Jazz HC Will Hardy Calls Out Players for Being 'Stubborn'
On the heels of the Utah Jazz's 102-94 loss to the San Antonio Spurs, head coach Will Hardy was not happy with how his team comported itself. The Jazz went ice-cold in the second half, while the Spurs' defensive adjustments neutralized even the All-Star Lauri Markkanen.
Utah's offense, or lack thereof, became clanky and one-dimensional, as missed shot after shot bonked off the rim. In the postmortem following the game, Hardy credited the Spurs, but also pointed to a few factors behind Utah's loss to a team that had heretofore won just 14 games.
Mainly, though, Coach Hardy highlighted his team's stubbornness.
"I think tonight was a very poor example by us of playing team basketball," Hardy said post-game. "I think we were very stubborn as a team tonight. We just refused to adjust. The game kept telling us over and over again what to do and we sort of just refused. That’s a hard game for us."
Hardy was later pressed to elaborate on what he meant by the "game was telling us" how to adjust.
“Uh, pass. Yeah, pass," Hardy said. "Pass when you have the ball, and there’s multiple people that are wearing a jersey not like yours in front of you—you should throw it to somebody else."
He's right. The Jazz did not play a complementary brand of basketball, especially in the second half.
Perhaps that had much to do with Collin Sexton and Jordan Clarkson being absent. But the ball was not being distributed and the offense was sort of arrested as a result.
It didn't help that the Jazz also kept giving the ball away like it was Christmas Season.
"And we have 20 turnovers to prove that we just sort of refused to make the simple play over and over and over again," Hardy said. "We would have little pockets where we did and then we would just kind of go somewhere else. Like, I don’t think it’s because anybody’s selfish. I know the guys on our team and I know their approach every day. I know they want to win. But sometimes, you just have to snap out of it a little bit and recognize what’s working for us and what’s not.”
On a night where Utah's stubbornness resulted in just 35.3% of shots going in, fans can only hope that it wasn't a harbinger of how the coming stretch run will play out. I don't think so.
If the Jazz have any existential threat right now, it's not themselves so much as it is the injury bug. Because Utah lacks bench depth now, the margin for error relative to the injury bug is razor-thin.
Here's to hoping the Jazz get Sexton (three straight missed games) and Clarkson back for Friday night's game at the Oklahoma City Thunder.
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