Jazz Showing Signs of Improvement

<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Their three-game winning streak was snapped Friday in New Orleans. Their spirit was sapped by a Sunday loss in San Antonio.
Still, the Jazz see light.
A flicker here. A glimmer there.
They have only 20 wins in 59 outings with 23 games still to go this season, but there is something of a shine nonetheless in what not long ago had been quite an abyss.
"I can see we're getting better," forward Andrei Kirilenko said after losing what easily could have been a win over the Spurs. "Much better."
"We're playing much, much better than we were," co-captain Matt Harpring added. "I don't think there's a question."
Even coach Jerry Sloan, who likes losses about as much as he would having his mouth washed out with soap, can stomach the Jazz's play of late.
"They're playing hard," he said.
"If they learn how to play hard all the time, and try to move it up a little bit," the Jazz coach added, "then they can eventually work this thing out to where they can be a good basketball team."
How good probably won't be known until sometime next season.
For now, though, not all hope is lost.
"There's been some things that we couldn't do at the beginning of the year" that the Jazz are doing now, said Sloan, whose club opens a two-game homestand tonight at the Delta Center vs. Indiana. "We couldn't come close (then) to doing some of the things that we did against (the Spurs)."
That includes staying in games against great teams, for starters.
At San Antonio, the Jazz had the ball and a chance to tie with 40 seconds left before fumbling down the stretch.
"We're finding ourselves having chances to win in all these games, and sometimes in the past we were getting blown away in the fourth quarter," Harpring said. "Now, we're there. We just have to make the next step."
Completing that step, Sloan suggests, might begin with following the lead of a team like the NBA-leading Spurs.
"When you watch their team play, they do a great job of moving. When they move, they move hard," he said. "They move like they want the ball. They look like they want to help somebody get open. And when they do that, they have nice opportunities to get good passes, and people get open."
And the Jazz?
"We go through a stretch when things aren't going well," Sloan said, "and then we start to slow down."
Sloan ? who remains one win away from tying Red Auerbach for sixth place on the NBA's all-time regular-season coaching victories list with 938 ? wants all-out, all the time.
"That," he said, "is how you become a better team if you're not very good: playing hard, and trying to do the right thing."
It's a credo for the Jazz to follow, even if not for their own direct and immediate benefit.
"Especially right now, everybody looks at us differently. Because we have only 20 wins," Kirilenko said. "So everybody thinks, 'These guys are not going to play (hard).' But, I'm telling you, we'll be a pain for some teams."</div> Source