Our preview asked who should hold the ball against the league's steal leaders, and we said Darryn Peterson. Keyonte George answered for him: 39 points, 9 assists, 3 turnovers, 4 steals. We set the bar at 10 Pelicans steals or fewer, and said that with Peterson running it we'd leave New Orleans with our second win. They had nine. We lost anyway. Our players turned it over 20 times and only nine of those were steals, and we added two shot-clock violations in overtime. Our pick was Pelicans 117, Jazz 111, and it finished 120-113 in overtime. Right winner, one point off on the margin, so the pick gets a B. The question gets a D. We asked about the wrong guard and the wrong end of the floor.
By the end of the night the postgame thread was mostly George's hero ball and Will Hardy's offense, plus some anger at a 43-30 gap in free-throw attempts. The morning stories went with the threes and the rebounding. We think the game was lost at the other end, and for a simpler reason: for the last eight minutes, we didn't have a center on the floor.
Eight minutes without a center
Jaxson Hayes picked up his sixth foul with 3:04 left in regulation, on a Derik Queen and-one that put New Orleans up 97-96. Josh Okogie replaced him. From that foul to the final horn, 8:04 of game time, the Pelicans scored 23 points without making a three. Nine came at the line. Six of their seven field goals came from six feet or closer. In overtime they grabbed two offensive rebounds, and both turned into points: Jeremiah Fears tipped in a Zion Williamson miss, and Saddiq Bey rebounded a Herbert Jones miss and drew two free throws.
Mo Bamba watched all of it. He was listed as available on the Jazz's injury update with his right ankle sprain, which Chandler Holt of KSL Sports posted before tip. His line was 7 points, 10 rebounds (five offensive) and a plus-8 in 14:45. His last real stint ran from 8:49 to 3:19 of the third, and we went 22-17 in it while George took over. In the fourth he checked in for one Dejounte Murray free throw with 6.4 seconds left and checked back out at the timeout. He didn't play in overtime. Tony Bradley and Kyle Filipowski, two more bigs who weren't on that injury update, didn't play at all. "Bamba was solid even with his tweaked ankle, but maybe it was affecting him too much," one r/UtahJazz commenter wrote in the postgame thread. Maybe. None of the morning stories we read say, so we don't know if the ankle had a limit on it. If it didn't, we can't explain it.
Hardy's read on overtime lands close to ours without getting there. "Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing was rebounding," he said after the game, per Jared Koch of Utah Jazz On SI. Koch has him on the rim too: "Guys like Queen and Zion put so much pressure on the rim. The guys at the rim are sort of locked up physically to contest those balls, and we need secondary rebounders." We'd flip it. The guys at the rim in overtime were Okogie, Lauri Markkanen and Ace Bailey, and our best offensive rebounder of the night was on the bench. Hardy also said, per Jazz.com, "I thought for a majority of the game we defended at a high level." He's right. The minority was the last eight minutes, and that's the part with no center in it.
Our offense in those eight minutes was better than its reputation. After Hayes went out we took 12 shots, 10 of them threes, and made five of the threes. Markkanen hit three of them, from 24, 26 and 30 feet, and the 26-footer made it 104-100 with 39 seconds left. Our only two tries at the rim both got blocked, George's in the fourth and Markkanen's in overtime, while the Pelicans kept getting layups at ours.
The 14-0
George opened overtime with back-to-back step-back threes from 25 feet, and we were up 110-104 with 4:10 left. We didn't score again until Markkanen's 30-footer with 2.7 seconds to go. New Orleans scored the next 14 in between. Our six trips went: a George pull-up three, a shot-clock violation, an Okogie offensive foul, Markkanen's blocked layup, a George three followed by a second shot-clock violation, and a Bailey three. Bailey fouled out with 0.9 seconds left.
That's where the hero-ball complaint has a point, and George half-agreed with it. "I think in those last two minutes and 30 seconds, maybe we could have gotten a better shot, who knows?" he told Shreyas Laddha of The Salt Lake Tribune. From 2:12 left in regulation on, he took six shots, every one a three from 24 feet or deeper, and made two. The 39 came from somewhere else. He was 12-of-18 inside the arc and 9-of-13 at the line, and 19 of his points came in the third quarter, when we scored 43 and took an 80-70 lead into the fourth. He was 0-of-5 from three in regulation. When the Pelicans gave him the paint, he took it. When they didn't, we had no second idea. Two shot-clock violations in a five-minute overtime don't happen to an offense that has one.
The regulation ending will sting for a while. Up 104-102, George missed a pull-up three with 14 seconds left, Jones got the rebound, and Okogie fouled Murray, who made both. George then hit a fadeaway at the horn that, after review, "was not released in time," per ClutchPoints. George thought he'd beaten the clock, Laddha wrote, and he took it on himself anyway. "It's a learning moment," George said. "You got to go get the ball. Can't get stuck on the right wing."
It wasn't the whistle
The free-throw gap is real. New Orleans went 39-of-43 and we went 20-of-30, and we were called for 33 fouls to their 26. Hayes and Bailey fouled out and Okogie finished with five. But in the Pelicans' two big runs, the 12-0 in the fourth that wiped out an 87-76 lead and the 14-0 in overtime, they scored 26 points and seven came at the line. One of those was a defensive three-seconds technical, called on Brice Sensabaugh. Most of the rest came at the rim, and in the fourth we went four minutes without a point while it happened. We also missed 10 free throws of our own. "we win in regulation if we hit 1 more shot or 1 more free throw," another commenter wrote in the same thread. That's fair. George missed four of his and Markkanen two.
Peterson had the quiet night the preview didn't want. He finished with 7 points on 2-of-8, 0-of-5 from three, 7 assists and 2 turnovers in 30 minutes, and a minus-12. He sat from 2:56 of overtime on, apart from 24 seconds near the end. George ran the game, and on this night that was right.
We're 1-7, six straight losses. The Pelicans are 4-4. Friday is Dallas on the road (schedule), an NBA Cup group game, and the thing to watch is simple: who's at center when it's close. If Bamba can go and it's tight late, play him.
Take note.
Sources: NBA.com box score (player lines, minutes, steals, player turnovers, fouls, free throws and the 14-point run) and NBA.com play-by-play (George's points by quarter and shots by distance, our shots and the Pelicans' scoring after Hayes's sixth foul, Bamba's stints and the score in them, the substitutions, the shot-clock violations, both runs, the overtime possessions and the free throws inside them, all our count); NBA.com schedule and standings for the records and the next game; the Jazz's injury update as posted by Chandler Holt of KSL Sports; data/roster.json for positions; Jared Koch, Utah Jazz On SI, for Hardy on rebounding and secondary rebounders; Shreyas Laddha, The Salt Lake Tribune, for George's quotes and his read on the shot at the horn; Eric Spyropoulos, Jazz.com, for Hardy on the defense; ClutchPoints on X for the review at the end of regulation; the r/UtahJazz postgame thread; our preview for the question, the steals line and the pick.