Jerry Sloan has never struck me as someone who took solace in anything that didn't appear in the "W" column, but down 0-2 to the Rockets, that's what he appears to be doing. From the Salt Lake Tribune:"I've been pleased," Sloan said toward the end of his 10-minute session with reporters. "I think we've made progress with our team. I think our team is better than when we started. When you've got a young team, you want to get better every day.We didn't win but we competed harder. That's a good attitude for a coach to take. A good attitude for a guy coaching fifth-graders at the YMCA, that is. What happened to Sloan's fire? Where's his venom? Maybe this guy is getting tired after all -- perhaps he can chalk up his completely random remark about going to 7-11 to sleep deprivation, because that made absolutely no sense at all. (Like, zero. My head hurts from trying to figure it out.)
"Obviously, everybody knows we didn't win, but I think we competed harder. We got more of the kind of shots we'd like to have in a game. We just got to do a better job of keeping them off the boards, try to keep them off the free-throw line.
"All that sounds simple. When you have your head into it and you're ready to go, get everybody to play well, we'll be just fine." ...
Asked if it was a must-win game, Sloan answered: "We'd hope so. That's what you want to see: How guys perform in those kind of games. When you've got your backs to the wall a little bit, see if you can fight back. Or you just say, 'Let's go to 7-11 tomorrow morning.' "
That said, I'm not ready to bury the Jazz just yet -- at the very least, they should make things interesting playing their next two games in Salt Lake City, where they won 31 games in the regular season. The Jazz had their chances with early leads in both Game 1 and Game 2, and you have to think that playing in front of the home crowd will help prevent the so far untimely (and massive) shifts in momentum.
