NEW ORLEANS — Sometimes the other team is going to shoot better. That’s going to happen. The NBA is, after all, a make-or-miss league. It’s understandable to get beaten by a team that shoots 50% from 3-point land.
But that doesn’t really capture why the Utah Jazz were blown out by the New Orleans Pelicans 153-124 on Tuesday night.
The real reason? The Jazz just didn’t play hard enough.
A good way to keep a team from shooting 50% from 3 is to not let it get easy, open looks early on and get into a rhythm. Defense is about effort. But let’s get away from the arc.
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The Jazz’s execution wasn’t perfect on Tuesday night, but it’s not like they were sloppy with the ball. They only committed eight turnovers for the entire game. That’s really good.
What’s not good is that the Pelicans still managed to score 35 fast break points. Since they scored just nine points off the Jazz’s turnovers, that means that 26 transition points came off dead balls and makes.
There’s no way around it. Not getting back on defense is purely about effort.
“The reality of tonight’s game and the reality of the last three games … is we’re just not playing hard enough,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said.
“They had 65 points between second chance and transition, and to give up 35 points in transition on a night where we only had eight turnovers is not very good.”
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Everybody knows Hardy’s mantra — play hard and pass. Throw everything else out the window and Hardy would still be happy if he felt like the Jazz were at least playing hard and sharing the ball.
That makes the last three games — losses to the Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets and Pelicans — a bit harder to live with considering they’ve been getting beaten in the open floor, on rebounds and because of a lack of effort when they need it most.
Hardy is not unrealistic in his expectations. He knows that January is rough and can feel like a slog in the NBA. The midway point of the 82-game grind sets in and starts to wear on bodies and minds.
That being said, the Jazz are not the only team dealing with this. There are 29 other teams playing through the same schedule, and they certainly don’t care if the Jazz are tired.
But it’s not even the physicality of the schedule that mounts in the NBA. It’s the mental fatigue that is most dangerous.
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“The initial part of the season has passed, everybody’s a little bit banged up, rumors start to swirl in the media about what’s going to happen with the team and the trade deadline and everything, everyone’s names are being thrown around,” Hardy said.
“Your mind can drift this time of year. I’m always going to try to be very aware of the fact that these guys are human beings and those things are natural.”
Natural or not, there has to be an answer. After all, the best players in the league are able to put aside how they’re feeling, physically and mentally, from tipoff to final buzzer, in order to impact winning for their team.
“There’s plenty of days where I would prefer to rest,” Hardy said, “but that’s not what this job is. This is an everyday business.
“We’ve got to find a way to crank up the gas. Sometimes you’ve got to create an alter ego. You’ve got to just figure out a way to become a crazy person with your hair on fire for two and a half hours, and then you can go back to being tired.”
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That’s not something that Hardy is worried about the Jazz lacking. He truly believes his team will find another gear, as it was able to over the last few weeks. But the team does need a bit of a reality check and to own the fact that it isn’t playing up to its potential right now.
Like many utilities in the Trump era, Rocky Mountain Power is pulling back on its renewable energy plans. But more than a dozen Utah communities are taking matters into their own hands.
About 300,000 homes and businesses will soon be part of a novel, bottom-up program to bring new clean power to the state’s fossil-fuel-heavy grid. The Utah Renewable Communities initiative allows city and county governments to offset their electricity use with 100 percent renewable power, backed by a $4 monthly bill surcharge.
“There’s no other program available to our residents that is this affordable or this impactful to Midvale’s environmental and economic future,” said Dustin Gettel, mayor of the Salt Lake City suburb of Midvale.
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Midvale is set to vote Tuesday on whether to join 15 other communities that have signed up ahead of an enrollment deadline next week. Three other eligible communities have opted out, although one may reconsider.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and The Salt Lake Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Utah.
A sprawling, 40,000-acre data center planned for northern Utah has stirred up controversy across the state over the past month, partly because of the pollution it’s expected to contribute to a region that already struggles with smog.
Officials with the quasi-governmental Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, which approved the project and created tax incentives to spur its development, have become de facto cheerleaders for the data center campus, called the Stratos Project. They say Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian TV personality and the main backer of Stratos, specifically selected a remote valley north of the Great Salt Lake because a gas pipeline runs through it.
The plant that will generate electricity for the data complex would be powered “100 percent off the Ruby Pipeline,” a MIDA official said in April.
But after weeks of protests, reams of comments against the project, and disgruntled Utahns digging into state leaders’ finances and family businesses, the state’s Republican governor has now asserted the project will “never” be solely powered by natural gas.
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“That’s never going to happen,” Governor Spencer Cox told The Salt Lake Tribune last week. “The very first phase will be natural gas, but the other phases should not be. They should be nuclear, and they should be geothermal, and solar and other technology.”
The proposed Stratos Project is light on details so far. O’Leary has said that at full build, it will be one of the biggest data centers in the world, as large as Washington, D.C. Scientists, environmental advocates and some residents have raised alarms about the impact that the project — and the possibility of a massive natural gas plant to power it — could have on air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and water supplies near the shrinking Great Salt Lake.
According to some estimates, a 9-gigawatt power plant entirely powered by natural gas could raise Utah’s carbon emissions by 64 percent. Although it’s still unclear how much water the facility would need, the project’s developers have said they’re working to secure 13,000 acre-feet in Hansel Valley and the surrounding area, which is mostly agricultural. That’s enough water to meet the needs of more than 20,000 households in Utah.
The north end of the Great Salt Lake and Hansel Valley, the planned site for the Stratos Project.
Trent Nelson / The Salt Lake Tribune
Opposition to the proposal has been intense. A water right filed to support the data center and power plant received nearly 4,000 letters of protest this month. Opponents held a rally at Utah’s Capitol last week and delivered a letter to Cox with more than 6,000 signatures urging him to take “binding action” to preserve the Great Salt Lake instead of issuing platitudes over social media.
During a news conference on Wednesday announcing a geothermal partnership with the neighboring states of Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, Cox acknowledged problems with the rollout of the Stratos Project in Box Elder County, saying future decisions like it should involve his office and elected representatives.
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“There’s no question, the process was not good,” Cox told reporters. “It’s something I’ve worried about for a long time with that entity that made that decision.”
Cox appeared to be referring to MIDA, a development authority ostensibly meant to fund projects to support the military. Its biggest developments in recent years, however, include a hotel at the Deer Valley luxury ski resort and a swanky ski village. MIDA officials and other Stratos supporters have called the project a matter of national security.
“That was not a decision that was made by me or the Legislature,” Cox said. “In the future, those are decisions that should be made by us, so that we can do these types of things ahead of time to make sure people understand what’s actually happening out there. That did not happen, and it should happen.”
When he made his comments, Cox was hosting the final workshop in his “Energy Superabundance” initiative as chair of the Western Governors Association, part of a broader push that complements his “Operation Gigawatt” goal to more than double Utah’s energy production over the next decade.
Electricity use across the country has held relatively steady for decades, but a surge in demand for artificial intelligence computing and data centers is putting a strain on the electric grid. That’s left Western states scrambling to build new energy supplies.
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At the same time, public skepticism toward large data center developments appears to be growing, particularly over concerns involving water use, noise, energy costs, and pollution.
“It feels like the future is here,” Cox said during his opening remarks at the workshop. “It’s coming quicker than people asked for, and there are so many amazing things that can come from that future, and some pretty awful ones as well.”
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Cox has also pushed for faster permitting timelines for large energy and infrastructure projects, arguing that environmental review processes often take too long. “This whole idea of being rushed — I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done,” he said in April. “It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer. It absolutely does not.”
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Last week, Cox struck a more measured tone as criticism of the project continued to mount. “One of the things people are worried about, and rightfully so, is air quality,” he said in a brief interview as he left the workshop. “That’s a yearlong [permitting] process. … We’re not speeding those up. Those are really important, and we want to make sure that things are done the right way.”
Earlier this month, O’Leary, who was featured on the reality show “Shark Tank,” also seemed to suggest that renewables could help power the Stratos Project. He described other technological advances — such as turbines cooled with air rather than water — before turning to the natural gas power causing a stir.
“We can also put a percentage of the power generation through solar, wind, and batteries, because the battery technology is 10x more efficient than it was just five years ago,” O’Leary posted on X on May 5. “So that’s very helpful, because it makes the cost of energy lower.”
But he stopped short of fully endorsing renewables for his project.
Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and analyst with Utah Clean Energy, calculated that a 9-gigawatt natural gas power plant will produce around 35 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. By comparison, the entire state of Utah generates 55 million metric tons annually, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. So the Stratos Project could raise Utah’s emissions by about 64 percent.
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“That’s massive,” Mitchell said. But it could be even more, because his estimate didn’t account for “any additional methane leakage” from piping and using the natural gas, he said.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25245321/AP24024079031152__1_.jpg "What happened in New Orleans? The Utah Jazz didn’t play hard enough. Period.")
