Jazz losing streak

Diego Garay, Staff Writer

The Utah Jazz are on a 4 game losing streak they have lost to the Spurs, Rockets, Phoenix, and the Celtics 2 of those losses are understandable, but the other 2 we should have won. When I was watching the first 3 games I saw a team that was not trying to compete; we played very badly. I saw hope in yesterday’s Boston game. We were playing solid defense, but there was some times where Boston’s got through. The Jazz also missed some big shots but the thing people noticed the most is that they switched the starting line up a lot of times, first with Mike Conley starting and then they benched him. Then they put in Joe Ingles but soon they took Ingles out and put Royce O’Neale in.

I feel like the coaching staff is experimenting with the line up pretty far into the season. The spark that has been holding the team together is Donovan Mitchell. Last night he had 37 points but as I said they were missing some pretty open shots. This was the team’s combined percentage for a field goal; 19 of 71, or 26 percent. That is terrible. Almost 10 percent lower then the season average that we are shooting. We have a lot to fix if we want home court advantage in the playoffs.

The other games we didn’t look like a team out there. The game against the Spurs we were supposed to win easily and yet lost by 9 points. We had almost tripled their turnovers as they had 6 and we had 17. The Spurs know how to use that to their advantage. They tripled our steals with 12, where we had 4. let’s look at the game against the Suns they had more rebounds then us but we again had 19 turnovers and they only had 13 they are draft lottery bound and we are in the playoffs but yet they still blow us out by 20 points.

What we need to do to fix these errors is to lower our turnovers because turnovers lead to more fast break points.  On average I say we are losing by 10 points, and if we keep on having double digit turnovers, they score off of those. We are let opponents score 20 free points a game. I feel we need to stop messing around with the starting line up although I get it right now because Mike Conley has been injured and the coaches are trying to figure out what works best with the whole team. Personally I wouldn’t mind if we were to bench him until he gets used to the way we play because there are still 24 games in the season. Maybe it would take him 5 games to get back into the team’s playing style.