SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 Brice Sensabaugh has a goal for his third NBA season.<\/p>\n
“This year is the time for me to solidify myself as an NBA player \u2014 undeniably,” he said.<\/p>\n
He’s off to a pretty good start.<\/p>\n
The Jazz wing had a team-high 26 points in Utah’s 134-130 overtime loss at the San Antonio Spurs on Friday. Sensabaugh is now averaging 25 points in the Jazz’s first two preseason games.<\/p>\n
On Friday, he went 6-of-13 from the field and 12-of-12 from the free-throw line, showing an ability to put up big scoring numbers even when his 3-point shot isn’t falling at an insane clip (he was just 2-of-8 from deep).<\/p>\n
It’s been a carryover from a standout summer league where he drew “MVP” chants in Salt Lake City. He credits that week in July for giving him some added confidence entering the season.<\/p>\n
“There’s a different level of confidence and understanding of what needs to happen for me and for the team,” he said. “I think Summer League was a big boost for me in terms of \u2014 even though it’s obviously different than the real game \u2014 just like breaking it down and seeing what I can really do as a shooter and other things as my role is going to expand a little bit this year.”<\/p>\n
And his second big preseason performance came in a game that was more fun than it had any right to be.<\/p>\n
The Jazz came back from a 17-point halftime deficit \u2014 albeit against San Antonio’s B and C lineups \u2014 to send the game into overtime.<\/p>\n
The end of regulation featured big buckets from Ace Bailey, Walt Clayton Jr, Taylor Hendricks, and a game-tying triple from Keyonte George in the waning seconds.<\/p>\n
“For us to be in that environment, let our young players play on the road in a close game, I thought was really good for us,” Jazz coach Will Hardy said.<\/p>\n
After a somewhat passive game against Houston on Wednesday, Clayton Jr. looked more like the player who led Florida to the national championship last spring.<\/p>\n
The rookie scored 20 points on 6-for-12 shooting and added five rebounds and five assists.<\/p>\n
“Walt didn’t overcomplicate the game,” Hardy said. “I think he was a little bit more aggressive looking for his shot, which opened up the rest of his game.”<\/p>\n
That, alone, showed a moment of growth.<\/p>\n
Hardy said that there have been moments in camp where Clayton has been trying to make every play “a little bit too technically perfect,” which has had a limiting effect on his play.<\/p>\n
“He’s almost trying to be the good guy, and Walt’s not a selfish player, but one of his best skills at this point in time is his ability to shoot and score,” Hardy said.<\/p>\n
Indeed, and when Clayton started shooting, it forced the defense to react, which opened up the rest of his game.<\/p>\n
“Some of those layups that he got were because the other team’s having to press up on him because they respect his shooting,” Hardy said. “So I thought a little bit of it was him being more aggressive for himself, not in a selfish way, but it set up the rest of his game.”<\/p>\n
Bailey finished with 20 points on 8-of-13 shooting and seven rebounds in 39 minutes of play, giving him consecutive 20-point games in his first two preseason games. Hendricks had 15 points, and Cody Williams had some strong moments in a 12-point night.<\/p>\n
“It was a fun game,” Hardy said. “I’m glad our guys get to be in that moment together. It gives us a lot to learn from in terms of the situational part of the game, and so I’m excited to get back to work.”<\/p>\n
The Jazz will have their first home preseason game on Monday against the Dallas Mavericks.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 Brice Sensabaugh has a goal for his third NBA season. “This year is the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":294246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[419,418,171,421,420,425,1260,50,422,423,62,399,314,67,132,68,424,313],"class_list":{"0":"post-294245","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-cars","9":"tag-classifieds","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-homes","12":"tag-jobs","13":"tag-local","14":"tag-nba","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-radio","17":"tag-salt-lake","18":"tag-sports","19":"tag-television","20":"tag-traffic","21":"tag-united-states","22":"tag-unitedstates","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-utah","25":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}