Down 4 starters, Jazz beat Blazers for 2nd road win of the season

PORTLAND — The last time the Utah Jazz were in Portland, they got a talkin' to.

An uninspiring performance led coach Will Hardy to bluntly tell his players — in harsher words — that to wear a Utah Jazz jersey they had to actually care about the Utah Jazz.

On Thursday, it certainly looked like they cared.

The Jazz might have played their best overall game of the season in a 122-114 win over the Portland Trail Blazers. Or at least their most impressive, considering the circumstances.

The Jazz were down four starters (Keyonte George, Lauri Markkanen, John Collins and Jordan Clarkson), were on the second night of a back-to-back, and were playing in their third city in the last four days. None of that mattered in Portland.

"A really really good team win on the second night of a back-to-back on the road," Hardy said. "I thought that everybody was very connected, especially defensively. And then offensively, I thought the ball moved around great tonight. I think we see what happens to the collective energy of the group when everybody feels like they're involved in the game and the ball is really popping around."

Hardy then went back to the mantra that he first coined in Portland in late November when Utah was in the midst of a disastrous late-November road trip.

"I'll continue to stand on play hard and pass," he said. "I think our team has done that now two games in a row."

The Jazz had a half-court defensive rating of 80.7, according to Cleaning The Glass, as they used a mixture of zone and ball denial schemes to keep the Blazers off balance.

"It allows us to just throw something different at guys," Walker Kessler said of the zone. "It's fun."

Kessler had plenty of fun as he continued to find the type of rhythm he displayed during his rookie season. He had arguably his best game of the season, finishing with 10 points, 10 rebounds and seven blocks.

The zone also allowed the Jazz to better use Collin Sexton's unrelenting energy. On Wednesday against New York, Sexton escorted Knicks guard Jalen Brunson nearly into the Jazz tunnel, resulting in what Hardy called "the weirdest and-one of all time."

"I guess that's one way to deny the guy the ball is to take him back in the back," a laughing Hardy said before Thursday's game "We're working on our defense. That's not exactly what we're going for, but we're getting there."

They got closer against the Blazers. There was still the same energetic ball denying, but this time it stayed on the court.

"We think that toggling our defense between a couple of things is good for our group right now. It's able to disrupt the rhythm of the game a little bit, which is really what we're trying to do," Hardy said.

As for the passing part of Hardy's slogan, the Jazz had five players with four or more assists. That provided offensive production from just about everywhere.

The Jazz got a Markkanen-esque performance from Simone Fontecchio, who had a season-high 24 points on 7-of-8 shooting and a perfect 5-of-5 from 3-point range. His 16-point first half helped Utah to a double-digit lead at halftime.

Sexton followed up his strong night against the Knicks 24 hours earlier with 27 points on 11-of-17 shooting.

Talen Horton-Tucker was also the catalyst to multiple Jazz runs and helped put the dagger in the Trail Blazers by leading a 26-8 run in the third quarter.

And there was plenty more, too. Ochai Agbaji had 16 points and Taylor Hendricks tied his career-high with 10 points and seven rebounds.

Utah led by 33 points — the largest road lead in the Hardy era — with 8:56 remaining. Portland made a run to make the game look closer, but it was never in doubt.

"I'm really, really happy for these guys," Hardy said. "We're down on some bodies at the moment and everybody dug in a lot of different people participated. It wasn't like it was one person who went nuts tonight and that's what got us to win there. There were a lot of people who had their moments, so a fun team win."

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