Nothing like a swift kick in the reality to deflate the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade-sized balloons that have been trailing the Pacers bandwagon all week. Sure it was the second night of a back-to-back during the tail half of a West Coast road trip, but Utah just sent Indiana a clear, 110-88 message about the difference between a borderline contender and an up-and-coming team with some moxie. (I use the term “moxie” only because I bet that’s how Jerry Sloan would describe this squad.)

It wasn’t all bad. There was the second quarter. But the rest was indeed bad. Really bad.

Indy started off the game looking like they had just stepped off a plane. They turned the ball over repeatedly, didn’t close out on shooters and could not keep the Jazz off of the offensive glass. Even while letting Utah score basically at will early, Indiana did manage to keep up … for a while. Less than four minutes in, the Pacers tied it up at 12-12. Soon after, it was 12-23. And the Pacers would only score 5 more points over the next 8:30. Deron Williams set the tone with 9 points and 9 assists in the initial frame.

At that point, with the Jazz finishing the quarter more than doubling up the Pacers at 35-17, the game looked all but over. To their credit, however, Darren Collison and Danny Granger showed some good on-court leadership, pushing the team to such a good quarter that, at the half, Indy actually was out-shooting Utah 47.1% to 46.9% — this despite the fact that the Jazz posted a video-game-like rate above 60% in the first quarter.

But the Jazz would blow it open again in the third, flushing any hopes the team had down the toilet. DWill continued his good play (overall, he dropped 24 points and 16 dimes with 0 TOs while shooting 10-15), but the second half belonged to Utah front court, with Paul Millsap and Al Jefferson torching whoever was standing in between them and the hoop. AK-47, if inefficiently, even got in on the action. Millsap, Jefferson and Kirilenko finished with 16, 17  and 18 points, respectively, to go along with a combined 25 boards.

There were no real standouts individually for the good guys.

Collison definitely looked really good in the second quarter, but he faltered at times later, turning the ball over six times. It wasn’t just the total either; a few came just as the team was starting to put a few good possessions together and hoping to crawl back into the game in the late third. Danny Granger was an all-too-willing shooter early, several times using a few mere inches of space after a dribble hand-off to launch a three. One of his attempts from behind the arc fell. Five others did not. He finished 5-for-16 with 14 points. Pretty gross.

Roy Hibbert’s 6-for-8 line looks better on paper. He probably should have gotten more looks, and I’m sure people will be upset that the team didn’t go to him more down low. The thing is, though, he had trouble really getting good position, often being forced to a less-than-ideal spot to receive the ball in a good place for him to do much. He didn’t really force the issue either, which is odd considering that he has size and strength on Al Jeff, a guy not known for being a formidable post defender by any stretch of the imagination. Hard to pinpoint what went wrong. Roy looked a little tired perhaps. Long road trip and all maybe.

Mike Dunleavy, Brandon Rush and Josh McRoberts each had their moments of good and bad play. James Posey and TJ Ford were largely a waste of post-game-uniform-detergent.

But it really wasn’t about the individuals so much as one team aggressively hammering the glass and making a lot of mid-range shots. At first, it just seemed as though Utah was hot. But after a while, the more and more quality looks they had, you could see their confidence grow as they realized they had jumpers available whenever they wanted — and quite possibly a second or third chance if they missed. 19 offensive rebounds by a team that missed 53 shots is simply unacceptable. Tough to win that way — especially if you’re also going to turn the ball over 18 times (most of which came before the fourth quarter garbage time began).

Ultimately, this was all to be expected. It would be absurd to expect a team unaccustomed to having the label of being good to win three straight out West. Not in Utah against a Jazz squad playing as well as this team has been.

The best thing to takeaway from this is the second quarter, during which the Pacers didn’t lay down and die when they easily could have, and part of the third, when they also cut the lead down to single digits for one stretch that made it seem like the game was not already over.

On to the next one.

If you want to beat the Jazz, it seems like the best thing to do is not take a double-digit lead during the game. From November 6-13, Utah won five straight games in which they trailed by more than 10, coming back to defeat the Clippers, Heat, Magic, Hawks and Bobcats.

It was pretty insane.

And they haven’t slowed down since. After dropping two of their next three games, they have since won six in a row, including wins over Western Conference heavyweights New Orleans and Los Angeles (you know of which one I speak). If the Pacers recent success has made the league stand up and take note of them as perhaps the most overlooked good team in the preseason, the Jazz’s winning ways have made people begin to think of them as the most underrated title contender.

Deron Williams is the main reason. Averaging 22 pts and 10 assists per game, he — as he has done for years — makes the offense work. He lost long-time running mate Carlos Boozer to the Bulls in the offseason, but no matter; Paul Millsap has stepped in seamlessly, Al Jefferson brings even more scoring to the frontcourt and Andrei Kirilenko fills in the cracks, mainly providing versatile defense at any number of positions but also helping out with some scoring or shooting if need be.

All in all, this is going to be a tough game for Indy to win. It’s a back-to-back on the road in a tough building to play against a very good team. Still, fans should be less concerned with the final score than how the team plays. If they can just go out there and execute, not letting themselves get dominated by a better squad, that will be encouraging.

Then again, beating Utah tonight and then finishing off Phoenix on Friday to go 4-0 on this West Coast swing would be pretty nice today

Pacers vs Jazz By the Numbers

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Glossary: Offensive Rating | Defensive Rating | eFG% | Pace

What do you get when you cross a streaking home team that has a good offense and an average defense with a scuffling road team that has a terrible offense and an average defense?

The Pacers at the Jazz.

Utah has won it’s last three games and six of its last seven. Their slow start out of the gates is over. And on the other side, we have Indiana, which has lost its last three and six of its last seven. Their slow start out the gates has returned and essentially erased any modicum of hope that the team’s earlier five-game winning streak may have given fans.

How should we expect tonight’s game to go? You do the math.

As for personnel, Carlos Boozer has reverted to the 20/10 beast he was two/three years ago (and he’s again doing in on 55+% shooting). You can say he’s playing for a contract, you can say he’s abandoned lower-percentage fadeaways … but whatever you say, the message is the same: Boozer is a problem on the block, and the Pacers have no one outside of Jeff Foster, who is reportedly again nursing a banged up back after his other-worldly 18-rebound game on Wednesday, who can even consider stopping him.

Speaking of unstoppable players, Deron Williams certainly won’t be phased by TJ Ford. And after Monta Ellis strung him up for a career high and Tyreke Evans abused him all night despite foul trouble in the Pacers last outing, TJ better hope that Jim O’Brien finally realizes that Dahntay Jones and Earl Watson need to be the ones tasked with guarding the other team’s best penetrator. Ford just can’t do it, for reasons that have to do with both his size and his technique.

Unfortunately, that leaves Ronnie Brewer as the guy TJ would need to defend. Yeah. Good luck with that. Thus, it seems TJ will be left on an island with D Will, where his best strategy might be finding an empty bottle, writing a note and sending out an SOS.

Throw in a three-point shooting center in Mehmet Okur (currently shooting a Troy-Murphy-from-last-year-esque 45.2% from long range) who will give Roy Hibbert fits, and the Jazz are just a really tough match-up for Indiana. Remember that time last year that you tried to never think about again when Memo dropped a career-high 43 points on the Pacers? Hate to break it to you, but it actually happened. And, as I recall, he didn’t even have a particularly good second half that night.

Even when the defense does force a miss, the Pacer bigs will need to keep Paul Millsap off the offensive glass. A silver lining for Indy in that regard is that Millsap hasn’t been getting to the boards that much this year, but he remains capable of creating 5 to 6 extra possessions for his team on any given night.

The last thing I’ll be watching is Utah’s rookie reserve point guard Eric Maynor. I admittedly stopped having the time to watch NCAA hoops like four years ago, so my opinion on draft stuff isn’t particularly educated, but I saw Maynor play quite a few times at VCU and really wanted to see him in a Pacers uniform. And his per-minute numbers in this young season while backing up Deron have looked very good, so it will be interesting to see him up close for the first time.