3-point shots: Spurs bomb Jazz
Well, at least the Jazz won’t get blown out on the road in 2011 again. Three more observations from Saturday’s ugly 104-89 loss in San Antonio:
POINT 1: The first three rules of real-estate success: location, location and – you guessed it – location. Likewise, the keys to success (or struggles) for the Jazz’s revamped defense are rotation, rotation and, yep, rotation.
Communication goes right with those rotation efforts, newcomer Josh Howard said Saturday night. And when those rotations don’t work properly, well, opposing teams shoot 8-for-10 from 3-point range in the first half while blowing games open early.
Manu Ginobili ended up with two wide-open 3-point shots — both swishes, go figure — because of Utah’s rotation woes in the pivotal second quarter.
“Utah usually collapses the paint and they shift a lot,” said Ginobili after his 23-point outing. “It’s one of those games that you start with the right foot and the shot went in.”
Interestingly, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich wasn’t all that enthralled with his team relying on outside shots. San Antonio went 10-for-16 from long range (compared to 2-for-16 for Utah).
“We were really fortunate in the first half to get that lead and it was mainly because of threes,” Popovich said after his 800th win. “We didn’t do anything that well, paint-wise or inside-out-wise. We just lived on the perimeter. We did that in Houston and lost by 20. We need to have a little bit more varied game, so to speak.”
POINT 2: The Jazz can shoot. It hasn’t seemed like that in blowouts to the Lakers (32 percent) and the Spurs (37 percent), but they really can make buckets. And they will eventually, one would assume with that one being Popovich.
“I thought we played pretty solid defense. They had a bad night shooting also,” he said. “They’re a better shooting team than what they displayed tonight, so we were fortunate in that regard.”
Gordon Hayward (1-for-9), Raja Bell (0-for-3), Devin Harris (2-for-8), Earl Watson (2-for-9) and Enes Kanter (2-for-7) were particularly off in the AT&T Center.
POINT 3: The Jazz finished with a very Jazz-unlike 11 assists. Yes, for the game. Two different Utah teams have dished out 15 assists in one quarter alone (in 1987 and ’88), so helping teammates score on less than a dozen buckets is stunning.
Starting point guard Devin Harris only finished with three assists. Starters Raja Bell and Al Jefferson and backup playmakers Earl Watson (22 minutes) and Jamaal Tinsley (three minutes) did not have a single dime among them.
It has been worse. The Jazz only dished out a record-low seven assists in two games: once in 1975, then again in 2004.