Our preview asked who would be at center when it got close, and we said Mo Bamba. He never got off the bench. He was active on NBA.com's box score and didn't play a second, and ESPN lists it as a coach's decision. Tony Bradley and Kyle Filipowski got 56 seconds each at the very end. That's three centers on the bench and 1:52 of game time between them, on a night a Dallas rookie had 10 offensive rebounds by himself.
So the preview needs grading on two counts. The pick was Mavericks 114, Jazz 108, and it finished 112-100: right winner, six points light on the margin. Call it a C. The premise gets an F. We said Dallas was bad on its own glass and we'd go get the misses. Dallas finished with 21 offensive rebounds and we had 8, five under our average. The test we set, 16 offensive rebounds with Bamba on the floor late, never got run, because he wasn't on the floor at all. The one piece of the pick that held up was the ball: we turned it over 21 times to their 15.
Jazz fans on X spent the night yelling about the whistle and about Darryn Peterson's minutes. By morning the Associated Press had handed the game to Cooper Flagg and Kyrie Irving, and SLC Dunk's James Hansen had pinned it on our bench. Will Hardy came closest. "The possession battle was out of hand today," he said after the game, per Eric Spyropoulos's Jazz.com recap. We'd go a step further: Morez Johnson Jr. won that battle on the offensive glass, and the guys built to stop him didn't leave Hardy's bench until the final minute. Bamba never left it.
Seven minutes in the third
The game was tied 57-57 at the half on a Keyonte George floater at the horn, and we were still ahead 70-68 with 7:44 left in the third after Peterson threw an alley-oop to Ace Bailey. Dallas called timeout and sent Johnson in for Daniel Gafford.
Inside 61 seconds, at 7:34, 7:06 and 6:33, Johnson grabbed three offensive rebounds. The AP's game story gives Flagg and Irving 21 of the points in Dallas's 22-10 run to an 81-70 lead, and the play-by-play agrees. Look at where two of those trips came from, though. Johnson's first board came off an Irving miss, and Bailey fouled Flagg on the next shot: two free throws. His second came off a P.J. Washington miss, and Johnson found Irving for a 14-foot pull-up. That's four points Johnson set up without taking a shot.
From the timeout to the last eight seconds of the quarter, Dallas outscored us 21-3. We went 1-of-10 from the field and turned it over six times, and we didn't score at all from 7:44 until a Josh Green three at 2:48. Josh Okogie's three at the horn made it 89-76, and that was as close as the fourth would get to interesting.
Hansen's bench complaint covers the back half of that stretch. Nine of Dallas's 13 straight points came before our 5:27 timeout, with our starting five on the floor. After Hardy sent in Isaiah Collier and Svi Mykhailiuk at 4:41, the problem changed: Collier turned it over three times, twice on travels, and Dallas won the rest of the quarter 12-6. Neither group had Bamba in it.
Hardy didn't dodge the glass. "Defensive rebounding has been a calling card for us all year," he said, per Jazz.com. Not on Friday. NBA.com has Dallas with 20 second-chance points to our 5 and 18 points off our turnovers to our 12 off theirs. One Mavs fan's pregame list on X ended with "This game is made for you Morez." Johnson finished with 13 points, 17 rebounds and a plus-20 in 23:48 off the bench, the first double-double of the rookie's career, per the AP. "Only 10 offensive rebounds. I mean, that doesn't happen without incredible effort," Flagg said afterward, per ClutchPoints.
Jaxson Hayes started and played 27:41. He went to the bench at 4:41 of the third with us down 77-70, came back to open the fourth, and sat for good at 6:33. In the 20:19 Hayes sat, Lauri Markkanen was our biggest man on the floor for all but the last 55 seconds, and Dallas got 11 of its 21 offensive rebounds. We don't know why Bamba didn't play, and none of the morning stories we read say. His ankle had him questionable before New Orleans and he wasn't on Thursday's injury report. If it was the ankle, nobody said so. If it wasn't, we can't explain it.
The whistle and the kid
The free throws looked awful, and fans had the count right: Dallas had 24 attempts through three quarters to our 4, per Jazz.com, and finished 25-of-31 to our 13-of-14. But the fouls were 22 on us and 19 on them, and Dallas spent the night at the rim, where fouls happen. They scored 48 in the paint to our 36 and took 93 shots to our 82. We shot better from the floor and made six more threes, and the extra possessions buried that.
We didn't take a free throw in the third. We took 10 in the fourth, and six were Peterson's. He scored our first 12 points of the fourth: a pull-up three, a running three, and three trips to the line, all made, to cut it to 100-88 with 7:42 left. "He did a good job of being patient and attacking the drop," Hardy said, per Jazz.com. Then Peterson took one more shot, a missed 26-footer with 3:11 left, before Hardy pulled the starters with 55 seconds to go. Fans saw a rookie get hot and then watch, and the numbers back them on everything after 7:42. But we were down 12 when the run ended, and the game was decided in the third, with Peterson on the bench from 5:27 on.
Peterson finished with 21 points on 6-of-12, five assists, two steals and three blocks in 29:55. That's the most he's scored in nine NBA games; his old high was 18 against the Spurs on Oct. 28. "Just a little bit more comfortable," he told Shreyas Laddha of The Salt Lake Tribune. Markkanen scored all 24 of his on threes, 8-of-15, and was a minus-15. George had 16 and 9 assists, and five of our 21 turnovers. Flagg had 21, 10 and 7 and a plus-17, and Washington hit six threes for 26.
We're 1-8, seven straight losses, 15th in the West, and 0-1 in our NBA Cup group. Dallas is 5-4. "Flush this one, get ready for Minnesota," Peterson told the Tribune. Next is Sunday in Minnesota at 5 p.m. MT on KJZZ (schedule), and the question from Dallas carries over: if the other team lives on the offensive glass, play somebody who boxes out. We have three of them.
Take note.
Sources: NBA.com box score (player lines, minutes, team totals, second-chance points, points off turnovers, points in the paint, fouls, and who did and didn't play) and NBA.com play-by-play (the 21-3 and 13-0 stretches, Johnson's offensive rebounds after the 7:42 timeout and what came of them, our shots and turnovers in the third, the lineups before and after the 5:27 and 4:41 changes, Hayes's stints and Dallas's offensive rebounds while he sat, our free-throw attempts by quarter, and Peterson's fourth quarter, all our count); ESPN's box score for Bamba's coach's decision, and ESPN's game log for Peterson's earlier games; NBA.com standings and schedule for the records, conference place and next game; Eric Spyropoulos, Jazz.com, for Will Hardy's quotes and the free throws through three quarters; the Associated Press game story (via the Deseret News) for the 22-10 run and Johnson's first double-double; James Hansen's SLC Dunk recap for the bench argument; Shreyas Laddha, The Salt Lake Tribune, for Peterson's quotes; Shabiha Akter, ClutchPoints via Yahoo Sports, for Cooper Flagg's quote; a Mavericks fan's pregame post on X; our preview for the question, the pick and the rebounding test, and our Pelicans recap for Bamba's ankle.