MINNEAPOLIS -- The road can be quite a telling place.
It can be cruel. It can be cold.It can be kind. And it can be kind of boring.
That's right. Boring.
Perhaps more than anything, though, the road can tell you about things you might never come to know at home, like just how good you are, or, in many cases, just how good you are not.
The Jazz will spend much of the coming holiday season out and about, beginning with a two-game trip that opens with tonight's game against Minnesota and continues on Saturday night at Milwaukee. After popping back into the town for a rematch with the Timberwolves on Monday, it's back on a plane and off to Los Angeles for a Thanksgiving Eve meeting with the Lakers.
And that's the easy part.
The Jazz play eight road games in December, including one stretch of seven games in 11 nights that begins Dec. 12 in Toronto and does not end until Dec. 22 in Miami.
Granted, there are worse fates in life than having to hang out at Christmastime on swanky South Beach, where the only trees to be seen are palm.
But the road is the road, and there's no home cooking when you must choose your meal from a menu.
Hotel beds are lumpy, even the four- and five-star variety. The pillows, fluffed as they are, just aren't your own. And nice as the name chains try to make their lobbies, they all start to seem the same when you don't stay in a city long enough to actually make unpacking your bags worthwhile.
So while things have gone swimmingly in Salt Lake City for a team that already this week has knocked off not one, but both, NBA finalists from a season ago, now comes the real test: Can the Jazz stay afloat in foreign waters?
There is no better time to find out than the present.
"I think we need to go out and prove we can win on the road," Jazz guard Jeff Hornacek said.
"To be a good team you have to be able to win on the road," said Jazz center Olden Polynice, who proved he can be a good player by scoring a season-high 8 points, including 6 with inside-the-paint field goals on the Jazz's first three shots of the game, in a 98-90 victory over the defending Eastern Conference-champion New York Knicks on Wednesday night at the Delta Center.
"It's a lot easier to win at home than on the road, and the Jazz have always been a good road team," Polynice added. "So I don't see any reason why we can't compete and be a road team."
One reason some might at least wonder is the fact that the 5-3 Jazz haven't exactly come home happy campers after their initial out-of-Utah ventures so far this season.
Though they are now 4-1 at the Delta Center, they have won only once away from home in 1999-2000 -- and that victory came at the expense of the lowly Los Angeles Clippers. The other two road games, at Seattle and at Sacramento, were both true tests for the Jazz.
They failed both, and flunked at least one -- against the Kings -- miserably.
Yet this is the same team that not only beat the Knicks on Wednesday but also won impressively against the defending NBA-champion San Antonio Spurs on Monday at the Delta.
"Now we need to start building that continuity on the road," guard John Stockton said.
But can they? Will they? Inquiring minds want to know.
"Obviously we're a good team now, and getting better all the time," Jazz coach Jerry Sloan said after victory over the Knicks.
But, Sloan added . . .
"I'm anxious to go out on the road and see how we can play. . . . Those won't be easy games for us, but I'm anxious to see how we compete. That's the bottom line. Wins will take of themselves if you get yourself in the mode where everybody is going to compete rather than just three or four guys. That's not enough."
Having too few working not nearly hard enough in the Jazz's last road game, at Sacramento, was enough to send Sloan packing. He actually flew home to his farm in Illinois over the weekend and left it up to Jazz players themselves to decide whether or not they would work out.
Veteran leader Karl Malone, who scored a game-high 33 points against the Spurs, responded by organizing a Sunday practice that no one missed. That answered more than a few questions for Sloan, who was starting to wonder about his club -- and maybe psychologically challenging them as well.
"I think our players indicated they wanted to come back and play, and that's all I wanted to find out," he said. "It was up to them. I could have gone back to practice two days and yelled and screamed and talked about everything in the world. But it's up to them to decide if they want to play.
"I still believe, had we had the desire and the tenacity to try to compete, I still believe we'd have a lot better record," Sloan added. "I bet, when we came out there earlier, we just kind of expected to do what people thought we were. And we may end up being, you know, a bottom-of-the-rung team. But I expect this team to play and win."
At home, and on the road.
"This (82-game) season's so long, I don't know how we're going to react to being out on the road," Sloan said. "I have expectations, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be right. I hope we can and play hard, and not be bored by being out there playing."
That's right. Bored.
"Well, some teams look like they're bored by having to play on the road," Sloan said.
Even his own.
Like last Friday in Sacramento, when the Jazz seemed so disinterested that their own coach left them behind.
"I don't know if he was challenging us," Malone said. "I think he was p----- off at us, and he was so p----- off that he didn't want to see us. So to assure he didn't see us . . . . he flew home. So I don't know if it was a challenge. He just needed to get away from us."
So he hit the road. And went home.