Season Opener: Utah Jazz @ Denver Nuggets

[HammerDunk]

Winning this game is your consolation prize for being able to whine endlessly for 6 months about not having your coach in round one of the playoffs and losing to the Jazz. Now STFU Nuggets fans...

[Farsider322]

It was the first game. Lets not get to edown on this team. They looked to me like they were still working on becoming a team. Missing passes, turnovers, poor offense.....give em time to gell. Same thing happened to Miami the other night. Teams need time to get used to each other. I think iots going to take 10-15 games to get all the new players on the same page.

BTW, I hate the new rules.. Its one thing to T people up for direspecting officals, but players should be allowed emotions to a bad call. If they continue to complain ... T em up.

[seejaydeja]

Well, time to pack up and grab one from the suns. All the boys needed tonight was a little bit of motivation and I'm sure the rabid fan base awaiting them at the ESA shall suffice. Go get em!

[gojazzmjsucks]

Awful effort!I listened to a video of Sloan earlier talking about practice a couple days ago and he said they played soft and things did not go well.Looks like he didn't do much to correct that. It is on the players, but i would like to see sloan break out of his old let the players get themselves out of it.If this continues in practice and continues to show up in games then i think we should bench a key player. Just to show that this effort will not be exceptable.

Ealier with my post i just was not happy and had nothing good to say, however i will continue to compliment J Evans.Showed effort from beginning to end and played great!

I agree with what some people said earlier with Hayward on the glass was awsome but his offense was sh**. D-will should have tried to take over a little bit in the beginning just to jump start the team but he too looked lost. This team has alot of new pieces and our offense has alot to do with knowing where the other person is on the court.they don't know that yet.

Final statement our defense is no better actually quite worse. Jefferson needs to start getting nasty.He played like the nice guy you meet for coffee in the morning.I want my Power Foward/Center to take the West by storm not turn the ball over and miss lay-ups. We have always been pretenders on the road lets hope we still kick ass at home!Salt Lake get ready we need all the help we can get!

[HolyToledo]

Truth be told the Jazz would have loss to anyone in the league tonight as they simply sucked. The nuggets played average at best so this Karl saved the day over Dantley is idiotic. SImply a nervous, not too bright, Jefferson and Ak-47, also not too bright, played poorly and they lost the game more than anyone with their poor play offensively and defensively. CJ, also not the smartest player ever, sucked it up big time. You cant have that many players play that terrible.

[carrottop12]

Couple of things.

1. Al Jefferson needs to shoot about 3 times as much as he did. 6 shots is ridiculous, he can't be timid if the Jazz expect to have success.

2. AK needs to play a lot better. Simply no excuse for his play tonight, he was flat out awful.

3. We have to make easy baskets, we missed so many gimmies it was awful.

4. CJ has to play more than 13 minutes. We need 30 good minutes a game out of CJ this year.

Do those things we'll be fine.

The positives: The Rookies played pretty well for their first games, if we can get production similar to that I think the Jazz would be very happy. Love Haywards rebounding and Evans is just a stud.

[jazzfan1971]

Well, I guess lowered expectations are in order. That was one of the most pathetic games I've seen by the Jazz.

And what's up with Deron? Seems like he's not even trying to put pressure on the defense.

[carrottop12]

Yeah, Deron played really poorly. He was struggling and I think everyone else reacted poorly to it.

[erudite23]

Just a case of sloppy ball skills tonight. Missed shots that we would normally make and a whole **** ton of turnovers of every shape and size. Its easy to say that its just a case of early season jitters and the team not being on the same page yet...but you have to hope that its not something deeper. I, for one, didn't see a single high pick and roll between Deron and Al in the entire first half. That is deeply, deeply concerning to me.

Best thing about the NBA, though, is that you get to turn around and play another one the next night. We'll see how it goes from here.

[toyguc]

memo haters..where are you ????????

[outerspacefella]

Team looked rusty in preseason finale @Nuggets... nice tribute to Coach Karl to hand'em this one... who cares about preseason...

Hopefully they're ready for season's opener tonight vs Suns...

[Jazzfan Bayamon]

I think the whistle took our team out of the game early and they didn't know how to respond. Our philosofy is based on playing phisical, setting phisical screens, lots of body movement and contact on hard cuts, etc. Granted, our energy was lacking to begin with, when that happened, our new guys were like: "well, what do I do?" and couldn't go on from there. They were timid and scared, and I think that had to do with the countless fouls that were called (on both ends, but I think it affected our offense more), and when our offense falls, the defensive intesity follows. I hope our (new) guys didn't like the taste of this beating and take it towards the rest of the year.

[outerspacefella]

Ain't has anything to do with Jazz horrid, disrespectful performance... but if the refs are going to call games the way they did last night @DEN... well... they're just going to ruin the game of basketball...

[UTJazzFan_Echo1]

I don't see why everyone is trying to shovel some of the blame onto the refs, they weren't that bad. Sure, the tech on Elson was....questionable but other than that I really didn't have a huge problem with them.

We could have gotten every call in the game and we still would have lost by double digits with how pathetic of an effort we gave out there.

Here is my player by player breakdown...
Ak- Horrid. Looked like his old terrible self.
Jefferson- Horrid. Looked like a rookie.
Deron- Showed some good but it was far too late by the time he did. Terrible leadership.
CJ- Bad. Just sucked at everything.
Bell- One of the only good looking players on the floor.
Fes- Meh.
Price- Meh.
Watson- Solid.
Elson- Meh.
Evans- Good, excited to see how he plays this season. Good energy.
Hayward- Solid, had some rookie mistakes but looked a lot better than I expected him to when he first came in. Offense wasn't there.

So in closing...we had two players play good (one being a rookie, the other an old man) two players play solid (one rookie, one new guy) and one guy who showed up late and brought no leadership (oh and he is our supposedly leader) everyone else was a non-factor, bad or worse. Not going to win many games when your playing like that...

[countrybama24]

I think everyone needs to calm down.

We're integrating some 6 new players into a really difficult offensive system. The result? More turnovers than assists. That's not gonna continue for very long, no matter what the "effort" level has been in practice or in the first game.

Our offense will clearly get much better. The good news, we defended them better (by fg%) than at any point in last years regular season, and better than all but 2 playoff games. They shot 43.8%, with much better offensive additions in Al Harrington and Aaron Afflalo, who is much better offensively (and getting JR's touches). Sure they went to the line all-day, but thats pretty much the norm in Jazz-Nug games.

And its not like Deron just forgot how to **** the nuggets up. Consider how motivated they were compared to us...

-Home Game
-Their coach who could have died is back
-They were bitter about the playoffs all summer
-Pissed about melo stuff
-The team is trying to win back Melo (who by some accounts is wavering), its do or die
-For every single player that game was personal. For 6 of our players, it wasn't (they also have less experience vs. the nuggets, whereas our offensive system stays the same).

Is it any surprise they came out way more aggressive than us? If the heat-celtics game taught us anything, it was that teams that play for a long time together are vastly better in Game 1 than a newly constructed team. That, and the cletics played so hard (at home, vs a team with a target on their back and a conference rival), that they lost to the cavaliers last night. Not to mention, we clearly were missing a lot of looks that we normally knock down.

Relax. Sure, the effort level wasn't great. Our team isn't perfect. I have a lot of confidence in our work ethic over the course of the season and, more importantly, the playoffs.

[countrybama24]

Here is question how was Evans not a high scorer in college? It seems like he should have scored at will versus college players.

Because college is a lot slower paced, you can get away with a lot more on defense which lets small but stronger players push tall skinny dudes around (and lets hayward look like luc mbah moute on d), there is less movement off the ball, your point guard play is much worse, the spacing is worse (every team packs the paint) and you can get screwed on role or minutes by your coach (see tubby smith, who had rondo on walking the ball up every play).

[outerspacefella]

Of course the refs did nothing to the Jazz; Jazzmen shooted themselves.

That said, the way the game was officiated was as horrid as Jazz performance. They never allowed the game to flow. They whistled both ways a miriad of no touchs, they almost didn't allow screens... they whistled the mere presence behind a rebounder and the mere jump to defend any man attacking the basket... Horrid, game killer officiating... and our game was't the only one officiated that way...

[ColdBlue]

What a letdown after all the anticipation. I guess it can't get any worse than that.

[GP]

Chill guys, a lot of people here have been over hyping the team for the past 2 months and now we are seeing the reality. This is sort of what I expected, the only surprise was how bad Jefferson looked. I knew our defense wouldn't be improved greatly, but he looked very lost out there on offense. I think he'll obviously play better, but to look as bad as the rookies who are playing their first NBA game is a little sad.

[dr0welf]

a great game and effort tonight and this poor performance will be written off as first game nerves.... and team expectations will be right back up where they were