After surviving a 154-148 overtime decision Wednesday against the now 3-31 Pistons, the Utah Jazz acknowledged how lucky they were.
Detroit shot 53.3% overall, made 19 of 41 tries from beyond the arc (46.3%), and buried a game-tying 3 at the regulation horn when Utah neglected to foul Alec Burks as he made his way up the court.
“You’d always rather win lessons after a win than a loss,” coach Will Hardy pointedly noted postgame.
He then rattled off a litany of miscues the team will hopefully learn from next time: breakdowns in coverages; failure to recognize personnel and locate shooters (as evidenced by Bojan Bogdanovic’s 15 3-point attempts); slippage in communication.
Oh, and that failure of Collin Sexton to foul Burks after Lauri Markkanen made what looked like it’d be a game-winning 3 with 5.2 seconds to go and Detroit out of timeouts.
If the Jazz foul Burks as he races up the court, the game likely ends after 48 minutes. But because they didn’t and he made the shot, an extra five were on tap that could potentially have gone wrong.
Everyone acknowledged that the crazy circumstances of the situation contributed to the breakdown. And everyone conceded they were lucky that it didn’t wind up costing them a win.
“It’s something that we’ve worked on a good amount this year, it’s something that we’ve watched film on,” said Hardy. “But this is also a moment where, when the emotion is super-high and the building is going crazy, it’s easy to lose focus on the strategy part. Obviously, we would have liked to have fouled when Alec Burks ran the ball up the court.
“… But this is part of learning how to win and learning how to become a really good team,” he added.
The players all took it to heart.
Asked when they realized they should have fouled, Markkanen quipped, “[When we] saw Will jumping on the sidelines. He was trying to yell, obviously, but we can’t hear anything. But we’ve just got to recognize it as players. That’s one big thing we can learn from.”
Sexton noted that he and Jordan Clarkson had a pretty immediate conversation about it.
“Me and JC was looking at it, and I’m like, ‘I should have fouled, right?’ And he was like, ‘No one told you,’” Sexton said. “But it’s all good — those are possessions and things that’s going to help us in the future.”
Clarkson, who registered a game-high 36 points, including a couple huge buckets down the stretch in the fourth and again in OT, also took responsibility for the miscue.
“In those situations, you know, we’ve all gotta be communicating. And me being next to him in that play, I could have been screaming and telling him,” Clarkson said. “So I’ll take that on myself, just being one of the guys that’s older and has that experience to scream and say that.”
Everyone who spoke postgame acknowledged that it was not a banner effort.
Yes, they tied a franchise-record with their 154 points. No, they couldn’t really enjoy it, because they recognized that Detroit was also scoring at will for pretty much the entire game.
“Obviously it’s fun to score the ball, but I think it just puts a lot of pressure on our offense and execution. Because if we are not getting stops, we know that we have to get a score on the other end so it doesn’t get out of hand,” said Markkanen. “… We’ve definitely got to pick up the 148 part, but we’re happy with the 1-5-4.”
He then noted Utah’s failure to properly account for the Pistons’ personnel in the game, letting 3-point shooters get off 3s, while chasing others off the line and, in turn, surrendering layups or free throws.
Still, it was Burks’ shot that most stuck with everyone.
Hardy used it as an opportunity to put some of the blame on his own shoulders, pointing out that he wound up second-guessing the information he prioritized conveying to the team in the timeout preceding Markkanen’s go-ahead bucket.
“This is where, as a coach, you always kick yourself: Could I have handled that 60 seconds differently? Could I have drawn our play and talked about multiple defensive scenarios?” Hardy said. “I don’t know. But that’s what I’ll be driving home thinking about. Is there things that I could have communicated better in that moment?”
And again, he gave his players some grace for not executing the situation ideally.
“It all makes sense in a quiet film room. Like this, if we put the film up behind me right now, it would all make sense,” he said. “But you make a big 3 and there’s four seconds left and the whole building’s going crazy and everybody’s scrambling around trying to find their matchups and figure out what’s happening — those are learning moments for our team.”
The players acknowledged the difficulty of trying to perform perfectly amid such chaos, but the need to nevertheless be better at it.
“Yeah, it’s nothing like the game reps where you can work [it] out in practice; and obviously in the film room, you can pause the video and, ‘We should have done this and this,’” said Markkanen. “We will learn from it, but I think that’s a good experience for us to have in the game, so the next time we know what we should do.”
Sexton concurred.
“We’re gonna be in that same situation, we’ll see it soon — so we’ve got to just be prepared,” he said.
Yeah, plenty of lessons to be learned.
But they feel a lot better with a 16-19 record than a 15-20 one.
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