've got to get to the point of doing that to the other team, too."
That point should have already come long ago, and now the book is out on the Jazz. No team is packing it in when Utah gets up because it knows it can still come back. That's what happened Tuesday, and that's what's happened all season long.
"We never get our hands dirty," Gobert said. "We're a really good basketball team and we have a lot of great basketball players, but we need to figure out a way to get that mindset of doing things for each other more."
Maybe it'll happen in the next couple weeks, or maybe the Jazz are in for a long summer.
The Jazz dropped to 45-31 and into a tie with Denver with the loss. They are now just two games up on Minnesota for the seventh seed. The Jazz hold both those tiebreakers, but Tuesday was a reminder of how bad this team can collapse.
