The Utah Jazz won (or lost, from a tanking lens) against the Washington Wizards, with a final score of 122-112<\/p>\n
Funny enough, Trae Young made his Wizards debut tonight. Conveniently, he was on a 20-minute restriction and didn\u2019t play in the final quarter of the game (but what about anti-competitive behavior and integrity of the game!) and finished with 12 points, six assists, and three turnovers. To be clear, I don\u2019t blame the Wizards for this \u2013 its something of a jab to the NBA to bring your player back from \u201cinjury\u201d and play him against a fellow tanking team on a minutes restriction.<\/p>\n
Regardless of this win\u2019s lottery sting, a shining takeaway from tonight was Ace Bailey\u2019s play. In the 10 games before tonight, Bailey has played the best basketball of his rookie season, averaging nearly 15 points and 6 rebounds a game. Tonight he reached a career high with 32 points from 12-19 shooting from the field, including 7-11 from three.<\/p>\n
Every player looks better when their shot is falling, of course. But it\u2019s especially clear how high his ceiling is when the combination of his athletic fluidity, length, size, and touch come together. The Jazz need this type of wing creation if they want to compete next season. Hopefully Bailey continues this trajectory.<\/p>\n
Notably, Isaiah Collier, who has also improved his play as of late (despite possessing the ball nearly 50% of the time when he\u2019s on the court!), finished with 27 points and 11 assists. I can imagine that next year, Collier will not have the ball so much when all of Utah\u2019s weapons return. But it\u2019s important he gets opportunities to run the offense \u2013 both Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. rely on their guards to set them up for good looks.<\/p>\n
The Jazz continue their roadtrip and face off against the Milwaukee Bucks on Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Utah Jazz won (or lost, from a tanking lens) against the Washington Wizards, with a final score…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3785],"tags":[7,423,6,422,427,8572,3972],"class_list":["post-642234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-utah-jazz","tag-basketball","tag-jazz","tag-nba","tag-utah","tag-utah-jazz","tag-utah-jazz-game-coverage","tag-utahjazz"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116179914413970962","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}