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Sarah Todd
Guest
Utah Jazz’s Donovan Mitchell (45) drives past Brooklyn Nets’ Caris LeVert (22) and DeAndre Jordan during the second half of an NBA basketball game Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2021, in New York. | Frank Franklin II, Associated Press
The Brooklyn Nets had not been playing the way they’d hoped through seven games. They’d lost four of their last five games and were desperate to turn things around on Tuesday night against the Utah Jazz.
In an attempt to shake things up, Jarret Allen, Jeff Green and Bruce Brown got their first starts of the season, creating a lineup that hasn’t played a single minute going back to training camp.
Whether it was the lineup changes, the ferocity of Kyrie Irving or just the desperation to break a slump, the Nets came out as a team ready to fight.
“We were struggling,” Nets head coach Steve Nash said of their recent stretch. “I think we’re going to continue experimenting. We have to find out who we, what we are and where we need to improve, and sometimes just giving guys different opportunities at different times can mix things up.”
The Jazz were already down by 21 points at the 2:50 mark of the first quarter. A starting lineup that has had plenty of time playing together and is familiar with each other couldn’t seem to stop the bleeding or to make a run of their own.
The Nets lead ballooned to as much as 34 points, and the Jazz never were able to get even within striking distance. Even so, Quin Snyder barely reached into his bench for answers.
At halftime the Jazz’s eight main rotational players (Donovan Mitchell, Rudy Gobert, Mike Conley, Royce O’Neale, Bojan Bogdanovic, Joe Ingles, Jordan Clarkson and Derrick Favors) were only aided by 2 minutes, 16 seconds of Georges Niang.
Even in the third quarter, when it was clear that the Jazz were not going to make a comeback, Snyder only went as far as bringing in Miye Oni for 3 minutes, 41 seconds.
By that point, the Jazz had already proven that they weren’t ready for the Nets, they weren’t ready to play defense, really they weren’t ready to play at all.
It wasn’t until the 7:31 mark of the fourth quarter, when Snyder decided to throw in the towel and wave the white flag, that any of the other reserves saw the floor.
On a night early in the season, on the first night of a back-to-back set, when it was clear the Jazz weren’t making a dent in the Nets’ lead, why wasn’t Shaquille Harrison thrown in for a few minutes to see if he could help contain Kyrie Irving? Why wasn’t there any variation away from the norm?
On the current seven-game road trip, and even throughout this truncated season, time for practice is limited or nonexistent. It’s possible that Snyder, in the absence of practice days prefers to use these early games in the season for his main rotational players to get more run on the floor together.
When asked after the game on Tuesday whether limited practice forced Snyder to go with his core rotation rather than reaching further down the bench, he didn’t offer much insight.
“You’d like to have different opportunities to get those guys some opportunity but that wasn’t the case tonight,” he said.
On one hand there is certainly an argument for allowing players to figure things out, for the main rotational players to get as much time on the court as they can in a shortened season.
On the other hand, if any of those rotational players have to miss games, the ones who step in to fill in the gaps are going to have very limited experience outside of mop-up minutes, which is what they played on Tuesday.
For now, it seems as if the Jazz will be operating on a nightly basis with a main rotation of eight players and they’ll have to figure things out and make it work, even when they have no control of a game.
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