SALT LAKE CITY _ An eighth-grade game broke out Wednesday night in Utah, although there may be eighth-graders who would take offense to that.
By the time the Mavericks started acting their age, it was too late to avoid their fourth consecutive loss to start the season.
The Mavericks needed a major hot-shooting streak just to reach 33 points in the first half, and the amazing thing was that they were still in the game.
They would fall behind by 20 in the third quarter, rally behind Dirk Nowitzki and Harrison Barnes, but didn't have enough left at the end as the Utah Jazz collected a 97-81 victory. They followed up their thorough victory in San Antonio Tuesday with a similarly comprehensive take-down of the Mavericks.
To know everything you need about the way the Mavericks lost to the Jazz, consider that they finally scored on four consecutive possessions late in the third quarter.
And managed to lose that stretch of the game by two points. The Jazz's lead went from 53-38 to 64-47. On the rare occasion when the Mavericks' offense worked, the Jazz's was even better with Rodney Hood canning two 3-pointers and Dante Exum lofting in another.
And then the Mavericks got worse news when they called timeout. The referees reviewed an earlier 3-pointer by Nowitzki. It was ruled that the shot came a fraction of a second after the shot clock had expired. And so, the 17-point deficit became 64-44.
Interestingly, sometimes the craziest things can spark an NBA team _ like taking three points off the board.
For the final three minutes of the third quarter, they went on a 15-2 blitz, capped with a Deron Williams 3-pointer just before the buzzer, to chop the Utah lead to 66-59.
They had revived themselves off of the critical list.
When the Mavericks scored the first four points of the fourth quarter, they were within three. They would get no closer as the Jazz leaned on point guard George Hill. His 3-pointer with 7:15 to go made it 78-69.
Just a few hours earlier, coach Rick Carlisle had been talking about how hard it is to play from behind in the NBA. Yet they spent the whole night doing so again, just as they have through most of the first four games.
Nobody wants to be 0-4. Heck, nobody wanted to be 0-3, either, but the Mavericks came to Utah hoping to welcome back Nowitzki to the lineup after missing two games with a victory.
But their offense was choppy _ and that's putting it mildly _ through the first half and much of the third quarter. That's when Carlisle went to a smaller, more athletic lineup with J.J. Barea and Dwight Powell on the floor.
But the comeback was more for show when the Jazz got Rudy Gobert and Rodney Hood going, in addition to Hill. That threesome had an answer for everything the Mavericks did.
"Getting Dirk back into the fold is an important thing for us to kind of re-establish what our plan was going to be," Carlisle said.
Eventually, the Mavericks will get smoother. But it didn't happen in the first game back for Nowitzki after missing two with a stomach illness.
The Mavericks couldn't get past 30 points until a Nowitzki flurry of layups, the last of which at 1:04 of the second quarter made it 35-30, Jazz.
It was that kind of game. They actually were within 38-33 with just 2.2 seconds showing in the first half. Then Hill tossed in a 37-foot prayer to suck out whatever momentum the Mavericks had.
Somehow, you just knew the hoop gods weren't going to help the Mavericks after that.
