Donovan Mitchell drove for a dunk and the Jazz took a 15-point lead over the team with the NBA’s best record, before everything crumbled Monday night.
This is all you need to know about the Jazz’s 96-85 loss to Houston: The thrilling moment of Mitchell’s drive gave way to a disgusting flurry of turnovers and missed shots as the home team scored 21 points in the next 20 minutes of basketball, lasting into the fourth quarter at Vivint Smart Home Arena.
That’s the Jazz offense everyone wondered about last summer, before the discovery of Mitchell. And when the rookie struggled with eight turnovers and 1-of-9 shooting from 3-point range, this game turned into one of the Jazz’s worst performances of the season after a promising start.
“If you turn over the ball as much as we did,” Mitchell said, “you can’t win a game like that.”
The missed opportunity came against a Houston team that hardly could have been more vulnerable, even with a winning streak that now numbers 13 games. The Rockets (47-13) were depleted and had played Sunday night at Denver, where their victory helped the Jazz.
But the Jazz (31-30) refused to help themselves, falling 2 1/2 games behind Denver for the Western Conference’s last playoff spot. They played carelessly, complained about too many calls and just couldn’t score — after somehow producing a 35-13 run in fewer than 12 minutes of the first half.
Derrick Favors cited “a lot of mental mistakes,” and that was only part of the Jazz’s story.
The most disheartening aspect was the Jazz’s lack of poise and mental toughness when things went wrong. They became “easily defeated,” in the words of coach Quin Snyder, who spoke of “the maturation of a team” as something that’s needed, as opposed to something that’s happening.
The Jazz committed 22 turnovers, with 15 credited as Houston steals. Yet those takeaways were mostly a case of the Rockets’ merely catching the basketball.
Asked what he would tell his players about the turnovers, Snyder said wryly, “Don’t throw the pass, ’cause there’s a guy there. Don’t throw the ball to the other team.”
That’s basically what the Jazz did at the end of the first half, when their last 11 possessions resulted in six turnovers and five missed shots and their 15-point lead was cut to five. The Jazz’s offense didn’t get much better after that.
The standings aside, this was one of those checkpoint games on the Jazz’s schedule. One way or another, the Jazz would get a gauge of their progress since losing to Houston three times by an average of nearly 20 points in November and December.
Mix in the element of a potential playoff matchup, if the Jazz eventually rise to that level, and you had the makings of a very interesting night in late February.
Not that Snyder was overplaying the Houston theme, being preoccupied with his own team’s performance lately.
“I told our team, sometimes when you come into the gym and they turn the lights on and it takes a little while to warm up, I feel like that is kind of where we were a little bit after [the All-Star] break,” Snyder said before the game. “So as much as anything about kind of where we are relative to Houston, I just think [about] where we are on our own.”
If there was any illumination Monday, it was the exposure of the Jazz as playoff pretenders.
Just imagine: If the Jazz could have beaten Portland on Friday, a win Monday would have been their 14th in a row. Instead, they’ve lost two home games after the break, while Houston keeps rolling.
Somehow, while the Golden State Warriors fight boredom, the Rockets stay engaged. “Your alpha dogs are hungry,” Houston coach Mike D’Antoni explained. “They love to play basketball.”
James Harden and Chris Paul were not overwhelming Monday, but they were better than the Jazz. Tougher-minded, too.
