SALT LAKE CITY — The final score was close. The game rarely felt like it.

“That’s three really bad quarters of defensive effort,” Jazz coach Will Hardy said following his team’s 134-132 loss to Portland on Wednesday.

And that might even be underselling it.

One of the most pleasant surprises of the early season has been Utah’s newfound ability to defend. A team that spent the last two years as the worst defensive team in the league has looked proficient — heck, even good — on that end of the floor over the first three games of the season.

At least, until the Trail Blazers came to town.

Portland drove into the paint with little resistance, scoring over 30 points in each of the first three quarters, including a 46-point outburst in the second quarter. The Blazers led by as much as 22 points before the Jazz made a late push — led by two players out of the rotation — to nearly steal a victory at the end.

Yes, Elijah Harkless and Cody Williams deserve their flowers for how they changed the game, immediately bringing more intensity to Utah’s perimeter defense and allowing the Jazz to get the game to one possession in the closing minute.

But, for Hardy, the first three quarters were at the forefront of his mind following the loss.

“Playing well one night means nothing in this league,” Hardy said. “It’s an every-night business, and there we have way too many guys who tonight in the first three quarters just did not do their jobs and did not compete at a high enough level.”

Hardy said the defensive game plan revolved around limiting straight-line drives. He talked to the team about it at shootaround on Wednesday morning and reiterated the point just before tip-off.

But once the game began, Utah rolled out a red carpet for the Blazers.

Portland scored 44 points in the paint through the first three quarters and used those drives to generate a variety of open 3-pointers.

Portland was 21-for-55 on the night from 3-point range.

“It’s a good learning moment for our team,” Hardy said. “I do appreciate the fight. I thought the fourth quarter, again, those two guys coming in really changed the feel of the game for us. But it’s too late. I’ve talked in the last couple of years about the difference between a survival instinct and a killer instinct, and we have to channel that much more than we did.”

So how does a team develop a killer instinct?

“That’s a hard one,” Hardy said. “When it’s all going good and all the shots are going in, it’s easy to act a certain way; but when you face some adversity, when it’s going to be really hard and you have to dig in to get it done, I think it reveals who the vicious competitors are, and we need more of those.”

On Wednesday, it seemed like they had only had two. Harkless and Williams played nearly the entire fourth quarter, which the Jazz won by 17 points.

The duo only combined for 5 points, but it was their defense that flipped the game. The two got into ball handlers, forcing errant passes and even drawing fouls.

Portland was held to just 19 points in the final frame, which gave the Jazz a chance at the end; they just ran out of time. In the end, Kyle Filipowski intentially missed a free throw with 3.9 seconds left, but Utah couldn’t get the rebound.

“It’s a huge confidence boost, and an honor that he trust me enough to play at the end of the game,” Williams said. “I don’t take that for granted. It kind of pushes you even more to play hard. EJ felt the same way, you can tell by how he was guarding.”

So will that energy lead to more time for the duo on Friday in Phoenix?

“We’re gonna have to go back and watch the film,” Hardy said. “We’ll talk about it as a staff, and we’ll make that decision.”

A perfect world, though, would see the rest of the team follow their lead.

“If we can continue to sit down on that side of the ball, lock in on our schemes, and really take pride, we’ll be that team that we were on opening night every single night,” George said.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.