The Jazz proved many things against the Thunder in Game 2 of their playoff series Wednesday night in OKC, but the one that stood out the most is this: They can play leathery, grown-man basketball.
Even when they are led by a fresh-faced kid.
Just as some observers were saying the Jazz couldn’t hang with Russell Westbrook, Paul George, Carmelo Anthony and Steven Adams, they did more than hang with those guys. They roughed them up. They punched them in the mouth and stole away their home-court advantage.
They evened a series by brushing up a good, thick lather, shaving with a straight blade and splashing on a handful of Aqua Velva.
They did what adults had to do.
“We needed this win,” said Derrick Favors, one of the most grown of the Jazz’s full-grown men. “… We played hard.”
They checked finesse at the swinging doors but brought their brawn.
“They felt us,” Jae Crowder said. “We hit first. We kept hitting, we kept hitting.”
And he wasn’t talking about hitting shots.
The Jazz shot the ball worse than they did in the first game — from the field, from deep, from the line, and it mattered not one bit.
A single fact everyone should know by now is that best-of-seven playoff series are distance races, not dashes. They are not pretty, not cute, not comely. Drawing conclusions after a single game is dangerous business. Game 1 demonstrated how difficult the Thunder can be when their three biggest stars go for 80 points. But that didn’t mean jack for Game 2.
Those three explosive scorers — Westbrook, George and Anthony — exploded for exactly zero field goals in the fourth quarter this time. Even after OKC went on a 19-zip run near the end of the third quarter to take a double-digit lead.
The Jazz answered with a flood of scoring of their own, led by 21-year-old Donovan Mitchell, who ended up with 28 points, bad toe and all.
The entire exchange, especially in that fourth quarter, looked like a Gene Fullmer fight, a brawl in which noses were busted, faces were mangled and toughness was championed.
The Jazz ultimately outscored the Thunder by seven points, but the real story came by way of wicked defense, the kind the Jazz played so often over the last three months of the regular season, and rugged rebounding. The same buttery-smooth OKC offense that many praised after the first contest was chopped to pieces as the Jazz D made like a Ginzu knife, brought to you by Ronco — it slices, it dices, it … it … well, it wins.
Favors, who had a rough first game, transformed himself into a trash masher, smashing and bashing the Thunder, again and again, scoring 20 points and hauling 16 boards. But he also set a tone early, fouling with all the subtlety of a swung tire iron George as Playoff P made a move to the basket. When he dropped George, Favors turned away, never flinching, never breathing deep, never apologizing.
It’s tempting to say that Westbrook limited himself, stowing away his offensive aggression after that nice burst in the third quarter, opting instead to pass. But the Jazz built a wall in front of him, one that the athletic guard could not scale.
Nearly everyone for the Jazz picked up themselves and one another through the tight first few quarters, for most of which the Thunder held the lead.
But … the grown men dug in down the stretch, with the rookie Mitchell carrying the biggest shovel, going for 20 points in the second half, including 13 points in the fourth.
He hit some remarkable shots, everything from soft squibs to whirling finger-rolls to elevated stop-and-pops, and he pumped up his teammates with the kind of enthusiasm that pays no respect to nothing other than its own good reward. It certainly paid no mind to a foreign floor and a rowdy OKC crowd.
Rudy Gobert did what Gobert does. He closed down the interior space on the Thunder, making them think once, twice, three times before they took the ball to the rim, and he fouled out Adams with a move to the basket that disqualified the OKC big in the final minutes.
And he pointed to the Thunder bench to punctuate the whole thing.
He also went from a free-throw shooting liability, clanking foul shots all over creation, to dusting the net with important shots from the line as the clock wound down.
Ricky Rubio hit a huge bomb near the finish, shining up a 22-point, nine-assist, seven-rebound bounce-back performance after shooting the ball as though he were wearing boxing gloves in Game 1.
Those Everlast gloves were used in a more productive way here, with Jazz players all taped up and hurling body shots with bad intentions. Game 2 looked like one of those old Western cartoons, where a fight breaks out, a dust cloud swirls, and boots, holsters, gloves, hats fly then the winner walks out of the cloud.
The Jazz were the ones walking.
They collectively thickened their beard, they sauntered sideways across the court like John Freaking Wayne, they creased their brow and narrowed their stare like Clint Freaking Eastwood. They were the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly rolled into one.
They grew up right there in front of everyone.
And they’ll have to do it all over again in Game 3.
Gordon Monson hosts “The Big Show” weekdays from 3 to 7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.
Follow @GordonMonson