Mike Conley busts slump with 29-point performance in Utah Jazz’s win over LA Clippers

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SALT LAKE CITY — Mike Conley, usually as even-keeled as NBA players come, balled up his fists and hollered back at the roaring home crowd as he ran back down the floor after a couple of buckets early in his breakout third quarter Wednesday night.

Conley uncharacteristically waved his arms, asking for more, as Utah Jazz fans showered their new point guard with a standing ovation and chanted his last name during a timeout after a driving layup punctuated a personal 10-point flurry in a span of just over two minutes.

The first week in a Jazz uniform felt like an eternity for Conley, whose 12-year tenure in Memphis ended with an offseason trade that Utah hoped would elevate its franchise to legitimate contender status. Conley couldn’t contain his emotions Wednesday night once he felt like his game finally arrived in Salt Lake City.

“That just kind of tells you where I was at,” Conley told ESPN after his 29-point, five-assist performance in the Jazz’s 110-96 victory over the LA Clippers. “It’s a lonely place where I was the last week or so. Emotionally, you could just feel every shot what I was feeling, because that was a unique stretch that had never happened to me before.

“For it to happen in a new place, where you want to play so well, almost like you’re pressing. And it wasn’t happening. It was a release. [The emotion] was just built up and just burst out. I wasn’t myself there for a little bit.”

Conley endured what he considers the worst stretch of his career during his first four games with the Jazz, when he scored a total of only 31 points on 9-of-45 shooting. Entering Wednesday night, he was the only player in the league with at least 40 attempts from the floor and a single-digit field goal total.

Conley’s 29 points against the Clippers came on 11-of-17 shooting. He had 18 points on 6-of-8 shooting in the third quarter, the second-highest point total of any quarter in Conley’s career, according to ESPN Stats & Information research. Conley was 4-of-4 from 3-point range in the quarter, compared to 3-of-20 in the first four games of the season.

Conley accounted for 22 points, including a couple of assists in the third quarter, more than the Clippers (20), who were without Kawhi Leonard due to load management. The players on the Jazz bench, including star guard Donovan Mitchell, celebrated by dancing on the baseline when Conley hit 3s on consecutive possessions to push Utah’s lead to 21.

“Mike’s a pretty calm guy, and he was yelling and screaming,” said Mitchell, who had 24 points on 10-of-17 shooting. “Once we saw that, we were feeding off that, too.”

Jazz coach Quin Snyder downplayed the importance of Conley’s breakout performance, implying that too much attention was paid to his early struggles, though he praised the point guard for relaxing and being aggressive while making good reads.

“That’s who he is, so I don’t want to make too big of a deal out of it,” Snyder said. “It’s good for him to play well.”

Conley, however, acknowledged that the weight of his poor performances was wearing on him. He changed his game-day routine in hopes of breaking his slump, as well as putting up so many shots at the team’s practice facility after shootaround that coaches had to shoo him off the court.

Conley, 32, admitted that, despite a dozen-year track record of being a premier point guard, he was battling his own doubts on the heels of Monday’s one-point, one-assist, 0-of-7 shooting outing in a one-point win over the Phoenix Suns.

“It started to creep in. It was something that I was not accepting,” Conley told ESPN. “I’m missing all these shots, but I’m like, ‘This is not who I am. It can’t be. I’m just too good to be doing this.’

“I think I got too worried about the outcome, making shots or whatever it was, and it was consuming whether I felt good or bad after the game. Today, I just tried to get back to the smaller details — shoot the ball with balance, follow through, stuff like that. Shoot the shots that are available. If it goes in, it goes in. If it doesn’t, just keep pushing.”



Source : ESPN