If the Utah Jazz had been able to secure the ball, they would be looking at a 2-0 start to their 2025-26 season.<\/p>\n
If Walker Kessler had been stronger with the ball in his hands and if Lauri Markkanen had been more intentional about boxing out Domantas Sabonis, the Jazz would have had the lead and forced the Sacramento Kings to play the free throw game til the final buzzer.<\/p>\n
If.<\/p>\n
Instead, with less than 10 seconds to play Friday night in Sacramento and the Jazz up 104-103, after a really solid defensive possession that included a deflection of the ball into the backcourt, forcing the Kings to scramble for a good shot, Malik Monk tossed up a rushed floater. <\/p>\n
And despite the Jazz having two 7-footers at the basket, Sabonis grabbed the rebound and put in the game-winning bucket. Kings 105, Jazz 104.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to grab that,\u201d Markkanen said. \u201cWe lose it, and we can all talk about the last play \u2014 what kind of shot we get up \u2014 but I think that\u2019s the rebound that we\u2019ve gotta get…just try to come up with that, no matter how you get it, just try to go get the ball. I can do a better job on that.”<\/p>\n
The Jazz ended up with the ball for the final possession with a chance to win, but failed to get the ball into the right hands. The final out-of-bounds play had Kyle Filipowski inbounding and was meant to get Markkanen open as the first option. <\/p>\n
What ended up happening, with just 6.4 seconds left, was a little bit of panic, disorganization and a bad shot. <\/p>\n
But for young players who have not been in these situations very often, they need to go through it. The end-of-game ATOs and late-clock situations are ones that have to be lived and repeated in order to clean them up.<\/p>\n
In the more than 47 minutes that preceded those final moments, the Jazz played through a tough shooting night and some incredible shotmaking from both Monk and Zach LaVine. <\/p>\n
They were grittier defensively than we saw in many of their games last season and they clawed through the night to bring the game down to the wire.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately, there\u2019s two reasons why we didn\u2019t win the game. One is turnovers,\u201d Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. \u201cThe other reason why we lost the game is we didn\u2019t get a loose ball at the end. Those are things that we have to face. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnalytics wants to judge the full scope of a game, and I understand that, but competitors shouldn\u2019t. We lost the game because we couldn\u2019t get a loose ball. We did all the things in that possession needed to generate a miss. We had the ball in our hands, and we didn\u2019t come up with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
No matter how young and scrappy and energetic the Jazz are, they\u2019ll have to learn the hard way that in order to secure wins, it\u2019s the details \u2014 the little things \u2014 that end up mattering the most. <\/p>\n
Sometimes, it comes down to just one rebound.<\/p>\n
The Jazz are now 1-1 on the young season and will return home for games against the Phoenix Suns and Portland Trail Blazers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If the Utah Jazz had been able to secure the ball, they would be looking at a 2-0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[121,123,122,127,15965],"class_list":{"0":"post-22692","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sacramento","8":"tag-sacramento","9":"tag-sacramento-headlines","10":"tag-sacramento-news","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-utah-jazz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}