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SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Jazz are the worst team in the West, the Oklahoma City Thunder are the best, but that doesn't mean the Jazz would roll over.
In the Jazz's 112-101 victory over the Thunder, they showed why they don't just give up, during this game or through this season.
The Jazz probably won't find themselves up by 20 points very often, but early in the third quarter the Jazz had the Thunder on the ropes, up 84-60. The Jazz looked like they were dominant against one of the top teams, starting the quarter on a 23-13 run.
The Thunder started to close the gap during the end of the third and had momentum on their side going into the fourth. The Jazz won the first three quarters and were up by 16 to start the fourth, but the Thunder ended the third on a 14-6 run and the game started getting chippy.
“Give them a lot of credit, they got down, I think we had a 20 or 21-point lead, in that third quarter and they got aggressive on both ends of the floor,” coach Tyrone Corbin said. “They made a run at us. It's a great thing for our young group of guys to weather the storm and be able to finish this game out with a win.”
Kevin Durant started to take the game over early in the fourth. He ended the night with 48 points and started getting calls to go his way by getting into the heads of Jazz players. Marvin Williams guarded him for most of the game, forcing him to take 34 shots to get his 48 points, although Williams eventually fouled out.
The momentum was slowly sliding toward the Thunder as they chipped the lead from 16 to 10 and to five with 4:50 left.
Most expected the Jazz to be a front-runner for the top pick in the draft to grab one of the great players expected to come out. Over the first 15 games, the Jazz lost any game where opponents challenged them late. They would play well until they got figuratively hit in the mouth, and they wouldn't be able to recover.
However, this group has started to believe it is going to win games and get stops. While the outside world might have thought the Jazz were going to fold and quit, the Jazz team didn't.
“Never thought that,” Richard Jefferson said. “I can only speak for myself and guys in the locker room that had conversations, but for the most part we've always believed. You don't just magically turn the corner 20 games into the season. We started one and whatever we were. Guys stayed focused and we believed in the system.”
A lot of the Jazz's success through this year has been because of either Trey Burke or Gordon Hayward in any given game. Against the Thunder it was G-Time.
Hayward scored a career-high 34 points and the last 17 for the Jazz to close out the game. He had been panned as a guy who had to defer in closing situations.
“I was in the zone a little bit tonight,” Hayward said.
He finished shooting 13-16 with 11 rebounds and seven assists. In the zone is being modest for the young leader on the team, but he shows off his ability to close a game, and the team followed by playing tough, even if he carried the scoring load.
“We said let's get a stop here, and we had some timely stops and some timely scores,” Hayward said. ”I don't think earlier in the season we would have been able to do that.”
The Jazz learned how to beat bad teams by a little. Out of 12 wins, the Jazz have beaten two teams with winning records, one is .500, and all but four wins are by six or fewer points.
This focus of this season might be shifting. To start, it was all about young players getting time and the Jazz being terrible. Now it is about the Jazz learning how to win games from behind and with the lead and to establish an identity to carry on through the coming years.
