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Los Angeles • When it looked like his team was in hot water, he transformed it into a win.
They don't call him Joe Jesus for nothin'.
And that's exactly what the Jazz brought Joe Johnson — seven-time All-Star, known bucket-getter, and now hero and savior of Game 1 of their opening-round playoff series with the Los Angeles Clippers — to Utah to do.
Johnson scored a team-high 21 points — no two bigger than the runner that thrice bounced off the rim and backboard before finding its way through the hoop on Saturday night — to lift the Jazz to a playoff victory for the first time in seven years.
"That's what he's been doing all his career, always hitting big shots," forward Boris Diaw said. "When he gets the ball at the end of the game, we're pretty confident."
What had started disastrously, with Utah losing star center Rudy Gobert to a sprained knee just 11 seconds into their first postseason game in half a decade, ended spectacularly with Johnson's floater giving the Jazz a 97-95 victory.
It was his eighth game-winning buzzer-beater in the last decade, according to ESPN. No other player has more than four.
"In those moments of the game, guys are not going to help," Johnson said. "It's kind of like you're on an island by yourself and they expect for you to get that stop. Nobody wants their man to score, so I just try to be patient, get to a sweet spot and make the right play."
Johnson's Game 1 heroics came in isolation, but with an assist to the collective savvy of coach Quin Snyder and swingman Joe Ingles. During a huddle late in the fourth quarter, the Jazz mapped out their game plan for a final shot. "We knew that we'd seen something we liked," point guard George Hill said. And it's clear the Jazz liked that Clippers guard Jamal Crawford would still be on the floor if Utah didn't call timeout and let Clippers coach Doc Rivers make a defensive substitution.
So after Clippers guard Chris Paul had scored a game-tying basket with 13 seconds to play, the Jazz quickly inbounded the ball to Johnson.
"We just wanted to have it where they couldn't set up on us," forward Gordon Hayward said. "… We wanted just to get it and go and let his man go to work. It's been stuff he's been doing for a long time."
Johnson pushed the ball up the court, where Ingles recognized he could put the 6-foot-8 forward in a mismatch if he could get Crawford and Blake Griffin to switch on a screen.
"Blake's not as easy to back down," Ingles said. "… They'd been switching a lot [at every position except center]. I set a half decent screen and they switched it."
For the poised veteran, the moment felt slow — "really, really, really, really slow. Everything was kind of moving slow. I just remember watching the clock."
He sized Crawford up with a few dribbles, then made his way into the paint. Four feet from the hoop, he lofted a shot over his defender and the outstretched arms of 7-footer DeAndre Jordan, who came in from the weak side to contest the shot.
"I saw it hit the rim a couple times and I knew it was going in," Jazz guard Rodney Hood said.
If they are to keep winning, the Jazz will have to put even more faith in the guy who has been called Iso Joe and the Armadillo Cowboy now that Gobert has been sidelined with a bone bruise and a hyperextended left knee.
"We understand we've got a lot more work left to do," Johnson said. "This is going to be a long series."
Johnson seems ready to deliver, as a man who now hangs around L.A.'s practice facility, trying to help a cast of stars overcome their cursed playoff past can probably attest.
"We call him Joe Jesus," Kevin Garnett, now a consultant for the Clippers, once said when the two men were teammates with the Brooklyn Nets. "He might not be there when you call on him, but he's there when you need him."
Twitter: @aaronfalk