Kragthorpe: Now comes the tough part; can the Jazz win home playoff games?

In advance of his team’s victory over Oklahoma City in Game 2, Jazz coach Quin Snyder fielded my question about what enables road teams to win playoff games.

“If I knew the answer to that,” Snyder said good naturedly, “I wouldn’t tell you anyway. I’d just try to go do it.”

His team then went out and did it again, winning 102-95 and evening the series that resumes Saturday night at Vivint Smart Home Arena. The Jazz will try to do what nobody has done consistently in a first-round series in Snyder’s tenure: protect the home court.

The truth is if Snyder had delivered a fully satisfying answer, I wouldn’t have anything else to ask him. The Jazz’s relative greatness on the road and average performance at home is a defining trait and ongoing subject of his four seasons in Utah.

The trend reached an extreme last April, when the road team won 5 of 7 games in the Jazz-Clippers series. It would not be shocking if something similar happened in the Jazz-Thunder matchup.

The Jazz’s defense, poise and confidence made me believe they would win in Oklahoma City at some point during the series. Yet they haven’t done enough at home to inspire any faith that they’ll win Games 3, 4 and 6 (if necessary) to close out the series. That would defy everything they’ve done in the playoffs under Snyder — and in the regular season, based on traditional standards.

Snyder’s Jazz teams are 4-2 on the road and 1-2 at home in two first-round series . That’s crazy.

The NBA undoubtedly has changed. Road teams won 43 percent of playoff games last year, with the Jazz’s 1-4 home record vs. the Clippers and Golden State contributing to that number. With each 2018 first-round series having completed two games through Wednesday, road teams stood 5-11 (31 percent). And that’s with the higher-seeded teams playing at home, so that figure will rise.

Snyder attributes last spring’s results to “a strange series” vs. the Clippers amid injuries to Rudy Gobert and Blake Griffin. What’s weirder is that each team basically won two road games without a star, counting Gobert’s foul trouble in Game 7. The Jazz’s two home losses to Golden State in the next series were explained by the visitors’ overwhelming talent.

It remains remarkable to me that the Clippers outplayed the Jazz in the second halves of Games 3 and 6 in the Jazz’s raucous home environment. Then again, being in the revved-up atmosphere of Chesapeake Energy Arena as the Thunder staged a 19-0 run and took a 10-point lead in Wednesday’s third quarter made me marvel at how the Jazz steadied themselves and came back.

“Even for the home team, it never goes smoothly,” OKC coach Billy Donovan said before Game 2. “There are going to be momentum-changing swings in the game. Being able to handle those, whether at home or on the road, is critical.”

As Snyder said about winning on the road, “You’ve got to make some shots.” Or make the other guys miss them, as the Jazz succeeded in doing. The Thunder’s Paul George, Russell Westbrook and Carmelo Anthony went 0 for 14 in the fourth quarter, inconceivable numbers for a home team.

But that’s the nature of playoff games involving the Jazz lately. We should know this by now: Home-court advantage is highly overrated when it comes to this team. That’s both an encouraging and frustrating development compared with the old days — like 2010, when the Deron Williams/Carlos Boozer Jazz were facing Anthony’s Denver team.

The Jazz, having lost Mehmet Okur to an Achilles’ injury in Game 1 and playing without Andrei Kirilenko in the series, pulled out Game 2 in Denver and dominated the Nuggets in Games 3, 4 and 6 at home. The Thunder are too good on the road for anything like that to happen this year, having gone 21-20 in the regular season, including a 103-89 win with Gobert injured on Dec. 23 in Salt Lake City.

The Jazz’s cast has changed since then, with Gobert’s return and the trades of Rodney Hood and Joe Johnson. The best illustration of Wednesday’s win came afterward, when the Jazz brought four players — Gobert, Derrick Favors, Ricky Rubio and Donovan Mitchell — instead of the usual two to the postgame news conference.

“The strength of our team is our team,” Snyder said. In other words, it took a collective effort to overcome the Thunder’s talent. That will remain true at Vivint, where the Jazz supposedly have an advantage.