PHOENIX — The Utah Jazz didn’t wear masks on Halloween night in Phoenix — they’d already done that nine days earlier in a season-opening blowout win.

“It feels in certain moments like the first game of the year warped our brains into us thinking that we’re something that we’re not,” Jazz coach Will Hardy said.

So who are the Jazz really? A team made up of mostly young players who haven’t yet solidified themselves in the NBA, which made Friday’s first quarter that much more frustrating to Utah’s head coach.

Phoenix closed the opening period on a 20-2 run, setting the tone for a 118-96 win in each team’s first NBA Cup game.

“Our effort and intensity to start the game was pathetic,” Hardy said. “And I think that we didn’t have enough humility and hunger as a team.”

And so Hardy gave those young players a lesson in accountability.

Taylor Hendricks and Brice Sensabaugh didn’t play in the second half, while Kyle Filipowski and Walt Clayton Jr. saw only mop-up minutes after hafltime.

That meant new rotations — and Hardy was willing to get creative.

“We need to have that hunger and humility every single day, and I will poke and prod and dig and sub and flip the team upside down until I find people that want to play hard,” Hardy said.

Veteran Kyle Anderson logged his first minutes in a Utah uniform, finishing with 8 points and three assists in 25 minutes, while two-way defensive hustler Elijah Harkless got extended run, playing 12 second-half minutes.

At one point, the Jazz rolled out a lineup of Anderson, Harkless, Jusuf Nurkic, Ace Bailey and Svi Mykhailiuk. Yep, that seems like it would constitute flipping the team upside down.

For those questioning his lineup choices — and those wanting the younger players to have longer leashes — Hardy had this response:

“There’s going to be a lot of questions asked about, ‘Oh, why did this guy play?’ Because you can’t lose a five-minute segment of the game by 20 points, throwing the ball over the gym, not executing the defense at all, and thinking that that’s OK,” the coach said. “This is our profession. This is my profession, and this is their profession, and we have to find people who want to compete every single night.”

Hendricks played five minutes and was -18; Clayton had the same line in the first half. To Hardy, that was unacceptable.

“When you sub in, you have to meet the level of the game,” Hardy said. “You’re merging onto the highway. You can’t do it at 25 miles an hour.”

The Jazz bench eased into the game — and before they knew it, it was all but over.

“The game was decided in the first quarter,” Hardy said.

And so some young players sat and watched as the Jazz tried to rally — teasing a comeback in the second half, but never able to get the deficit to within single digits.

“The word development gets misused a lot — ‘We’re just here to get better every day.’ That’s not true,” Hardy said. “Every game day, we turn in a group project and we see where we’re at; and when you step on the floor, you compete to win.”

The grade on Friday’s project was obvious.

Still, there were bright spots. Lauri Markkanen had his fourth straight 30-plus-point game, scoring 33 on 10-of-20 shooting, while Keyonte George added 17 points and nine assists. The Jazz even outscored the Suns by three in George’s 33 minutes — no easy task in a 22-point loss.

“I think for the majority of the second, third and fourth quarters, I think we played good basketball,” Hardy said.

Just not good enough to make up for an absolute stinker of a start.

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.