Asked prior to Monday night’s game how he intended to handle dividing up minutes between veterans looking to get on track and youngsters looking to show out, with the contest the middle of just three scheduled preseason matchups, Utah Jazz coach Quin Snyder replied that this affair wouldn’t be nearly the clean split that Saturday’s opener was.
“This is really about our veteran guys,” Snyder said. “We’d like to see guys have a chance to play together. … The regular season is right around the corner, so you’d like to make sure guys are in good shape for that.”
Good call. After struggling through much of the first half against Phoenix on Monday, the Jazz’s rotation regulars eventually figured things out, busting the game wide open in the third quarter as Utah rolled to a 111-92 victory at Vivint Arena.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Jazz guard Jordan Clarkson (00) stuffs the net as Phoenix Suns guard E'Twaun Moore (55) watches as the Jazz crack open their 2020-21 preseason with their second game against the Phoenix Suns, Dec. 14, 2020.
After burying Phoenix on Saturday under a barrage of opening-half 3-pointers, the Jazz found the going much tougher two days later in the rematch.
With Chris Paul leading a spirited defensive effort by the Suns, Utah was discombobulated from the outset. Spacing and timing issues abounded, as the Jazz committed 13 turnovers before the half — including five by Joe Ingles and three by Donovan Mitchell, the team’s two primary ball-handlers. Meanwhile, neither Mitchell nor Bojan Bogdanovic could get their shots going, the former too often settling for tough midrange looks, the latter repeatedly clanging open 3s off the rim.
Even when things turned out OK — such as when Bogdanovic drained a 3 off an assist from Ingles at the shot-clock horn — that didn’t necessarily mean all was well, as the possession had previously featured a driving Mitchell kicking to a beyond-wide-open Ingles behind the arc, only for the latter to pass up the couldn’t-be-better look and swing it to a well-covered Bogey with the clock running down.
And so it was that Snyder left the regulars in before halftime to try and get their mojo going again after being thoroughly worked over by Phoenix’s second unit.
They finally figured it out.
JAZZ 111, SUNS 92
• Utah closes the first half on an 8-0 run and opens the second with a 13-0 blitz to break the game open.
• Bojan Bogdanovic overcomes another slow start shooting the ball to score a team-high 18 points.
• Rudy Gobert adds 11 points (going 7 for 10 at the line) and 20 rebounds, while the Jazz’s defense held Phoenix to 42.0% shooting for the game.
Utah closed the first half on an 8-0 run — featuring a Mike Conley 3, two Conley free throws, and a Bogdanovic 3 — to take a 49-48 lead.
After the break, that duo picked right back up where they left off, opening the third quarter with Conley hitting a 3, Bogdanovic driving for a layup, and then Bogey drilling a 3 — forcing Phoenix coach Monty Williams to call a timeout with Utah suddenly up nine.
That 16-0 run spanning halftime eventually became a 21-0 run, and then a 32-6 run.
“We came into this game with a defensive mindset. Guys were just super-locked in on the defensive end; and things weren’t flowing as smoothly on the offensive end,” Conley said. “In the third quarter, we started getting free on some early actions and in transition … so we didn’t have to work so hard scoring the ball.”
Indeed, by the time the third quarter was over, the Jazz had amassed 38 points in the period and opened a 17-point advantage.
“We played good defense in the first half, but the turnovers didn’t help us,” Snyder said afterward. “Once we got that figured out and kept guarding, we were a lot better.”
Bogdanovic led the scoring effort, notching 18 points (on 4 of 9 from the field and 7 for 7 at the stripe), to go along with five boards. Conley added 16 points, while Mitchell contributed 15. Rudy Gobert chipped in 11 points while dominating on the glass to the tune of 20 rebounds.
Utah’s defense, meanwhile, proved stifling for a second consecutive game — albeit one that saw Paul limited to just 17 minutes, while rotation regulars Jae Crowder, Cameron Johnson, Dario Saric and Cam Payne all sat out entirely. The Suns shot just 42.0% from the field and 28.6% from the 3-point line.
“We’re going to have nights like that where we don’t come out strong offensively, and the biggest thing is we’ve got to make sure that defense is something that carries us, whether we’re having a good night or bad,” Mitchell said. “So I’m really happy with how the game went — we needed this type of game to see where our defense was at.”
And so it was that the Jazz sent out those aforementioned youngsters at the start of the fourth — Miye Oni, Elijah Hughes, Juwan Morgan, Nigel Williams-Goss — to play against the Suns starters for a few minutes. They more than held their own, outscoring the Phoenix rotation guys 14-9 before Williams emptied his own bench.
The only downer of the young guys’ run came with 2:14 to play, when rookie center Udoka Azubuike met Abdel Nader at the rim and clobbered him. With the latter falling hard and hitting his head on the court, a referee review culminated with Azubuike being assessed a flagrant-2-level foul and ejected from the game.
The Jazz will wrap their preseason slate Thursday evening in Los Angeles, taking on the Clippers at Staples Center.
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