‘Right now, we're low': The Utah Jazz know what they are doing wrong, but can they fix it?

SALT LAKE CITY — It’s easy to think back to previous seasons to find comparisons for Utah’s recent slump.

Last season in November, the Jazz lost nine of 13 games. Or the season before that when they won just four times in a 17-game stretch. Compared to those slides, the Jazz’s current run of poor play — Utah has now lost five of its last six games — doesn’t seem all that bad.

But here’s the thing: Wasn't this year supposed to be different? Weren't these Jazz supposed to better?

“Obviously, this year the expectations are higher,” Rudy Gobert said. “We hold ourselves at high standards, so every loss is — a loss today is not like a loss six years ago. Then when we lost, we were just learning, today we want to win every night especially at home. This is a tough stretch.”

Sure, the Jazz have had a hard schedule and went on a long road trip that seemed to send everything spiraling down. And yes, they’re incorporating a bunch of new players into a system that is famous for not being very simple. But, the thing is, so are other teams.

The Lakers team that punked the Jazz 121-96 at home on Wednesday night at Vivint Arena has a bunch of new faces, a new coach and just went through one of the hardest back-to-backs in the league (Denver and then Utah) unscathed.

And it’s not just that the Jazz are losing — it’s how. The Jazz haven’t been competitive in any of the five recent losses (and the win required a 15-point comeback itself). They have been outclassed by teams, they have looked lost on both ends, they have taken head-scratching (to put it nicely) shots, they have been run by in transition.

With all that happening, the results haven’t been surprising.

“We want to be one of the best teams this year in the league, among the contenders, and those are the teams that we need to contend to,” Rudy Gobert said. “We are not playing like it right now, but that is the standard that we want to have for ourselves. Tonight we saw that team … every minute on the court, they take everything seriously and that has not been us.”

That naturally leads to the question of why haven’t the Jazz been focused? Gobert tried to find a reason, but that's the answer that seems to be escaping the Jazz too. They know what they aren't doing and why they are struggling — but they just can't seem to fix it.

“I think we just have to come together instead of everyone going in different directions," Gobert said about the team's focus. "We do it at times, but not all the time. Maybe sometimes we have been traveling and all of that, we are tired and everything becomes a little bit harder in those moments. That is when we have to be even more together.”

Gobert, Quin Snyder, Donovan Mitchell, Mike Conley have all talked about the same thing following each of these losses. They need to do the little things, they need to communicate on both ends, they need to become connected.

They’ve said it. And the next game have had to say it again.

“It's so easy to say and to be honest with you guys, it's at the point where I've said the same thing like the past six games, it's just like, man, it's just repetitive,” Mitchell said. “We got to figure it out.”

The sky isn’t falling. Not by a long shot. The Jazz are still 12-10 and have all the pieces that had people glowing over them in the offseason. There are just more concerns now though. The bench depth is a big question mark (actually, no — at this point, the question is can Utah survive with such a lowly bench?), so too is the offense’s shot selection and apparent love of midrange floaters, and then there’s the defensive slippage over the last couple weeks.

The Jazz were once the No. 1 team in defensive rating — they have fallen to No. 10.

“We have to be honest with ourselves and really be truthful with ourselves,” Jeff Green said. “We know what we're doing wrong. We know what's lacking in our defensive effort. And we just have to man up about it and take it in the chest and get better and continue to fight.”

Utah’s locker room is often a place full of lively banter and music after games. Even after losses, the players usually find ways to enjoy being around each other. But this stretch has started to weigh on the players. On Wednesday, it was a somber place. And that’s been the trend as the losses have started to pile up.

‘Right now, we're low, to be honest with you,” Green said. “I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. We're not who we want to be. The last six games to me, we kind of took a couple of steps back to the progress that we had. But the great thing about the NBA is we got a couple of games ahead of us that are games that we can win. We got two days to practice, which would be great for us to get back to our roots. And, you know, we're going to go in tomorrow with a game plan to get better. We can't get too down on ourselves. To me, it's too early in the season.”

The schedule lightens up after Wednesday with plenty of non-playoff teams filling out the December slate of games. That could and should lead to more victories and maybe a pallet cleanser for the team and for the fanbase that is quickly becoming skeptical of this team’s ceiling.

Because suddenly that ceiling doesn’t seem too high anymore. That’s why when Green was asked what glaring things the Jazz need to fix, he didn’t have just one.

“At this point, everything.”

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