If it were easier, maybe they would do it more often or would have tried it in the first two games, but being down 0-2 and needing to win in their first home game of the Western Conference Finals Saturday night was the time to bring out the surprise.

The Utah Jazz normally play the pick-and-roll defense the same way for long stretches, maybe even all game if it's working, but with San Antonio's Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili shredding the defense and getting into the lane for layups or kick-out plays in the first two games, something had to change.

And "change" is the key. In Saturday's 109-83 win over the Spurs, the Jazz kept their pick-and-roll defense refreshing throughout the game, switching it up often to keep the Spurs guessing.

"It's more difficult to do, to change defenses repeatedly throughout the course of one game," said guard Derek Fisher, "but we understood the circumstances last night. Whatever we had to do to win the game, we were going to have to put the effort into doing it, and that's what we did. It's not easy at all."

"We would always change," said Matt Harpring, "which I think made them not know what we were going to do. Jerry (coach Sloan) did a good job of switching it up on them, and any time you don't know how the defense is going to play, it works for us. When you come off a pick and don't know if he's going to show out or not, it's hard, so we tried to do that to them."

"We tried to use every pick-and-roll defense, and I think we did pretty good job," said center Memo Okur. "If you look at the first two games, we weren't really active on pick-and-roll defense. We did not help each other on defensive end. Our rotation was not good enough to win the ballgame."

Saturday, said Andrei Kirilenko, Utah's concentration was far better, which helped the rotations work better. The Jazz made a concerted effort to force the ball outside. "We don't let them score those easy layups. We put them in a position where they need to make every shot from three, or like outside shot, and I think that's very tough to do, making every (outside) shot the whole game."

Parker did get into the lane a lot the first half, but Utah found a way to somewhat neutralize that play. "I think we contained them inside, force them outside," Kirilenko said, adding that Utah didn't double team his drives but did help on them, "so he needs to kick it out every time. Everything was, like, with resistance. It's pretty hard to play that way."

"Game 2," said Harpring, "we had a strategy of stopping the layup with a big guy, and once you stop that, then try and get back. Last night we didn't do that."