NEW YORK — This certainly isn’t how the Utah Jazz wanted the trip to go. A 2-4 record with back-to-back losses at the end is less than ideal. But here we are.
It was the longest road trip of the season — a six-game expedition through Houston, New Orleans, Washington, Charlotte, Brooklyn and New York — and it was illuminating in both good and bad ways.
Here are my biggest takeaways from the trip:
Good, bad and ugly
There’s the Utah Jazz team that went on a tear through late December and early January, winning 15 out of 19 games. There’s the Jazz team that played in those losses and few in prior to that run where they lost their way a little but still showed some fight despite a few glaring mistakes. Then there’s the Jazz we’ve seen the last few days.
When the Jazz are good they look like world beaters made up of misfits and castoffs who are scrappy and quick and full of spunk. They’re the experimental group led by a young head coach who are taking the NBA world by storm.
But that’s contrasted so incredibly when they play the way they did on this road trip. Wins over the Charlotte Hornets and Washington Wizards were expected and frankly any other outcome would have been a catastrophe. But the way that they’ve lost the other four games of this six-game trip have been mystifying.
Jazz head coach Will Hardy said that this team is not as good as people were saying during that run that started in December and that the Jazz aren’t as bad as their early-season record indicated. And that’s fair. It makes a lot of sense for this team to be exactly what their record indicates.
But to explain the disjointed, effortless, confused style we’ve seen the last few days is not as simple.
This could be a really important point of the season for the Jazz. When they return home, they need to be able to regroup and find what it was that made them look like a team because right now they look like a bunch of guys who aren’t sure what they’re supposed to be doing.
