They fell behind early, way behind, as a team. They rallied, and even took a late lead, as a team.
When it came time to cap the long climb out of an incredibly deep hole, however, they reverted to what has been their downfall for much of a miserable season.
When the going got tough in the final minutes of an 89-83 loss to Indiana on Tuesday night at the Delta Center, the Jazz played like anything but a team.
"There were stretches in the last part of the game where I thought we played pretty hard," said Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, who failed for a third straight time in his bid to tie legendary Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach for sixth place on the NBA's all-time regular-season coaching victories list.
"But we still have a tendency," Sloan added, "to think, 'I can do it by myself,' instead of running the play and knowing what you're doing."
Before they got to that point, though, the Jazz had it stuck to them early on by a Pacers team that got 24 points to soon-to-retire star Reggie Miller, who was playing his final game in the Delta Center, and a game-high 30 from Stephen Jackson.
Indiana - despite being without injured starters Jermaine O'Neal, its leading scoring, and Jamaal Tinsley, who averages a team-high 6.4 assists per game—jumped to a 13-0 lead.
Continuing a start Sloan called "really kind of disastrous" for the Jazz, the Pacers built a 25-point advantage at 33-8 with just more than a minute to go in the opening quarter.
"We weren't pushing the ball up the floor, we weren't getting to our sets," Jazz point guard Keith McLeod said. "That's probably my fault."
He was hardly alone with cause for blame.
"The most frustrating part was the way we came out," Sloan said. "We couldn't get close enough to guard anybody.
"If they wanted to shoot in our face, they did," the Jazz coach added. "If they wanted to drive the ball to the basket, they did."
No so in the second half, however.
The Jazz's rally was marathon-like, jump-started by a 14-2 run that began late in the third quarter and continued into the fourth.
"A lead like that, you can't get it all back at once," McLeod said. "So we had to get stops, and try to get buckets."
And they did.
Eventually.
"They did a great job," said Pacers coach Rick Carlisle, whose 30-30 club was finishing a 2-2 Western road swing, "of clawing their way back into the game."
After a handful of chances to take their first lead of the game went awry, Matt Harpring - who matched Mehmet Okur for team-high scoring honors with 18 - finally hit a high-arcing jumper to put the Jazz up 78-77 with five minutes and two seconds remaining.
It wound up being a short-lived Utah advantage, though.
After Raja Bell hit two free throws to make it 80-77 Jazz, the Pacers responded with a pair of Jackson free throws and an Anthony Johnson jumper to reclaim the lead.
The 20-40 Jazz, meanwhile, would miss four shots and commit a couple turnovers over the next five possessions.
The most glaring miscues: a head-down drive to the basket on one possession and a missed 3-pointer on another by Andrei Kirilenko.
Bell also missed a trey try, Harpring had a turnover, and McLeod had one shot blocked and missed another.
"I don't know what happened, man," Bell said.
Sloan, though, sure seemed to have an idea.