Utah Jazz almost squander game in 4th to Alec Burks’ Golden State Warriors

The Utah Jazz started the game poorly then ended the game poorly, but luckily came away with the win tonight against the Golden State Warriors. Alec Burks tried his best to show the Jazz what they are missing out on as he put on a 4th quarter comeback that almost led the no-name Warriors’ leftovers to a HUGE upset of the Utah Jazz.

Tonight’s Jazz performance probably didn’t inspire any confidence in the current state of the Jazz. The starters are still good and the bench isn’t capable of beating the Santa Cruz Warriors. The night became even more eventful after the game when a suspicious package was found outside of the arena, but thankfully was found to only be a toolbox. However, there also were shots fired a couple blocks from the arena in this same timespan. Despite the difficult win, events like that put a basketball game in perspective. Stay safe out there, Jazz fans.

Rational reaction #1

The Jazz starters looked really good for most of this game. There has been much consternation about the bench struggles and rotation for the Jazz but lost in that is the fact that the starters and especially Mike Conley are looking a lot more comfortable together 15 games in. Granted, the Warriors are not the powerhouse team they once were, but the Jazz “first teamers” looked like they are getting used to playing with each other at several points throughout the game.

Rational reaction #2

Rudy needs to get more touches. It’s hard to understand why the Jazz don’t use games like this to practice getting Rudy more involved on offense. There is still a lot of time for it to get better and I am sure that it will, but given how much he changes the game when he is rolling on offense, you would think that the team would want to figure it out sooner rather than later.

Overreaction #1

The defensive effort looked terrible throughout the game! The Warriors are a young team and do not have a “go to guy” on their team right now but the Jazz did a good job of protecting the paint for the most part and got a good number of deflections. The 4th quarter wasn’t their best defensive look but they were playing against a team with nothing to lose and a former Jazzman(Alec Burks) who wanted to single handedly stick it to the Jazz.

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Overreaction #2

The Jazz couldn’t really pull away from the Warriors. Yes, they started the game kind of slow and almost let it slip away in the 4th, but there was never a point in the game that didn’t feel like the Jazz were in control. I know there may be some hand wringing over the fact that the team looked kind of flat, but this was a solid win by a team who knows that they have a more challenging game waiting for them 24 hours from now.

Under-reaction of the game

Quietly the Jazz have won 10 of their first 15 games this season despite learning chemistry on the fly. It took the Jazz until 11/28 the last two seasons to reach double digit wins but they also had double digit losses by that point too. The Jazz are on pace to win 54 or 55 games this year and that’s not even considering the fact that they haven’t really played their best basketball yet. Once the Jazz really get in sync, they will be fine.