Our preview asked whether Will Hardy would close with Darryn Peterson. He did. Peterson played all 12 minutes of the fourth quarter, the last five included, but we were down 24 when it started, so it didn't count for much. We said that if the game wasn't close we'd grade the turnovers instead, and that anything under 15 was a win for Hardy. We had 19. We even named "another 19-turnover night from us" as one of the ways we'd be wrong. Our pick was Jazz 118, Blazers 114. It finished Blazers 112, Jazz 90. Wrong winner, off by 26 on the margin. That's an F, and we'll take it.
Fans spent Saturday afternoon on Hardy's lineups, Keyonte George's 2-of-10 and Lauri Markkanen's 3-of-14 in his first game back. Fair things to be mad about, all of them, but the margin came mostly from us handing Portland the ball and the free-throw line. Fouls were even at 26 apiece, and the Blazers still shot 41 free throws to our 26 and made 34, 13 more points at the line than we got. They scored 20 points off our 19 turnovers, and we scored 11 off their 17. Add those two gaps and you get 22, the final margin. The two overlap a little, so it isn't clean accounting, and we'll still take it as the shape of the afternoon.
Hardy saw the same two things. "Our ability to be solid with the ball is continuing to haunt us," he said after the game, per Na'Andre Emerson's takeaways in the Deseret News. On the fouls he went further: "We're not getting a bad whistle. ... We're fouling."
Seventeen to nothing
It was 7-6 Jazz at 8:30 of the first after an Ace Bailey dunk. That was our last point until Mo Bamba's free throws at 2:48, and in those 5:42 Portland scored 17 straight. NBA.com lists it as the biggest run of the game.
Seven of the 17 came at the line: two Deni Avdija free throws on a Bailey foul, three for Damian Lillard when Bailey fouled him on a three, two for Jrue Holiday when Josh Okogie fouled him. Five came after turnovers. Isaiah Collier threw it to Holiday and Avdija scored on the run, then George was called for an offensive foul and Avdija hit a step-back three. Three more came on a Lillard three after Donovan Clingan grabbed an offensive rebound. Holiday's 12-foot step-back is the only basket in the run that came off a normal possession. Meanwhile we missed shots, turned it over four times (Jaxson Hayes, Collier, George, Okogie) and didn't get to the line once.
Hardy described that kind of stretch without naming it: "I think we're seeing pockets where it's three and four turnovers in, you know, five or six possessions." We had four of them in that 5:42.
The rotation fight starts right in that stretch, and the fans have a point. Eric Spyropoulos, the Jazz's digital reporter, posted around the start of the second quarter that the Jazz had opened this one with more staggering, "splitting up the pairing of Keyonte George & Darryn Peterson." Peterson came out for Collier at 6:42 of the first, with Portland up 8-7. When he checked back in at 3:29, it was 23-7. With him back, we closed the quarter on an 11-4 run. Over the whole game we were minus-8 in his 35:57 and minus-14 in the 12 minutes he sat. That gap is real. It still doesn't explain a run that started with Peterson on the floor and came almost entirely from the line, off turnovers and off an offensive rebound, and Bailey's foul on Lillard's three came with the starters still out there.
Avdija lived at the line
Avdija had 24 points on 6-of-12 shooting, went 10-of-13 at the line, and was plus-32 in 30:11. He had 19 of those by halftime, and all 10 of his made free throws came before the break. Five different Jazz players fouled him on shots.
Some fans blamed the whistle, in the building and in the postgame thread, where one line was simply "41 free throws is insane." The box doesn't back that, and neither does Hardy. Twenty-six fouls each. The difference is what kind of fouls we committed: by our count of the play-by-play, 20 of our 26 were shooting fouls. Portland attacked, and we fouled shooters. Forty-one is the most free throws anyone has taken against us this season; the Lakers' 38 had been the high. Another fan in that thread had it right: "we were way too handsy."
Hardy also said, "I thought we guarded well enough to win the game," and put the fouling on the first half: "The first half, the fouling was a little bit out of control." We won the paint, 28-26, and the fast-break points, 14-6, so we see what he means about the rest of it. We still don't buy it. Twenty shooting fouls are part of the defense, and Portland scored 112 on 41 percent shooting because we kept sending it to the line.
A rough return for Markkanen
Markkanen missed Wednesday's Spurs game with the sprained right wrist. The Jazz listed him available about an hour before tip, and Chandler Holt, KSL's Jazz beat reporter, posted that he warmed up with a wrap on it. He started and missed his first five shots, all threes. His first basket was a 30-foot running three with 1:24 left in the half, and Holt wrote that he "was clearly relieved after starting 0/5."
He finished with 13 points on 3-of-14, 2-of-11 from three, with 6 rebounds, 2 blocks and 2 steals in 28:49. He also fouled out at 6:21 of the fourth with us down 20. Five of his six fouls were shooting fouls, and Portland made 8 of the 10 free throws they gave up. We don't know how the wrist felt, and we haven't seen him or Hardy asked about it, so we're not going to call it rust or pain.
George was the other half of the fans' anger: 8 points on 2-of-10, 0-of-4 from three, 4 assists and 3 turnovers in 28:42. At 2:48 of the second the Jazz were called for a five-second violation, and George checked out at the same stoppage. He was back 2:07 later. We don't know why he sat.
What to keep
Peterson led us with 16 points on 6-of-15, 3-of-8 from three, with 4 assists. Brice Sensabaugh scored 12 in 19:03 and was the only Jazz player who finished on the plus side, at plus-2. Bamba went 2-of-2 in 10:30. We had 23 assists to Portland's 16. And Portland's threes didn't beat us the way we feared: they went 16-of-44, plenty of volume but nothing like the 18-of-36 they shot at the Lakers, the night our preview warned about. We went 11-of-40.
We're 1-5 and have lost four straight. That's a 1-4 homestand, and 22 is our worst loss of the season, two worse than the opener in Memphis. Jaren Jackson Jr. (right MCL tear) and Jusuf Nurkić (right foot) are still out, per the Jazz's injury report. Monday we're in San Antonio (schedule). Same test as Saturday: keep the turnovers under 15 and stop fouling jump shooters. Hardy said the fouling is ours to fix, and we'll hold him to it. Who closes can wait until we're close.
Take note.
Sources: NBA.com box score for player lines, minutes, plus-minus and team totals (free throws, fouls, turnovers, points off turnovers, paint and fast-break points, assists, threes, the 17-point run); NBA.com play-by-play for the first-quarter run and how Portland scored in it, Peterson's and George's exits and returns, the five-second violation, Avdija's first-half free throws, Markkanen's misses and fouls, and the shooting-foul count (our count); NBA.com box scores of our first five games for opponents' free-throw attempts; NBA.com's Jazz schedule for results and records; Na'Andre Emerson in the Deseret News for Will Hardy's postgame quotes; the Utah Jazz on X for the injury report; Eric Spyropoulos on X for the stagger; Chandler Holt of KSL on X for Markkanen's warmup wrap and his first make; r/UtahJazz's postgame thread for fan reaction.