One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Welcome to the NBA Daily Ding on The Athletic NBA Show.

Ding ding!

How about we can just watch basketball?

I like that idea.

Good morning and welcome to the Daily Ding here on the Athletic NBA show.

I'm Jared Weiss.

He's Mojikil.

We have Andrew Select Produce.

We're going to get right to the game of the night, which no, is not what you expected.

It was Utah beating the New Orleans Pelicans 132 to 129 in a battle of the Western

Conference Titans.

And this one starts at the end with Mike Connolly missing two free throws.

It was a rough night in the box score, but he made up for it on the other ends.

I mean, Connolly was awesome, man.

I think, you know, rough night in the box score, but he's one of the heroes of this game, Jared.

He comes up with big defensive stops.

You know, the after missing those free throws, the Pelicans call a timeout, down by three, trying to get a play.

And he pokes the ball out of bounce on forcing them to have to run another sideline out of bounds.

But this time in the deep corner, and he pokes the ball out of bounds again when they're trying to get it to CJ. And then the next time when they finally do get the ball unbounded, he's all in CJ. And then once, by the time he gives up, he switches with Clarkson. Clarkson's all over CJ McCollum. And, you know, for a moment, it looks like CJ did have a chance at a a wide open three, but just missed it really short. I mean, really impressive across the board. And I was just blown away by the jazz tonight. I mean, they were so much fun. Walker Kessler was playing great defense. Clarkson shot his shot absolutely lights out. He was 15 for 26 and at 39 points. Like really nice bounce back after he had a rough game before that. Then Mark even was just attacking all night.

Yeah. I mean, to be honest, like the, the, the pelicans really kind of struggled, especially in the first quarter.

Like in the first quarter, it looked like, oh, the jazz might kind of get going. Clarkson hit 17 of his points right then and there in the first quarter.

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