Utah Jazz exhibiting personality of coach Jerry Sloan

SALT LAKE CITY — He is under contract to coach the Jazz through next season.

That bit of business was taken care of early last December, when Jerry Sloan — the fourth-winningest coach in NBA history and an inductee last year into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame — signed a one-year extension that will take him through a 23rd season in Utah.

Before deciding for certain if he actually plans to be back for 2010-11, however, Sloan will need some time this offseason to decompress and make sure that's what he really wants to do.

Just like usual.

"We'll see what happens," he said recently.

"I'll make that decision," added Sloan, who typically takes a couple of weeks or so to clear his mind and make the call, "and I won't hold anybody up in the process."

The way Utah has been playing lately, though, there is no known reason to hold Sloan back.

The Jazz — playing with the personality of the only head coach they've known most of the Oughts, all of the 1990s and even a pinch of the late-'80s — have won three straight games in its first-round NBA playoff matchup with the higher-seeded Denver Nuggets, and will take a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven series into Wednesday night's Game 5 at Denver.

Since losing Game 1 in Denver and a second would-be starter on the same night — center Mehmet Okur ruptured his Achilles tendon, joining small forward Andrei Kirilenko on the sideline — the Jazz have exhibited just what Sloan yearns to see most from his team.

That would be fight, and plenty of it.

Or, to be more precise, both a willingness and ability to fight back even after taking a particularly taxing blow or two.

"He just wants you to play hard and lay it all out there," point guard Deron Williams said. "I think we've done that for him.

"Even though we're a little shorthanded, we're still competing — and I think that's why we're winning basketball games right now."

The 68-year-old former Baltimore Bullet and longtime Chicago Bull — scrappier than he was skilled, he'll profess — has a pocket of critics who mostly hide behind the anonymity of screen names and sports-talk radio while suggesting he's been at it too long.