Given how good the Jazz looked and how utterly inept the Kings looked in preseason action, I was estimating that this would be a 50-point blowout in Utah’s favor.
It wasn’t.
What happened tonight? The Kings are bad. They have nothing but bad players on their roster, don’t @ me. The Jazz were coming off a playoff series win and a largely intact roster from last year. They managed to pull out the win in the end, but it should’ve been Grayson Allen time for most of the second half. Instead, he didn’t even get to play.
Joe “Sloppy Joe” Ingles was the reason the Jazz were where they were at the end of the first half, as he had a significant percentage of their points as well as a significant percentage of his career high total. He wasn’t the problem. Was Ricky Rubio the problem? Looking at the boxscore, yes he was. Donovan Mitchell was also probably the problem early on.
It’s only one game. One game out of 82, so there’s no reason to panic in Jazz-land quite yet. But imagine how bad it’s going to look when the Kings lose every game and this is the only one that was a single-digit difference.