SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Jazz head coach Quin Snyder didn’t offer a lot of specific reasons for his team’s latest disappointing effort — a 121-88 home loss to the Indiana Pacers Monday at Vivint Arena.
That’s because there might be too many to list.
“There’s no one thing you can point to,” Snyder said. “We just have to keep working, keep grinding those things until we play better.”
The Jazz were turnover prone, inaccurate, couldn’t defend and when that is all combined, you get a 33-point blowout.
Indiana is a good team, yes, but the Pacers were playing without All-Star guard Victor Oladipo and it's not like those were new problems for the Jazz. Yes, the schedule has been daunting — the Jazz (9-12) have faced just one team who currently is under .500 and that team (Minnesota) is 10-11.
But it’s not that the Jazz are losing — it’s how.
Monday’s loss was the seventh time this season that Utah has lost by double-digits. As Joe Ingles said following the game, “When we lost this year, we have lost.”
But the question is why?
Here are some thoughts straight from the players.
Rudy Gobert has the unenviable task of facing the media after each loss. He’s arguably the Jazz’s most important player and he’s seen as the leader of the squad. So, no matter how poor or great he plays, he has to answer questions. Gobert usually has kept to the same script, but he changed his tune just a bit on Monday.
“We really didn’t have it,” Gobert said. “Hopefully, we don't have to say that every night. But sometimes that’s really what it is.”
The Jazz just weren’t good. They lacked energy, lacked focus, lacked the shooting touch. It was the second game of a back-to-back in a different city and the legs just weren’t there.
It happens. But it’s happened a lot.
Preseason expectations were high for this team, mostly based on how they finished last season. But it isn’t last season anymore. And the 29-6 run to end it now feels like a distant memory. The parts might be mostly the same, but the team is different.
“We can’t keep going back and relying on the team we were last year,” Ingles said. “That’s gone; we all have to move on. It’s a new year.”
Ingles said that the team is doing everything right in practice. The players are working, they are getting better, but the Jazz have yet to see it really translate into games. That’s where the newness comes in. It may have been expected for the team’s continuity to be a huge advantage, but maybe the Jazz are proving that just isn’t the case.
“We need to get back to playing the way we know we can play,” Ingles said.
And perhaps stop assuming it'll just come.
The Jazz have pointed to a lack of communication all season as a reason for the losses. It has been evident in many games with the team struggling in transition and on pick-and-rolls.
“With the pace of the NBA today, you have to communicate,” Jae Crowder said.
How to fix it? Crowder said energy can help. He knows that he or his team is going to play perfect, but if they play with energy, that can make up for some of the issues.
There’s a pocket of Jazz fans that believe that some of the issues can be solved by simply swapping out Derrick Favors for Crowder in the starting lineup. Yes, the Crowder-Gobert-Ricky Rubio-Donovan Mitchell-Ingles lineup is better, numbers wise, than when Favors is included, but the team isn’t willing to say that is the issue for the slow starts.
“We have high character guys,” Snyder said. “We have a team that puts the team in front of themselves, whatever the situations are. They might not always agree with what you are doing. Guys are competitive — everyone wants to play, everyone wants to start, everyone wants to finish. It’s a credit to our guys they have a level of selflessness and character.”
There hasn’t been any inner-team turmoil over the starting lineup or rotations or anything really, but the players recognize they have to start better. It takes extra effort to climb out of holes and the Jazz have had plenty to climb out of.
“They probably got 10 points off turnovers in the first five minutes,” Gobert said. “We make it hard on ourselves.”
Said Ingles: "We have to be ready to come out and play."
The Jazz haven’t been able to make runs when they get down by double digits, and often give them up. The last few weeks have been filled with blowout loss after blowout loss. The Jazz were down by 11 points at halftime against Indiana. By the time, the fourth quarter came around, it was at 19 and then it was at 30.
“I don’t think we are giving up,” Gobert said.
But they are also not getting stops.
“The other knows that every bucket is a big bucket that can put us out of the game; can end the game.”
The type of buckets the Jazz haven’t been able to stop.
So what is the problem? Pick one.