SALT LAKE CITY — The Jazz practiced Thursday ahead of their game Friday against the Miami Heat. Center Rudy Gobert and head coach Quin Snyder spoke to the media after practice.

Watching film today

The Jazz’s pretty good defensive rating on Tuesday against the Philadelphia 76ers hid some horrific mistakes on the defensive end. I looked at those in that night’s Triple Team if you’re interested in reliving the lowlights.

So the film session Thursday was long and revealing.

"It's about us. We made some mistakes that are not really about skills, it's not about how good you are as a basketball player. It's about focus and communication,” Gobert said. “They scored about 37 points on those mistakes, and if we can take away at least 20 points, we win that game easily."

Over and over again, the Jazz got beat on very simple plays, the kind of thing that they’ve excelled at defending against for years. And the Heat and Erik Spoelstra are even much better at exploiting those kinds of mistakes than the Sixers were, so the Jazz will need to be several steps better on Friday.

Did the Jazz get good shots?

The Jazz shot 30 percent on Tuesday, and even that figure flatters them somewhat, it was lower for most of the game. Some of that is just because of who shot the ball: Ricky Rubio, Donovan Mitchell, Joe Ingles and Rodney Hood led the Jazz in shot attempts, and those guys are pretty inconsistent shooters in general.

But I thought some of the Jazz tried to do too much and some didn’t. Hood’s 14 attempts are counterbalanced by the fact that he got to the line 10 times, a great step forward for Hood. And Mitchell’s 21 shot attempts were broken down by Salt City Hoops’ Dan Clayton on Twitter Wednesday night in this thread:

Clayton found that 16 or 17 of the shots were pretty good looks. Ingles probably tried to do too much, shooting mid-range shots, which we haven’t really seen in his skillset. But he was 6-16, with the best shooting percentage among Jazz perimeter guys.

Rubio probably just needed to make better decisions. Teams have even started to guard that mid-range shot a little bit, so they weren’t all good looks, in my opinion. That, plus the turnovers, plus the defensive mistakes, made Tuesday night’s game the worst in Rubio’s short Jazz career so far.

Gobert had a good point about the shot selection impacting his offensive rebounding, too.

“It's always hard, I'm always going to have guys tagging me because of the spacing. I'm just trying to open things up for my teammates, and I think our shot selection has to be better. We shot too many contested shots last game, for guys and for us. If we’re going to move the ball and find an open teammate, we’ll be a lot better defensively.

Is Hassan Whiteside a Gobert rival?

While the two clashed on social media over the summer while the Jazz, Heat and Celtics competed for the signature of Gordon Hayward, Gobert swears that he doesn’t see Heat center Hassan Whiteside as a rival.

“Not really,” he said. “We only play them twice a year, he’s on the other side of the country.”

But you have to understand why Gobert was asked the question after tweets like these.

Bradley, O'Neale called back up

Another yo-yo move for Tony Bradley and Royce O'Neale, as they were both called up to the Jazz after playing significant minutes in Wednesday's SLC Stars loss. Bradley had 20 points for the Stars on 9-11 shooting, though did show inexperience at times. Still, Stars coach Schiller credited Bradley for being able to learn even during a game, as his second half helped the Jazz nearly come back against the Wisconsin Herd.

O'Neale struggled shooting the ball (4-17 FG for 11 points) but added some good defensive size and knowhow to the young Stars lineup. I'm curious how he'd perform in the Jazz's rotation given more minutes, though he probably wouldn't solve the Jazz's shooting woes.

Related topics