Utah Jazz have taken page from Celtics' book

SALT LAKE CITY — They limped into Boston 3-4, a disappointing loss to Sacramento already a blotch on their resume, a narrow victory at New York having come just two nights earlier.

It was last Nov. 11, a Wednesday, and there was no telling which direction the Jazz were headed.

They lost that night, too, falling 105-86 to the Celtics, further concerning those who cared most.

Afterward, point guard Deron Williams was boiling.

"Right now," he said then, "we're soft. There's no way around it. We're not playing tough at all."

Jazz coach Jerry Sloan fumed, too.

"We looked like we never played a game that difficult — and it wasn't a lot of fun to watch," he said that night.

Sloan subbed out two-time NBA All-Star Carlos Boozer just four minutes and 23 seconds into the game, and 3:42 into the third quarter.

And he subbed out one-time All-Star Mehmet Okur for sporadically used backup Kyrylo Fesenko at the same time of the third, making a statement with obvious implications.

"The rough route," Sloan said at the time, "is stay in there, set screens and defend better. And then the rest of it will come to you. If you're tough enough. If you aren't tough enough, they just keep burying you."

And the Celtics, at least on that night, kept burying them.

On his since-closed Twitter accounted, Williams vented.

"We got to change something bc (because) what we doing ain't working right now!" he tweeted. "Don't know what but something?????" Later the same evening in Boston, Williams went to dinner with some teammates.

The next morning — before practice in the basement gym at Suffolk University, a small college in the city where the floor shines and tough kids play for the love of the game — Williams shared some of what was said.

"We looked at Boston, and, you know, Paul Pierce has 10 points (actually 13 by game's end), K.G. (Kevin Garnett) has 10 points (actually 18), Ray Allen has 10 points (actually 15), (Rajon) Rondo has 14 points, somebody else has 12 points — and they're on the bench happy," Williams said. "They don't care who ... gets the glory. They just want to win. Until we figure that out, we're not gonna be a good team."

Flash forward a little more than four months later.