Jazz Doesn’t Need Another Early Exit : NBA playoffs: After last year’s stunning loss to the Warriors, Utah faces a tough matchup against the Suns.

This is a strange time for the Utah Jazz, who won a franchise-high 56 games but will open the NBA playoffs tonight with everything to prove.

Last season, the Jazz won a then-record 51 games, but were swept, 3-0, by the Golden State Warriors in a major upset.

That prompted talk that Coach Jerry Sloan might get fired. It also brought the drafting of swing man Blue Edwards--so that Utah could be more versatile against smaller lineups such as the Warriors’--and, more than anything, it fostered disbelief that the Jazz couldn’t win a game from a team that had gone 43-39.

“That made it easier to deal with as a fluke, if only for our acceptance,” owner Larry Miller said.

The first round calls again, and the Jazz has that disconnected look. Utah will begin the best-of-five series against the Phoenix Suns after staggering out of the regular season 5-8, a slump that cost the team the Midwest Division title--won by San Antonio--over the final weekend.

Another reason a quick exit by what is supposed to be one of the NBA’s strongest teams might not be such a surprise? The Jazz were 1-3 against the Suns during the regular season.

But if it does happen again to the Jazz, it could be devastating. When it lost last year, David Checketts, the former president and general manager, said that Miller wanted to fire Sloan but reconsidered the same day. Miller denied it then and denies it now.

Just the same, Sloan felt the heat. He had moved up when Frank Layden, among the most popular people in town, kicked himself upstairs to the front office a month into the season, and the playoff fiasco hardly endeared Sloan to the masses.

“I probably took as much heat as anybody,” he said. “I was out-coached in that situation. I was the fall guy, and I can handle that. Any time we lose, I figure I was out-coached.”

That these teams would play now makes the matchup even more interesting.

“It’ll be the first time in quite a while that a team won 50 games and didn’t have the home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs,” Sun Coach Cotton Fitzsimmons observed.

Better than that. It’s the first time since Chicago-Detroit in 1974 that two teams with at least 50 victories have met in the first round.

Chicago and Milwaukee also open their first-round series tonight at Chicago.

So what if the Bucks ended the regular season by winning seven of 10? So what if Ricky Pierce will probably be named the league’s best sixth man? The most important thing to keep in mind, besides Michael Jordan and his 33.6-point average, is that the Bulls have won 17 of their last 19 regular-season games against the Bucks, including four of five this season.

Chicago’s biggest concerns may be internal. Horace Grant and John Paxson are both unhappy about their salaries, and Grant has not been shy about speaking out. Just what a team needs heading into the playoffs.