With Portland on tap tonight, Jazz players hope to forget about Thursday's ugly loss in San Antonio as quickly as they can.
"It's only one game," swingman Gordan Giricek said.
"That's one of those games we have to put behind us," point guard Deron Williams added.
Don't, guard Derek Fisher suggested, read too much into it.
Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, however, does.
And he doesn't particularly like the story line, one he's seen before and one — he continues to contend — that separates pretenders from contenders among the NBA's elite teams.
It goes something like this:
Opponent gets physical with the Jazz ... Jazz, usually the ones being commended by other coaches for their own physical play, go into a shell ... Jazz get whipped ... Coach questions Jazz's toughness.
"That's the thing I've been concerned about all along: Are we tough enough to play in tough games, when it really gets tough? I haven't seen that for 48 minutes," Sloan said after now 21-9 Utah, which trailed by as many as 31 points early in Thursday's fourth quarter, fell 106-83 to the Spurs. "I've seen us play a little bit in stretches, but that's not good enough. You see a team (in San Antonio) that knows how to play. They come out and see if they can destroy you, which they did right in the first quarter."
Even when they have a hiccup along the way, they keep on destroying.
"That's what great teams do," Sloan said. "They (the Spurs) have that ability to do it. We don't have that ability to understand that yet, evidently."
Jazz players seem to sense it, too.
"I think we were pretty soft this game," Giricek said, no doubt borrowing some of the same phrases used by Sloan.
"We have to learn a lesson from this game," he added. "Next time they stroke us, we have to stroke back — and we'll see who will win."
Sloan, whose Jazz do not see the Spurs again until late January, can only hope that case is made then.
In the meantime, he wonders if the 52 games that remain in Utah's regular season — including the one tonight against the Trail Blazers at EnergySolutions Arena, the Jazz's last of the calendar year — will be enough for his club to prove it, too, can be one of the league's legit elite.
"These guys have all played basketball," Sloan said of his own collection of mostly young players, "but they haven't played at this level with that kind of toughness.
"You can't make guys tougher," he added, likely still frustrated by the unwillingness of his primary big men — chiefly Carlos Boozer and Mehmet Okur — to mix it up inside with the Spurs. "But they can learn how to play basketball, and play within a system, I think, and get better and gain confidence with each other."
They not only can, but they are, the Jazz's starting backcourt maintains.
"We're not far away. We're a good team," Williams said. "We just have these games where nothing seems to go right."
"We just have to keep playing and learn from it," Fisher added. "The important thing for us is to respond and close out what we feel like is a good start to a good season. You know, we're still 21-9. I'll take that any day, even with (Thursday's) loss. If we can win 21 out of every 30 games, we're in good shape."
As for worrying about how to contend with teams like the Spurs — who have now won 15 straight over Utah in San Antonio — that, some with the Jazz say, will come in due time.
Just not now, it appears.
"We have to try to win every game, and then try to make playoffs, and we'll see what happens," Giricek said. "But I think we shouldn't compare ourselves right now with (the Spurs)."
E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com