The Jazz finally had a boring game! Boring in the sense that there was never any danger that the Jazz weren’t going win and also boring because the Jazz now have nothing to accomplish in the regular season except playoff seeding(and 50 wins if you care about that). The Oklahoma City Thunder played with no recognizable players and at times looked like they were playing an exhibition game. It’s obvious that winning is not imperative at this point in the season for a team that is 24-55, but you still would like to see as many entertaining games as possible, which this one was not.
The Thunder looked like they might push the Jazz in the early part of the first quarter but fell behind by double digits(41-31) by the time the quarter was over. OKC did make another push to get within two right before halftime but the lead stretched to 13 by the half. In the second half, it was almost as if the Thunder waived the white flag. The game was never in reach after that. Oklahoma City was lead by Jaylen Hoard with 23 points, 5 rebounds and 3 assists.
The Jazz played well tonight for a team that is missing two all stars. It’s easy to look at this game and react by saying that “they should have won this game”, but the reality is that we haven’t seen that consistently from the Jazz for most of this season. So it was nice to see a balanced effort and have several players play well. Utah was lead by Bojan Bogdanovic with 27 points and 5 rebounds but it was the play of Rudy Gay and Hassan Whiteside that was really encouraging. Whiteside has looked better for the last couple of games and if he is rounding into form in time for the playoffs then that is going to be an X factor for the Jazz like it was tonight. It’s nice for the team to win their second in a row even if it is against lesser competition.
The Thunder continue their limp to the regular season finish line with a penultimate matchup against the equally underwhelming Los Angeles Lakers on Friday, while the Jazz host a playoff tune up against the Phoenix Suns. Let’s go Jazz!
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