SACRAMENTO — Every time Keegan Murray makes a shot inside the Golden1 Center, the Sacramento Kings in-arena announcer calls out “Kee-gan” and the crowd responds with a booming “Mur-ray.”
On Saturday night, during a 125-104 Kings win, the Utah Jazz heard that call and response over and over and over and over as Murray scored a career-high 47 points on just 23 shots, going 12-of-13 from 3-point range through the first three quarters and making an NBA record 11 consecutive 3-pointers in the game.
As the Jazz continued to see Murray’s shots go in, hearing his name reverberate throughout the building added insult to injury.
“For sure. I’ve never seen or heard anything like that from a crowd,” Ochai Agbaji said. “Obviously that’s really special, but that was just crazy.”
What was even crazier was that the Jazz, despite how obviously on fire Murray was, allowed him to get wide open from 3-point land nearly every time he touched the ball.
While the game was still going on, famously good 3-point shooter Stephen Curry was taking questions after his Golden State Warriors beat the Brooklyn Nets in San Francisco. He was asked how difficult it is to get to that point in a game as a shooter.
“When a team knows you’re hot, they’re going to start to shade your way and take your looks away,” Curry said.
Well, Mr. Curry, you would think that would be the appropriate response. But it turns out that there are some teams that will watch a guy hit five, six, seven ... 11 3-pointers in a row and still let him shoot wide open looks.
“Our team has to do a better job of recognizing, in those moments, who has the hot hand,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “I mean, their entire arena yelled his name after every shot.”
Yes. They did.
So how does this happen?
Well, I went back and watched all of Murray’s attempts and the Jazz were just slow and not smart.
They left him wide open, they doubled away from Murray, they lost track of him, the Jazz helped too far off him, they let him leak out to the corner undefended after a made basket, they went under on screens when he got the ball and they did not close out hard enough.
Even after he’d made 12 3-pointers, they still gave him open looks. And it wasn’t like the Jazz coaching staff wasn’t saying the obvious in timeouts and throughout the game.
“It hurts me to say it to you guys now because I feel like I’ve been saying it for the last two hours,” Hardy said. “We definitely talked about it a lot and Keegan never let us off the hook. Every time you make a mistake, he makes the shot.”
That’s what happened on Saturday night. Keegan Murray did not let the Jazz get away with their mistakes. He made them pay and in doing so he had a career night.
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Keegan Murray put on a historic performance and the Jazz helped him do it - Deseret News
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