Our preview asked whether Jaxson Hayes could keep Victor Wembanyama off the rim. He mostly did. Wembanyama went 4-of-5 within five feet with one alley-oop, after going 7-of-8 with four lobs on Oct. 28, and we'd said four makes and one lob was a win for our bigs. Two of the four came in the last 34 seconds of the third quarter, with us already down 21. He finished with 12 points on 5-of-15, 0-of-5 from three, in 24 minutes.
We also listed three things that would prove us wrong: Wembanyama held at the rim, fewer than 15 turnovers from us, and Lauri Markkanen making shots. Get two of them, we wrote, and it's close in the fourth. We got all three. We turned it over 11 times, a season low per the Salt Lake Tribune, Markkanen had 22 on 8-of-16, and we started the fourth down 94-69. Our pick was Spurs 118, Jazz 106. They scored 119 and we scored 97. Right winner, 10 points off on the margin. The pick gets a C. The thinking behind it gets worse, because we built the whole preview around the wrong guy.
San Antonio didn't need its center at the rim. It needed us to miss, and we missed 62 shots. The Spurs went 10-of-15 on the break and won the fast-break points 26-9. Eric Spyropoulos's takeaways on Jazz.com counted 15 Spurs shots in transition to our eight, with the turnovers about even (11 to their 12), so the break ran off our misses. @BensHoops, KSL Sports' Jazz insider by his X bio, called it in the first quarter: "the Spurs just run off every miss."
Nine of thirty
We picked a lot of those misses ourselves. We took 30 two-pointers from beyond five feet and made nine. The Spurs took 16 of those and made seven, and spent the rest of the night close in, where they went 24-of-43 to our 13-of-32. That's how you lose the paint 52-36 to a team whose star center scored eight of his points there.
James Hansen's recap at SLC Dunk blames some of it on role players who "hijack possessions." Svi Mykhailiuk's 1-of-7 fits that, but it doesn't explain the night. Markkanen, Peterson, George and Bailey took 52 of our 96 shots and made 18, and George and Bailey went 5-of-23 between them.
The first quarter showed the whole pattern in four minutes. Between 8:25 and 4:31 the Spurs scored four running layups, and every one came right after a miss: a Darryn Peterson pull-up three, a Keyonte George floater, a Mo Bamba layup and an Ace Bailey turnaround. De'Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle, Dylan Harper and Devin Vassell each got one. It was 20-6. We shot 7-of-26 in the quarter and 1-of-8 from three and scored 16 points, our lowest quarter of the season, per the AP game story.
The maddening part is that we did the dirty work. Rebounds were 53 apiece, we had 17 offensive boards to their 9, and we won second-chance points 26-22. We fought for the misses we could reach and gave the game away on the ones we couldn't.
Will Hardy put his finger on it after the game. "There's execution that's needed, and sometimes that means doing boring things over and over again in order to generate good shots," he told the Tribune's Shreyas Laddha. "You know, we can't get tired of doing the simple things." Over in the other locker room, Castle explained the Spurs' second half almost word for word: "Just not getting bored on what was working," he said, per Pounding The Rock's recap. San Antonio kept doing the boring stuff all night, running after every miss and getting to the rim. We managed it for about one quarter.
The run came with George on the bench
That quarter was the second, and Peterson was running it. Hardy sent Peterson in for George at 3:30 of the first with us down 13, 14 after the last free throw. Over the next 9:13, with Peterson at the point, we outscored the Spurs 26-15, and a 16-point lead was down to one when Bailey hit a pull-up three to make it 35-34 Spurs at 6:54 of the second. Peterson set up two of Markkanen's four threes in the first 74 seconds of the second quarter, and a third later in the half, in his next stint. Wembanyama was on the floor for 7:24 of the run. Josh Okogie, who finished plus-7 and went 6-of-6 at the line, was out there for the whole run.
At 6:17 Hardy swapped them back, George in and Peterson out. In the next 3:48 the Spurs went 13-8 and the lead was back to eight.
Over the whole night, by our count of the play-by-play, Peterson and George were on the floor together for 11:32 and we were minus-13. In the first three quarters Peterson played 13:57 without George and we were plus-5. George played 10:31 without Peterson and we were minus-17. Those are small samples with a lot of other players in them, and the third quarter was bad no matter who had the ball: Peterson was minus-6 in his solo minutes there. Still, it's the second straight Spurs game where the numbers point the same way. On Oct. 28 we lost the overtime 12-6 with Peterson on the bench and George doing it alone.
The minutes Peterson ran used to belong to Isaiah Collier. He didn't play until the fourth, and the Jazz have declined his team option, Michael Scotto reported (via SLC Dunk). Hansen read Monday as proof that giving Collier those minutes "wasn't the best play." We'd take it further. Peterson already starts next to George, and the second unit is his now. What's left is who runs the starters.
Peterson didn't make a shot in the first half (0-of-5), and @BensHoops still had him as "the Jazz's best PG in the first half." We agree. He finished with 14 points, 6 assists and 1 turnover, plus 3 steals and 3 blocks, and his minus-4 was the best of our starters. George had 7 points on 3-of-12 with no assists and 3 turnovers, and two of those turnovers became Spurs baskets on the break. He was minus-30.
Plenty of fans came away from Monday questioning George's effort, and whether he's the guy to build around at all. We're not there. Two bad shooting nights in a row (he was 2-of-10 against Portland, our recap) don't undo the extension, and they don't answer that question. But the job can change. Peterson should be the one with the ball, from the opening tip, with George scoring off him. That's a smaller ask than giving up on him, and Hardy can do it Wednesday.
Five straight
We're 1-6 and 15th in the West, losers of five in a row. Laddha has that as tied for the third-worst seven-game start in franchise history. The Spurs are 5-2. Collier scored 7 on 3-of-4 in the fourth, and we won that quarter 28-25 after it was decided, which tells you nothing. Bamba left midway through the fourth with a leg injury, per Jazz.com, and we haven't seen an update on him yet.
Next is Wednesday in New Orleans (schedule), against the only team we've beaten, 120-119 on Oct. 23. Two things to watch: who brings the ball up in the first six minutes, and how many of those two-pointers from beyond five feet we take. Thirty is too many.
Take note.
Sources: NBA.com box score (player lines, team shooting, paint, fast-break and second-chance points, plus-minus; rebounds are the player totals) and NBA.com play-by-play (Wembanyama's shots by distance and the alley-oop, both teams' two-pointers by distance, the first-quarter layups and the misses before them, the first-quarter shooting, the substitutions, Peterson's assists, the halftime splits and the lineup plus-minus, all our count); the NBA.com box score of the Blazers game for George's shooting and the play-by-play of the Oct. 28 Spurs game for Wembanyama's shots at the rim then; NBA.com standings for the records and conference place; Eric Spyropoulos on Jazz.com (transition shots, Bamba's injury); Shreyas Laddha in The Salt Lake Tribune (Hardy's quote, the season-low turnovers, the franchise start); the Associated Press via the Deseret News (the season-low quarter); James Hansen at SLC Dunk (recap, Collier option); Stephen Michael at Pounding The Rock (Castle's quote); @BensHoops on X (first quarter, halftime); our preview for the question, the pick and the three conditions.