Why the Jazz’s loss to the Mavericks was Will Hardy’s favorite game of the season

It probably feels counterintuitive for an NBA head coach to say that a 106-94 loss was his favorite game of the season, especially one in which his team shot 9-of-39 (23.1%) from 3-point range and 34-of-95 (35.8%) overall.
But the poor shooting performance was precisely one of the reasons that Utah Jazz head coach Will Hardy was so pleased with how his team carried itself on Saturday night at the Delta Center against the Dallas Mavericks.
“Probably my favorite game of the year,” Hardy said after the Jazz loss. “We couldn’t throw the ball in the ocean. We had a lot of people who got good looks and couldn’t make them…But the competitiveness of the team never waned.
“I think we guarded well enough to win the game. We competed well enough to win the game. We just didn’t shoot well enough to win the game.”
Hardy has spent a lot of time this season talking to his players about body language, effort and competitiveness, and he felt that Saturday’s game was a representation of what he’s been preaching.
The goal is to get the Jazz players — particularly the young ones — to move on quickly from mistakes, to brush off moments of embarrassment and still put pressure on the opposing team, even if they are clearly outmatched.
Those are habits that will serve the players well in the future, no matter what team they are on and no matter how well that team is playing.
On Saturday, the Jazz clearly didn’t shoot the ball well, but they only committed 15 turnovers (well below their season average) and allowed just nine points off those turnovers.
The transition defense was much better than it has been in many instances this season, and even as the clock neared the final buzzer, players had their heads up and were guarding every possession.
“Transition defense in the NBA is hard because it takes effort and then it takes communication and problem solving,” Hardy said. “The team has had moments where we’ve given great effort and we haven’t talked great and haven’t problem solved great, so putting those three things together tonight is a good step for us.”
The Jazz don’t have a roster that is currently built to win and they know that they are going to be on a losing side of a lot of games, so Hardy has a hard job of teaching winning habits when losses will be the norm for the young squad.
What Hardy is hoping is that the players will see, especially with games like Saturday’s loss, that shot variance is a huge part of the NBA and that if they play hard and give effort despite everything that’s going on around them, they could be on the right side of things when their opponent is having a rough shooting night and it’s the little things, the effort plays, that often matter in winning.
“Tonight’s a perfect example of there’s a difference between playing bad and shooting bad,” Hardy said. “Yes, there’s turnovers from time to time, yes, there’s a botched coverage here and there, or poor recognition of personnel from time to time, but those things are all kind of built in to what you expect in an NBA game. But if the competitiveness, the togetherness, the energy, the fight is at that level every night, there’s a lot of good things ahead in Utah.”