Sometimes you just have to take a leap toward greatness, which is exactly what the Utah Jazz had to do Saturday night after getting comprehensively defeated 142-121 by the Denver Nuggets at Ball Arena in Denver.
It’s not that the Jazz were horrible, it’s just that they’re not the Nuggets and they didn’t have a standout offensive night like the Nuggets did.
The Jazz got some great defensive moments from Walker Kessler in his return after missing four games, Keyonte George scored 29 points and fellow rookie Brice Sensabaugh showed some very savvy moves.
The Jazz even dominated the Nuggets in the third quarter, but it was to no avail.
The Nuggets were incredible on Saturday. They closed the first half shooting 65.9% overall and 70% from 3-point range, pretty quickly dashing any hope the Jazz might have had.
“Fourteen from 20 from 3 in the first half is pretty spectacular,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “This is a championship-level team. When a team shoots the ball from the perimeter like that, it’s a tough game to win, especially when you compare that to what we shot from 3 in the first half… It’s just a tough game to win mathematically… But it was a special team that we played, and that is to their credit.
Yes, this is a special team. They are the reigning NBA champions led by Nikola Jokic, who is likely to win his third NBA Most Valuable Player award, and Jamal Murray, who compliments and is the league’s best one-two punch. And this is a team on a mission to try and repeat last year’s success in the playoffs.
Meanwhile, the Jazz are…well…not that.
Even with a perfectly healthy roster, the Jazz aren’t close to what the Nuggets are, and even though the Jazz played as perfectly as they could with a perfectly healthy roster, the Nuggets were, as said Hardy, Saturday specials.
But the Jazz weren’t perfect — they trailed by 39 points — and they weren’t healthy (their best player, Lauri Markkanen, watched from the sidelines as he nursed a quad bruise).
The good news is that the NBA forces you to move quickly, so the Jazz will have another chance to prove their mettle on Tuesday night.
The bad news is that they will face the winningest team of the season, the Boston Celtics, who have only lost 11 games on the road all season.
