New-look Jazz can't hang with Suns in first game after deadline deals

Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

PHOENIX — It took Jazz coach Will Hardy about six weeks to find a rotation that worked. He now has to go back to the drawing board.

"There's gonna be a process right now of figuring out what's next in terms of who fits well with who," Hardy said in the wake of Utah's trade deadline deals.

The first attempt didn't go too well.

The new-look Jazz were routed 129-115 by the Phoenix Suns Thursday in a game Utah never led.

Kevin Durant scored 31 points, Bradley Beal dropped 30 and Phoenix shot 48% from 3-point range.

The Suns jumped out to a 19-point lead in the first half against a Jazz team that took a while to find its footing after the recent trades. Utah did close the lead to 3 points in the third quarter, but the comeback attempt was short-lived. The Suns responded with a 13-0 run and kept Utah at arms' length the rest of the night.

"I would anticipate that these next couple of games we're going to have to experiment a little bit and try a few different things out to try to find the right balance," Hardy said.

With Utah's true small forward both traded over the last couple of days, the Jazz went back to the starting frontcourt of Walker Kessler, John Collins and Lauri Markkanen. The Jazz started the season with that group; once they mostly abandoned it, though, the turnaround occurred.

The Suns jumped out to a 17-9 lead against that group in the wire-to-wire Phoenix victory.

Collins had a good box score line of 21 points and 14 rebounds but was a team-worst minus-20 in plus/minus. Utah's bench group of Talen Horton-Tucker (back in the rotations following the moves), Keyonte George, and Taylor Hendricks struggled to find consistency.

So, yeah, the Jazz will need to tinker with lineups moving forward; especially, when they welcome in the new additions of Kevin Knox II, Otto Porter Jr. and Kira Lewis Jr. Those players — depending on injury status — should be available for Utah's next game on Monday. It's unknown, however, how big of a role any of them will play.

Porter and Knox are known commodities at this point, and Lewis hasn't played more than 25 games since his rookie year in 2020-21. And one of the reasons for trading three rotation players on a team that was trending up was to get more minutes for some of the younger players on the team — especially Hendricks.

He played had 3 points and eight rebounds in 17 minutes on Thursday. There were high moments; his first-half block against a driving Durant was a thing of beauty. But more often he looked like, well, a rookie playing his first NBA game in over a month.

In the second half, he was nearly put on the ground by a Durant crossover (Durant clearly remembered that block) and then was badly fooled by Bol Bol to move the hoop. Welcome to the NBA, young man.

"We had some moments where we're playing some sort of new lineups and that leads to disjointed play at times," Hardy said. "But overall, I felt like the team had pretty good intent on the offensive end."

Can Hardy find another rotation that will spark the team down the stretch? Maybe, but as the organization showed at the deadline, that's not the top priority.