Jazz hang close but still lose fifth straight

In the Jazz's first home game after he blasted players and coaches in the midst of a loss to the New York Knicks, franchise owner Larry H. Miller was not in his usual courtside seat at the Delta Center on Saturday night.

Team officials said they did not know why.

Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, meanwhile, actually picked up a chair in anger Saturday.

In this instance, the reason was quite apparent.

Sloan was not a happy man watching Utah lose its fifth straight game, falling 80-72 to the Memphis Grizzlies.

Seeing the 7-3 Grizzlies shoot 30 free throws while his 4-7 Jazz shot just 11 might have had something to do with that.

"The thing about it is we had 28 points inside, so it's not like we were backing away from them," Sloan said. "But that's the way it goes sometimes."

The way it went for the Jazz on this occasion, though, was particularly tough to swallow after Utah used its fifth different starting in as many games, all losses.

"With a couple of guys out of the lineup, it takes a while to regroup to form chemistry out there," forward Matt Harpring said after the Jazz played without Carlos Boozer, Andrei Kirilenko and Keith McLeod, who, it was learned Saturday, has a small avulsion fracture in his lower back that will keep him out at least another week.

"We're playing better, and we will continue to play better the more we are out there," Harpring added. "Hopefully, we'll get healthy too."

In the meantime, the Jazz were simply sick over the way they lost Saturday.

Memphis, idle since last Wednesday while the Jazz have been busy playing their second straight set of four games in five nights, led 43-35 at the half. The Grizzlies extended that advantage to as many as 11 with just less than eight minutes left in the fourth quarter.

Yet Utah, even in the back half of a back-to-back set that opened Friday at Phoenix, was not about to call it quits.

"That was the Utah Jazz spirit that we've known for years. They compete. They compete very hard, and we knew that it was going to be a real battle in here," Grizzlies coach Mike Fratello said. "When they get 10, 12 points down, they came right back, and before you know it it's a five-point game."

Actually, it was a 3-point game a couple of times later in the fourth, the final time when Matt Harpring made a Deron Williams-fed layup to make it 75-72 with 1:10 remaining.