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SALT LAKE CITY — When Will Hardy saw the renderings for the Utah Jazz's purple In-Season Tournament court, he was a bit worried.
After all, it featured a lot of purple. He was pleasantly surprised, though, when he saw it for the first time in person.
"It actually looks great," he said. "It's gonna be fun. I think it could have been worse colors than purple."
The Jazz could have played a much worse game, too.
Utah smashed Portland 115-99 Tuesday at the Delta Center to win back-to-back games for the first time this season. And a bonus: The team improved to 2-0 in the In-Season Tournament — and got a nice point-differential win, too.
Jordan Clarkson led the Jazz with 30 points on 13-for-19 shooting, and Lauri Markkanen added 21 points and nine rebounds. Rookie Keyonte George had a career-high 15 points and seven assists; he is now averaging nine assists in his three starts.
Even with the blowout, the Jazz (4-7) fell to second place in their group, by virtue of the Los Angeles Lakers beating the Memphis Grizzlies by 27 points. The Lakers, who are also 2-0, have the tiebreaker based on point differential.
Utah is currently in the wild card position as the second-place team with the best record.
The Jazz have two more group games — at home against the Phoenix Suns Friday and on the road against the Lakers next Tuesday — to decide their tournament fate. One more win would put them in heavy contention to make it to the knockout round.
"Vegas here we come!" Jordan Clarkson said. "Nah, it's good. A win's a win. And now we are just out there competing, trying to make it happen."
And while the Jazz would obviously like to end up in Las Vegas to compete for the NBA Cup (and its prize money) — "We're coming for the cup, baby," a joking Will Hardy said — they are looking at these games as a way to simply get better.
It's still November after all, and the big tournament — the one that doesn't come with an endless supply of tongue-in-cheek comments — is still months away.
"Our team, ultimately, is just really focused right now on trying to improve on both ends of the court," Hardy said.
The Jazz improved their positioning in the In-Season Tournament race, but more important to Hardy was how his team made major strides in playing winning basketball.
Utah only committed four turnovers in the first half — an unheard of number for this squad — and held an opponent under 100 points for the first time with Hardy as the coach.
"I really think that we did a good job of not trying to squeeze in between help defenders, especially like around the free-throw line area," Hardy said. "That's a spot on the floor where we've gotten ourselves in trouble early in the season."
He said the team was more patient in their attack, worked the ball around, and created holes in the defense.
"I felt like early in the season, we were maybe overly aggressive on that first drive instead of kind of working the possession and getting the defense to loosen up some," Hardy said. "I thought tonight we gave respect to Portland's initial defense and moved it a couple of times, and then attacking it made the reads cleaner for us."
There were two benefits to that: The first was the Jazz had a better offensive possession; the second, it stopped Portland from getting easy points in transition. The Jazz have allowed 20.7 points off turnovers this season, the second-worst mark in the league. On Tuesday, Portland had just 11.
And that made it so the Jazz — even if it is just a secondary goal in the end — are right in the mix for the NBA Cup.
