Utah Jazz: Players examine effort after dose of humility

SALT LAKE CITY — Even when the Utah Jazz were on a hot streak earlier this season, outplaying expectations and climbing as high as No. 2 in the West, Raja Bell couldn't help but be concerned.

Sure, the standings were fun to look at and their record sparkled.

But the glitter that accompanied talk of being a playoff contender instead of a lottery team, he worried, might've been the NBA equivalent of fool's gold.

"We won some games early, but I tried to tell everybody that we had to take that with a grain of salt," Bell said after Tuesday's 111-85 loss at Oklahoma City.

"We caught a lot of teams playing without their best players — a lot of teams," he added with emphasis. "I hope that we didn't get too bigheaded and think that we're supposed to beat every team just because we're better than them. It seems like to me that we might have done that a bit."

Overconfidence can lead to lackadaisical effort and cutting corners, like not screening hard enough, getting sloppy on cuts, slacking on defensive rotations and being less mentally sharp.

And that, the Jazz have found out the hard, punch-in-the-gut way of late, can lead to getting beaten by poor teams and getting pounded by good ones.

That's especially true when teams are on the road and tired, which just happened to Utah in a confidence-draining 86-80 loss at four-win New Orleans and a season-worst 26-point defeat in Oklahoma City.

"We have to execute. We have to screen. We have to make the right basketball play," said Bell, in his 12th NBA season. "When we are not doing that, we are not good enough to beat a lot of good teams."

Or, sometimes, bad teams (see: Raptors, Knicks, Hornets).

On the other hand, Bell added, "when we do that, we are."

Another Jazz veteran noticed similar troublesome signs of slacking and focus issues, resulting in upstart Utah losing seven of nine games.

Key reserve and leader Earl Watson insisted that embarrassing losses to less-talented teams, like the Hornets, "don't just happen overnight." Watson believed that demoralizing defeat, which still stings worse than Tuesday's OKC meltdown, had been building up.

Not giving your all, he added, eventually catches up. It can grasp you 24 hours after a seemingly big win a la Memphis.