Lauri Markkanen was once again in a convincing game, when the Finn recorded 26 points in the meeting of the jumbo teams of the Western Conference.
Lauri Markkanen scored 26 points and grabbed seven rebounds when the Utah Jazz, represented by a Finn, won the basketball NBA away game over the Memphis Grizzlies with a score of 127–121.
Markkanen threw a total of nine shots from behind the three-point arc, four of which sunk in the middle.
The Jyväskylä native has now succeeded in making three-pointers in 10 games in the early season 41 times. That’s the league’s second-highest tally right after the Warriors’ superstar Stephen Curry’s after. Four-time NBA champion Curry has managed to make 53 three-pointers since the beginning of the season.
After Markkanen, the Slovenian superstar is third in the statistics Luka Doncic 39 with a successful three-pointer. The Dallas Mavericks represented by Doncic are the top teams in the series.
Markkanen and the back man Jordan Clarkson were Utah’s most effective players in the match. The point king of the match was from Memphis Desmond Banewho bagged a convincing 37 points.
It was a meeting between the jumbo teams of the Western Conference. The Jazz broke a streak of four consecutive losses with their win.
Utah has now won three of its first ten games of the season. The Memphis win was Utah’s first away win of the season.
Without its superstar And Morantia played, the Grizzlies have won only one of their nine games and are last in the entire NBA. The 23-year-old Morant was sidelined from his team’s activities in the spring after he appeared with a gun in a social media video. The 2020 NBA Rookie of the Year is scheduled to return to the court on December 19 against the New Orleans Pelicans.
An effective early season
26-year-old Markkanen is playing his seventh season in the NBA and his second season with the Utah Jazz. The Finn, who hit his breakthrough last season and was selected for the All Star match, has started his season even better than last season.
Markkanen’s scoring average in the first 10 games of this season has been 24.2. Last season’s equivalent was 22.2 points per game.
While Markkanen has continued to produce points, Utah’s performances as a team have been significantly worse than at the start of last season.
In the first ten games of the 2022–23 season, the Jazz collected seven wins, while this season only three wins have been accumulated in the first ten games of the season. The group still has a long way to go before the playoffs. During his entire NBA career, Markkanen has never reached the playoffs, and Utah now wants to go far.
Utah head coach Will Hardy I told you in the summer for ESPN The Jazz want to be a playoff team this season.
– We don’t want to be just a happy team that can’t make it to the playoffs. We have to be much better.
When the NBA season started in late October, Utah is the only team in the West that has had to play at least every other day. Now the team gets a couple of days off from the games, as Utah will next face Portland on Wednesday morning at home against Finland.