A sloppy beginning to a new Jazz era

This article was published on February 14th, 2011 in the BYU Daily Universe.

In their first game since Jerry Sloan departed the sideline, the Utah Jazz lost to the Phoenix Suns 95-83 on Friday night in Salt Lake City.

The loss was an ugly one for Jazz fans, one the team hopes doesn’t establish the pace of the rest of new coach Ty Corbin’s tenure with Utah.

The game featured two completely different halves, and the Jazz chose the second half to underperform.


Utah came out swinging in the first quarter, scoring 31 points and racing out to a 15-point lead with 9:40 left in the second. The Jazz went into the locker room with a 12-point lead and a chance to break out of their three-game home losing streak.

The team looked as if new life had been given to them with Corbin on the sideline. But the new life didn’t last long.

Instead, Utah ended up pushing that losing streak to four with a dismal second half, managing just 27 points after the break in front of a sellout crowd of nearly 20,000. The 52.3 percent shooting effort of the first half turned into 32.4 percent shooting in the second half, with the two teams nearly switching roles at halftime.

Corbin admitted that the first half might have been about the players trying to make him look good in his first game as a head coach. He summarized his first game as head coach in one word, “Frustrating.”

To fill in the shoes of a hall-of-famer who coached the Jazz for 23 years and won over 1,000 games was a tall order for Corbin. And being the head coach three days after being third in command presented quite the change in perspective for Corbin.

“It’s different, I mean, every call is on you. You feel more responsible for the way the guys are playing. Your sense of urgency is a little bit more because you’re in that first chair,” Corbin said. “I felt the need more tonight than as assistant coach of doing something or saying something to make something happen.”

Jazz point guard Deron Williams, who has taken a lot of the blame for Sloan’s departure, admitted he heard a couple of boos in his direction at the start of the game. However, he reconfirmed after the game that he had nothing to do with the hall-of-fame coach leaving mid-season.

“I love our fans, I don’t want them to think I ran a hall-of-fame coach out,” Williams said. “I can’t get caught up in that anymore. I’ve said what I had to say. Coach Sloan said what he had to say. [Jazz owner] Greg Miller said what he had to say. [The fans] can choose who they want to believe.”

Utah played Friday’s game without any practices under its new coach and will have three days of rest to work with Corbin. The Jazz will look for revenge in Phoenix on Tuesday in their next game.