After every game this year, I am going to do a quick recap, and give the Jazz a grade for their effort. I will touch on stats occasionally, but I will not try to prove my points through stats in every case. After watching nearly every game for almost twenty years, I, like a lot of you, feel that I have a pretty good understanding of professional basketball. I try to pay attention to the intangibles that go into winning games, and those intangibles are not always stats-related. For example, on paper Carlos Boozer can have a twenty and ten night, but he might also blow some key defensive assignments that cost the Jazz the game. If those defensive assignments look as if they were blown due to Carlos’ lack of hustle, it wasn’t an “A” game… I don’t care if he racks up forty and twenty.

Last nights game was decent, but again, the Jazz played three solid quarters and buckled in the fourth. My hat goes off to Houston; that team has been through more adversity in the last four or five years than any team in the league, yet they consistently play the game the way it was meant to be played. They played a full four quarters, and really controlled the pace of the game throughout. Battier is a beast, a guy who has made his living in the league the way Jerry Sloan did. He comes to work every night without much national acclaim and lays his guts out on the floor. Even at the tail end of the game with Houston up by nearly twenty, Battier was guarding DWill like his career depended on it. He was in a perfect defensive stance, with his palms up, and you could tell he was doing everything he could to frustrate Williams. The Jazz could learn a lot from the heart he displayed.

Houston is also a very small team, and the Jazz should have dominated the paint and the boards, but instead, it looked like Utah was intimidated and content to settle for fifteen foot J’s. Most of their jump-shots resulted in one-and-out failed opportunities. Houston’s bigs (or lack thereof) dominated the boards and pushed our guys around when it counted. Utah had a slight edge in the paint, but stopped going to the block in the fourth quarter.

The most disheartening thing for me was the apparent lack of focus the Jazz displayed throughout the game. For the second time in this young season, the Jazz blew it in the fourth and buckled when it counted. It wasn’t that their shots weren’t falling; it was that it appeared their hearts weren’t in it. As I have said before, it is not a matter of winning or losing the game so much as it’s a matter of playing your heart out and letting the chips fall where they may. They played better than they did against Denver, but still lacked the focus that they should have had to control the game from the get-go.

Final grade: C: I would have given them a B- if they would have stayed focused in the fourth and at least lost respectably.

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