Jazz road woes continue with loss to Indiana

"At that point, I don't know what's happened," forward Andrei Kirilenko said. "We just kind of stopped. Probably we just lost it. Kind of stuck firing."

"If we could have kept going we would have made a better game," added 19-point team-high scorer Carlos Boozer, who missed out on a double-double for just the second time this season. "But they shot the lights out."

The Pacers indeed did that, finishing 57.9 percent from the field — a Jazz opponent high for the season.

Rather than dwell, though, on all Indiana did well — dishing nine more assists, committing two fewer turnovers, pulling down four more rebounds, shooting nearly 11 percent better, getting a game-high 25 points from Mike Dunleavy and a game-high 13 assists from Jamaal Tinsley — Sloan focused mostly on what went wrong for the Jazz.

"It's mindboggling to me," he said, "that we wouldn't have a little bit more energy to play than what we had.

"They just manhandled us all night long," Sloan added. "We weren't even in the ballgame except we made four or five plays there to start the second half. That was about it."

It was, so much so the Jazz coach sat each of his five starters for the entire fourth quarter.

Indiana went into that final period up by 25 thanks to a 16-3 run late in the third, and by the time Sloan called C.J. Miles and Ronnie Price from the end of his bench with 9:10 remaining (and Utah down by 25) it was apparent he had seen enough.

"They," Sloan said of the Pacers, "looked like they were having fun playing. We looked like we were really bored by it."

Bored, and broke.

---

E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com