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SALT LAKE CITY — There were a few stages of booing on Thursday night from the fans that filled Vivint Arena during Utah’s 114-97 loss to Philadelphia.
First, there were hearty boos for Ben Simmons — the foe of Donovan Mitchell’s rookie campaign last season. Simmons was greeted by a chorus of heckling when he was announced, and then each time he touched the ball during the early stages of the game.
But those eventually petered out because the Utah faithful found a new enemy: the officials. After a series of unpopular calls in the third quarter, the fans blasted the refs with the juvenile, but ever popular, “Refs, you suck!” chant.
The final stage came early in the fourth quarter after Philadelphia once again slashed the Utah defense for an easy bucket to put them up by 21 points. It wasn’t the whole arena, but the boo-birds came out again, and this time the boos were directed at their own team.
There wasn’t much for the sold-out crowd to be happy about. Philadelphia (23-13) simply blasted Utah (17-19) in front of a national TV audience.
It was a game that had a couple of intriguing personal matchups. There was the continuation of the rivalry between Donovan Mitchell and Ben Simmons after last year’s Rookie of the Year race. And two of the league’s best big men in Rudy Gobert and Joel Embiid were going to toe-to-toe.
Those matchups aren't too exciting when the game ends up lopsided, though. And things got pretty lopsided on Thursday.
Utah had one of the league's top defenses over the last month, but that defense was nowhere to be found against the Sixers.
That much was clear from nearly the beginning. Early on in the game, Simmons found Jimmy Butler for an alley-oop dunk against a set Utah defense. That wasn't just a one-time slip, either: Butler got free time and time again for easy backdoor cuts. That was just one of many problems for the Jazz's defense.
"Usually when we make a mistake, we cover it up quick,” Gobert said. “It always happens, and we react and adjust. Tonight I feel like we weren’t getting to the next play: whether it was a backdoor, whether it was a turnover, we were kind of stuck in the past.”
Once Philadelphia got rolling, Utah didn’t have an answer. The Sixers scored 73 points between the second and third quarters to blow the game open.
JJ Redick scored 24 points, Embiid had 23 and grabbed 15 rebounds, Butler got 19 points, and Simmons ended with a triple-double of 13 points, 14 rebounds, and 12 assists.
And with the Jazz struggling to shoot, (Utah shot 38.4 percent from the field), they couldn’t keep up with the Sixers’ offensive eruption.
Mitchell led the Jazz with 23 points on 10-for 20 shooting, and Gobert finished with 17 points and 15 rebounds. Dante Exum continued his strong play of late by scoring 20 points in 21 minutes off the bench. Kyle Korver was the only other Jazz player in double figures, finishing with 11.
“Our offense affected our defense tonight,” Mitchell said. “They had many transition opportunities and many transition buckets. We didn’t communicate the way we wanted to. That can happen from time to time, but it can’t happen multiple quarters. If it happens multiple quarters, you have to be able to bounce back.”
The Jazz looked like the team that struggled for much of November, not the squad that had looked to turn a corner over the last couple weeks. And some of the same issues that were present in the early season showed up once again. The Jazz struggled with communicating on defense, allowing for easy Philadelphia buckets and getting lost on multiple possessions. And they were just 11-for-35 from 3-point range.
But, if there is a positive, they know what needs to be done to fix it.
“The past seven or eight games we have been playing how we want to," Mitchell said. "Tonight was just a slip and we have to fix it. There’s nothing to really overreact to today. The loss hurts, but we have another one on Saturday and we have to be ready for that. We know exactly what it was. We just have to go out there and fix it for Saturday.”
