Utah Jazz show plenty of fight, but Spurs burst their bubble at the end

Not to leave out the Spurs' superiority over the Jazz inside where they outscored the home team 50-28 in the paint, once again dominating an area where Utah usually excels.

Corbin credited the Spurs' defense for pressuring the ball at the point, for making Jazz perimeter players force passes from bad angles and for effectively fronting, bumping and denying the Jazz bigs the ball down low where they like it.

It didn't help that the Jazz missed 12 of their 26 free throws, only got nine points from starting wings Gordon Hayward and Josh Howard and shot an ice cold 40.4 percent in their own building.

On top of that, Utah finally got big games from Harris and Big Al, both near no-shows in San Antonio, but saw that and big bench efforts from Derrick Favors (15 points, 11 rebounds) and Alec Burks (11 points) go for naught.

"It's going to take more than one or two of us to have good games," said Harris, who only had 12 points total in this series coming into this game. "To beat this team it's going to be a full, full-out effort."

While they played better, that wasn't good enough for a bounce-back victory.

"We just try to limit everything they do well," Parker said. "We know they're very good in transition. We know that they're going to crash the boards and go hard to the offensive boards, and so we try to make sure we control all the stuff that makes them good."

Parker didn't think the Spurs succeeded at that in the first half. However, when it really counted in the second half, Parker said, "We did a lot better."

Added Corbin: "At a certain point of time, you've got to pick up the intensity and they did a little better than we did tonight."

NOTES: Game 4 will tip off at 6 p.m. Monday. … The Jazz fell to 9-2 all-time in home playoff games against San Antonio. … Utah is 22-24 all-time and 14-10 in elimination games.

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