SALT LAKE CITY — Keyonte George had a tough talk after last season.

“My exit interview was pretty blunt,” the third-year guard said.

He didn’t share specifics, but the message from the Jazz brass was simple: “It’s time to grow up.”

George’s first two years were a bit of a roller coaster. He won the starting point guard spot eight games into his rookie season, and some in the organization even whispered that “Keyonte was the future.”

By the end of his second year, though, he was coming off the bench. Iffy decision-making and poor defense forced coach Will Hardy’s hand, and he was replaced in the starting lineup by Isaiah Collier.

That led to what George called a “straightforward” conversation at the end of last season. There was never any doubt about his skill — he can score at all three levels and he can pass — but he needed more maturity in his game.

George may not have gotten into specifics about the meeting, but it’s easy to guess what was said: He needed to clean up the inefficient shots, not hijack possessions and care about defense.

Flash forward to Wednesday, and that’s exactly what he was doing in Utah’s 129-108 win over the Los Angeles Clippers to open the season.

“Keyonte did a heck of a job for us with nine assists, (only) three turnovers,” Hardy said. “I thought he played a really good overall floor game.”

George finished with 16 points and nine assists, but it was less about the numbers and more about how he got them. In the past, he’d been guilty of over-dribbling and trying to play make on his own. On Wednesday, he had a simpler approach: get the ball in his teammates’ hands.

“Whether it’s Lauri (Markkanen) or Walker (Kessler) or Brice (Sensabaugh) or anybody, like, just putting the ball in our playmakers’ hands and letting them kind of be them,” he said.

It was part of a pass-happy offense that finished with 38 assists to just 12 turnovers — a prototype for how the Jazz can succeed this season.

“We don’t want our team in this moment to turn into a style where it’s one person making all the decisions,” Hardy said. “I don’t think that’s what’s best for our group. I don’t think that’s ultimately how we’re built. I also think that the team enjoys playing a style where everybody’s involved.”

Everyone was: Markkanen, Kyle Filipowski, and Walter Clayton Jr. each had five assists; Kessler had four; Svi Mykhailiuk and Jusuf Nurkic added three.

“If you have the ball, just try to make a good decision so we can get a good shot,” Hardy said. “Because you trust that the other guys are going to do it too, and that we’ll look up at the end of the game and you’ll have six guys in double figures, because we all got shots.”

That’s just what George did, passing out four assists on Wednesday before taking his first shot.

“You saw it today, giving the ball to Lauri in space in transition — like he’s a monster. Finding our shooters, because then that’s able to loosen the defense, and then I can go get a layup every now and then and make an open shot,” he said. “But just letting the game come to me and then putting the ball in our playmaker’s hands.”

It’s a different approach for George, and one that makes things interesting for the Jazz. He’s always had the skills to be an effective lead guard, but that sometimes got in the way of actually running a good offense. If he could get to the basket himself, why pass? If he could make a contested three, why run a set?

This time, he didn’t force it. He made the right plays.

It was — to use the words from his exit meeting — a grown-up game.

“The way we play, it’s gonna be somebody else’s night, so continue to play the right way,” George said. “Let the ball have energy. We’ll continue to have nights like this.”

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.