Rockets 109, Jazz 86
HOUSTON — After the Jazz folded in the fourth quarter against Dallas on Monday night, coach Jerry Sloan wondered how his team would respond.
"It's disappointing," he said after Utah's loss to Dallas, "but you have to find out who you are and come back tomorrow." How you do that, Sloan added, is "the telltale sign of who you are as a person and who you are as a competitor."
So what did the Jazz's pitiful performance in a 109-86 loss at Houston on Tuesday night tell the coach?
"It doesn't tell me much that we wanted to win," a clearly disappointed Sloan said. "It looks like they packed it in."
Sloan ripped his 47-23 Jazz for what seemed like just about everything, from the way they tied their shoes to the way they combed their hair.
"They did everything they wanted to do," he said of a 39-32 Rockets club that led by 27 points at halftime and by as many as 30 in the second half — easily the largest advantage Utah has permitted an opponent this season. "They threw lobs. They got layups off of lob passes where we couldn't find people and things like that that (make it) pretty tough to . . . win.
"Our offense is non-existent," Sloan continued before turning somewhat sarcastic. "We've just got to let everybody play 1-on-1 for a while, until we figure out it's pretty tough to play that way. I mean, everybody wants to shoot the ball and not run any offense."
He thinks he knows why, too.
"I think it's a lot of selfishness — that everybody seems to want to get their own shot," said Sloan, whose Jazz hadn't been down by more than 21, or lost by more than 15, this season, before Tuesday. "They're not trying to create anything for anybody else. You don't do that, that's pretty tough to have any kind of offense."
Jazz guard John Stockton seemed to agree: "There's not a lot of guys that are stepping up for each other at either end of the floor and trusting each other offensively to be able to help out."
The Jazz must reaffirm that trust, Karl Malone suggested.
"Everybody can sit here now and say we've got 'a selfish team here, a selfish team there,' " he said. "I don't feel that."
Moreover, Malone added, "We're not going to get out the ice picks and start stabbing each other now, because we've been through too many wars as a team, and these guys in the locker room know how to win."
The Jazz, losers of five of their last nine games, actually did hang close for a quarter and trailed only 27-23 after the first.
But Houston, which snapped a three-game losing streak and extended its home winning string to seven straight, jumped on the Jazz's second unit of 4-of-13 Jacque Vaughn, Quincy Lewis, Bryon Russell (2 points), Danny Manning and scoreless Greg Ostertag from the start of the season quarter.
By the time Sloan replaced Vaughn with Stockton and Lewis with Donyell Marshall just more than four minutes into the period, the Rockets were up 40-25. The margin was still 15 when Sloan reinserted Olden Polynice for Ostertag and 5-of-14 Malone for Manning just more than a minute later, but Utah never did recover.
Over the next five minutes, the Rockets — who got double-figure scoring from seven players, including Steve Francis' game-high 18 — pounced on the Jazz's regulars, pushing their lead to 26 before Sloan all but threw in the towel. After the break, Houston — which came into the game 2-17 against the five teams, including Utah, with the best records in the NBA's Western Conference — held its lead at 20 or more.
"I told them . . . in the second half, we'd just go out there and play 1-on-1 . . . . until we get that out of our system (and) come back, maybe, eventually, and see if we could play as a team," Sloan said. "I'm not sure we're a good 1-on-1 team. (But) maybe they could prove me wrong."
That, obviously, is not what Sloan really wanted from the Jazz, and they knew it.
"We have to understand that we've got a team concept, and we have to stay with it a little bit more," guard John Starks said. "I don't think guys are selfish. I think guys are just trying to get it done, and when you do that, it may come out to look like that.
"But I think everybody on this team has a main purpose: That's to win," he added. "So we just have to understand that we have to play with one another and get better-executing again, like we (were) early on, and everything should be fine."
Starks hopes that is the case by Thursday, when Utah visits league-leading San Antonio. Sloan, however, wishes he had seen signs of it prior to then.
"I was totally shocked," he said, "that we didn't come with a lot more than we showed up with."
E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com