Our preview asked whether Will Hardy's new starting five could get through a third quarter. It could. Keyonte George, Darryn Peterson, Ace Bailey, Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. opened the second half down 74-71 and played the first 7:05 of it at plus-2, by our count from NBA.com's play-by-play, and the quarter finished 29-29. Our pick was Lakers 121, Jazz 113: right winner, margin off by one, and both teams scored about 10 more than we guessed. We also said a bad third would put this one away. The third was fine. We lost it in the second quarter and the last four minutes.
Read the game thread and you'd think the officials did it. The Lakers shot 38 free throws to our 27, and Austin Reaves took 13 of them on his own. Hardy saw the same number and didn't blame the whistle. He blamed us. We're with him, and we'd go further: the free throws hurt, and the threes hurt more. The Lakers made 20 to our 10, a 30-point gap, and they scored 22 points off our 17 turnovers.
Hardy got the game he asked for
Before tip, KSL's Chandler Holt summed up Hardy's pregame message on X: the team needed to "minimize high-percentage shots around the basket created by Luka's decision-making and passing ability." The Lakers scored 30 points in the paint. We scored 58. We won the boards 52-31, the offensive glass 20-5 and second-chance points 34-11. We shot 48 percent from the field to their 49, on 13 more shots.
"Those are areas of emphasis for us and were executed well," Hardy said after the game, per the Jazz's own recap (Eric Spyropoulos). They were. So Luka Dončić shot from 25 feet instead, and went 8-of-18 from three on his way to 52 points, 8 rebounds and 10 assists in 38 minutes. Reaves was 4-of-5 from deep. Matisse Thybulle and Ziaire Williams went 3-of-7 each. We went 10-of-35, and 1-of-10 in the fourth. "Lakers with 10 more made 3s. That's tough," one r/UtahJazz commenter wrote in the game thread.
We gave the second quarter away
The first quarter was the best we've played all season: 47 points, the most by any team in a quarter this season, per the NBA's account on X, and the third-most the Jazz have ever scored in an opening quarter, per the team's recap. Bailey had 15 on 7-of-8 shooting, three of those baskets putbacks or tips, and George had seven assists before the 4:50 mark. We led 47-29 after one.
With 9:09 left in the second we were still up 55-37, and the Lakers won the rest of the half 37-16. We turned it over seven times in the quarter, and they scored 11 points off those giveaways. We were in the penalty with 5:30 left, and they went 11-of-11 at the line in the quarter. Reaves scored 15 of his 29 in those 12 minutes.
With 13 seconds left in the half, Dončić stripped Bailey, and his 27-foot pull-up with four seconds left made it 74-71 Lakers at the break. Dan Woike, who covers the Lakers for The Athletic, posted: "Luka just stole the ball from Ace Bailey on one end and his ankles on the other."
The free throws were on us
The officiating complaints have numbers behind them. We committed 33 fouls to the Lakers' 24, and 12 of ours came in the fourth. Reaves scored 11 in the fourth on two field goal attempts and eight free throws. With the game tied at 116, Peterson picked up his fourth foul on Dončić at 3:34 and his fifth on a Reaves three at 3:02, and the Lakers got five points at the line in 32 seconds. "The touch fouls the refs called on DP at the end were beyond awful," a fan wrote in the postgame thread. We can't rule on a call from a play-by-play, and we won't pretend to.
Hardy didn't try. "Two guys shooting 24 free throws, that's us not being disciplined," he said, per Carson Hilton of the Deseret News. "You could look at just that, and if we cut that number in half, the outcome of this game is different." Dončić and Reaves made 21 of those 24. Half of that is about 10 points, and we lost by nine. The coach is right, and it's a better complaint than the refs, because it's one we can fix.
The rest of those four minutes was on us too. George was called for an offensive foul at 4:44 and a charge at 3:55, the second with the game tied. After Dončić's three tied it at 116 with 4:06 left, the Lakers scored 16 more: threes from 29, 28 and 26 feet, plus 7 free throws, two of them on our take foul down seven with 12 seconds left. We scored 7.
Another commenter in the game thread had it about right: "yes bad refs but still we coulda done better on defending him."
Who got the ball late
Markkanen led us with 28 and went 0-of-6 in the fourth. His free throws at 4:17 put us up 116-113. After that he didn't get a shot off until a 26-footer with five seconds left and the game gone. George took the late shots and the late fouls, and one fan in the postgame thread put it plainly: "Instead Key called his own number down the stretch even though he didn't have an advantage on his defender."
That's the hard part of George's night, because the rest of it was great. He finished with 24 points, 9 rebounds and 10 assists, one board short of his first career triple-double, and his three at 7:25 put us up 111-110. He also had six turnovers, two of them those late offensive fouls, and his minus-12 was the worst of our starters. The triple-double chase will get the headlines; the turnovers are what we'd fix first.
The best stretch of the fourth came from the end of the bench. Hardy put Josh Green in at 9:15, down 109-106, after he'd barely played in the first two games. "Sometimes you need to put somebody in to try to give the group life," Hardy told the Deseret News. "I thought Josh Green did a great job of that." In his 3:28, the Lakers turned it over four times and made one field goal, and we won those minutes 6-4. The closing group came back at 5:47 and lost the rest 19-11.
Bailey is the other question. After the first quarter he took three shots in more than 20 minutes, none in his eight minutes of the third, and he didn't attempt a free throw all game. He sat from 3:57 of the third until 5:47 of the fourth, then had a tip dunk at 2:43 that made it 119-121. He still finished with 17 points and a career-high 12 rebounds, 6 of them offensive. Hardy loved the work: "To come in and have him guard Dončić for a majority of the night, that's experience that you can't replicate in practice," he told the Deseret News. We haven't seen him say why the ball stopped finding Bailey, and we'd like to.
The player we worried about most barely showed up. Walker Kessler came in 22-of-26 from the field in his first two Lakers games. Against us he took two shots in 28 minutes, scored 2, grabbed 7 rebounds and had 4 fouls, while Jackson Jr. scored 20. Kessler still finished plus-6, which tells you how the night went.
We play the Grizzlies at home Monday at 7 p.m. MT, the second night of a back-to-back (schedule). The rebounding and the paint defense showed up Sunday. Cut the fouls and the turnovers Monday, and nobody will be talking about the refs.
Take note.
Sources: NBA.com box score for player lines, team totals, paint, second-chance, fast-break and points off turnovers (as corrected the morning after); NBA.com play-by-play for the lineup plus-minus, quarter turnovers, free throws and fouls, Bailey's and Markkanen's shots, Green's minutes and the finish; NBA.com box scores for Warriors-Lakers and Clippers-Lakers for Kessler's first two games; Deseret News (Carson Hilton) for Hardy's postgame quotes on free throws, Green and Bailey; the Utah Jazz recap (Eric Spyropoulos) for Hardy's quote on the paint and glass and the franchise first-quarter mark; Chandler Holt (KSL) on X for Hardy's pregame message; the NBA on X for the league first-quarter record; Dan Woike (The Athletic) on X; r/UtahJazz game thread and postgame thread.