Game Recap: Utah Jazz take another butt whoopin', lose to San Antonino Spurs 122-104

March Game Streams -- Pounding The Rock -- Jazz vs Spurs coverage

.

The last incarnation of the Jazz seemed to have a problem with the Los Angeles Lakers. These guys? It's the San Antonio Spurs. Tyrone Corbin started Enes Kanter (who played 7 minutes in the first half) and the team got pounced on early by the several-times-champions Spurs. The game normalized a bit and Derrick Favors and Marvin Williams started cooking. Gordon Hayward was doing a bit of everything on his way to another triple-couple. And, the largest surprise, was that Utah was hanging in with San Antonio.

Perhaps the majority of that was San Antonio checking us out and probing us, and less of it was Utah doing amazing things. It was a sloppy game in the first half with a number of defensive mistakes and, well, . . .

#turnovers

— B.Burke (@Benjib10) March 17, 2014

But as we're certain that the sun will come up the next day we are certain that the Spurs would turn it on in the third quarter, and they blew open what was once a close game to, well, become a normal Spurs/Jazz game. Save for a few runs the margin was above 10 points the rest of the way.

We saw Ian Clark, Brandon Rush, John Lucas III, and yes, even Rudy Gobert in garbage time.

Three Positives:

1. Offensive rebounds, mang, without them this would have been another 20+ point margin of defeat. Partly because of the 13 offensive boards it was only an 18 point final deficit.
   
2. Gordon Hayward had 17 points, 6 rebounds, 6 assists, and uh, 6 turn overs. Good, right? Okay, well, Trey Burke and Alec Burks managed to fill it up for 25 points, 4 steals, and, uh, a lot of dribbles?
   
3. Derrick Favors continues his apotheosis here. Had a very solid game on offense and defense, despite being saddled with foul trouble that saw his minutes reduced in the third quarter. Favors finished with a career high 28 points to go along with 10 rebounds, 3 steals, and 1 assist. He only gets better playing against these guys. And he's becoming a beast.

Three Negatives

1. It's almost as if this team has never seen Manu Ginobili play before, they just let him go left on drives all the time, or leave him open for threes. Either it was a player defensive breakdown, a bad film session, poor Xs and Os, or some combination of those things.
2. In general, the defense was ineffectual. I don't want to go into it more than that right now.
   
3. Three pointers . . . the Spurs just drilled us from deep with their outside shooting. It wasn't even a contest. They could have put on their warmups like Larry Bird and kept not missing. They finished 10 for 16, or 62.5 3PT%. That's higher than a lot of our guys' free throw percentages.
   

The Jazz continue their three games in four nights road trip with a game @ Houston Rockets tomorrow, and then @ Memphis Grizzlies.

Go Jazz!