Game 82: Utah Jazz (48-33) @ Portland Trailblazers (48-33)

[pickIBL]

I remember a young Carmelo with Denver ,super talented but shoot Denver out of the playoffs with bad volume shooting ,Mitchell reminds me of Carmelo's early Denver days in the playoffs.

The year before they won 17 games. Young melo was the best thing to happen since the mutombo/english 80s and 90s.

Bzdelik wasnt much of a coach offensively. My memory says they couldnt score well at all from the perimeter. You could sag off andre miller and voshon leonard and joe barry just didnt cut it at the two.

The question always was who would come in and be the second option offensively and Denver failed to provide that. Young melo would abuse the little guys (like bruce bowen) on the block and freeze the bigs with killer jumper/first step on the perimeter.

If the nuggets kept the pace up, slid melo to the 4, and brought in wing/guard help it would have been interesting. But they spent on kenyon martin instead.

Carmelo did become a ball stopper, and now he's really going down hill.

Mitchell isnt a ball stopper and he's not lazy on D. The problem is the jazz need more offensive firepower.

And dear god their drafting outside of melo was... skita, rodney white, julius hodge...

I don't remember - did Melo played any defense at that time? Anubody remembers?

He could be solid when he focused in. Inconsistency with melo and jr was a big issue discussed. The AI mess was terrible.

[dr0welf]

I understand everyone being critcal of the Jazz after their performance last night. The ball was just not dropping. Some of this was caused by Portland being focused on taking Ingles out of the game by pressuring him and forcing someone else to make those plays. Great game plan by POR. We started to figure it out in the 4th but it was way too many missed shots and too late to make it up unless someone got really hot. Dame and McCollum were making their shots as well even with decent defense. They are great players and are going to have those types of games. I hope the Jazz spend some time now in the film room and figure out a couple options to get around this type of gameplan because OKC is going to be similar type of play. The iso's from OKC don't scare me much, but the ability for Westbrook to go off on us is big.

[dr0welf]

Also, man we have some solid players doing a great job. What they have done to even get us in the playoffs is quite impressive. Even if they suck it up in one of the biggest ones they still rocked it out of the park. Some days the ball doesn't fall and if DM hit his season average we win this game.

We have high expectations, but man they were playing hard last night and just couldn't play. Hopefully that gets the jitters out of playing in the playoffs so we can hit the court running on Sunday.

[eLo]

very good season shame that we end it this way, about our fire power i think its not the case, at least not main one, its more about shoot distribution, when it comes to tough one i would rather like Jingels to take it than Spida

[zero24gravity]

Ball simply wasn't dropping and Portland looked more energized. 3rd seed would have been amazing, but really, 5th is amazing as well considering where they were a couple months ago.

With the easy GS win, I know players got to rest, but there still was a flight & other travel stuff that wears a person down. I really think the NBA needs to not schedule any B2B on the last few games of the season. Not making excuses, but would have been nice to have a huge game like this not have one team playing 2 games in 2 nights, especially after traveling.