Even after their eight-game winning streak ended late Saturday night at Golden State, the 12-2 Jazz — undefeated at home this season — still own the NBA's best record.

A true test of just how legit it is, or is not, comes this week.

Beginning tonight vs. Orlando at EnergySolutions Arena — and continuing Wednesday with San Antonio and Thursday against the Los Angeles Lakers — Utah faces current division-leading teams in its next three games.

So maybe the Jazz's wake-up loss came at an ideal time, right?

If Jerry Sloan was thinking that, he certainly wasn't saying it.

"Nothing good comes when you lose," the Jazz coach said. "You know, I don't like the taste of losing. I hope our players don't like the taste of losing."

A little bitter on the tongue, though, might make appreciation for winning's fine wine a little stronger. So Sloan seemed to be thinking after a 23-turnover, 32.5 percent shooting debacle in Oakland.

"We realize we have a lot of work to do, even though we've been fortunate to win a couple games," he said. "We still have a lot of things to work on if we're gonna go forward."

Chief among them might be solving the sort of gimmicky defense coach Don Nelson's Warriors used Saturday.

Sloan called it a "1-2-2 zone." Nelson deemed it "a 3-2," designed to "shut down their bigs" — starting power forward Carlos Boozer and starting center Mehmet Okur.

Whatever the label, it appeared to thoroughly baffle the Jazz. Beyond point guard Deron Williams, Utah's other four starters — Okur, Boozer, Andrei Kirilenko and Ronnie Brewer — all finished with just four points each. The early going was especially tough for Boozer and Okur, who had just two points apiece in the opening quarter. "We really surprised Utah," Golden State big man Andris Biedrins said.

"In the beginning of the game," he added, "they didn't know we were in a zone."

At the very least, they didn't show they knew how to break it — or how to respond when things went wrong in transition, frequently losing track of whom they should be covering.

According to one former Jazz player, it's all nothing new for Utah.

"Last year, when we played against a zone, it slowed us down a little bit," ex-Jazz guard Keith McLeod, who was traded to Golden State in the offseason, was quoted as saying in the Oakland Tribune. "Being here (Saturday), zoning them, you could see that they were stagnant. They weren't as fluid, and there weren't many places to go."

When Nelson used the break to tweak the way the Warriors were defending the Jazz, Utah did nothing successful to adjust.

Okur wound up scoring just two more points and Boozer none in the second half as the panicked Jazz continued to fire up one bad shot after another.