Let the games begin

Now, as to the Lakers’ upcoming series against the Portland Trail Blazers . . .

Oh, right, that would be the second round, and neither team is out of the first round yet.

And look who’s coming to dinner, after all, ticked to the max at the notion that it is supposed to be the pumpkin pie with the whipped cream.

If Utah Jazz Coach Jerry Sloan called his team’s chances against the Lakers in the first round “pretty bleak,” he didn’t actually concede.

It wasn’t a mind game. Sloan doesn’t dabble in psychology, may not know Sun Tzu from Bruce Lee, and deals in brutal candor, the operative word being “brutal.”

Nevertheless, it worked great.

If no one in the West scares the Lakers, the last three teams they wanted to see were the rising Trail Blazers, the wily San Antonio Spurs and the physical Jazz.

Now, Utah looks like a walkover with its players stung by their coach’s rebuke and dire predictions from coast to coast, including the coast of the Great Salt Lake, with a headline in the Salt Lake Tribune proclaiming:

“They’re toast.”

They may be in a week, but they aren’t yet.

The Jazz fights on, even if it doesn’t want to, as in Tuesday’s humiliating loss to the Lakers, when Sloan left his starters in to be humiliated.

“Even as you saw tonight, Coach [Sloan] didn’t take those guys out of the game until three minutes to go,” said Derek Fisher, who played for Sloan two seasons ago, afterward.

“They’re just not going to quit.”

They’re not merely gallant. Against tremendous odds, dollar for dollar and pound for pound, this old-school operation is one of the best the NBA has ever seen.

The Jazz doesn’t have a billionaire owner like Portland and Indiana, never had a No. 1 pick like the Spurs’ David Robinson and Tim Duncan, and until recent years, was the last place many NBA players wanted to go.

Meanwhile, it has one losing record in 27 years.

In the last 12, it has been to two NBA Finals and four Western Conference finals, while turning over its entire roster.

With one coach for 21 of the 30 seasons since the move from New Orleans, the Jazz is wholly identified with Sloan and mirrors his gaunt, hollow-cheeked hunger.

This is hardly a good time, with their season-ending 2-7 nose dive into the Lakers’ laps suggesting they have issues, but they’ve seen worse.

As much as they miss their passionate everyman owner, the late Larry Miller wasn’t above second-guessing Sloan and once looked as if he might fire him.

“Hot” Rod Hundley, the venerable broadcaster, says it took a visit from Karl Malone and John Stockton, telling Miller that if he fired Sloan, “We’re outta here.”

As recently as the dark-as-night 26-56 season in 2004-05, Sloan, who surprised everyone by staying after Stockton and Malone left, wondered whether he stayed too long, noting, “When your players stop listening to you, you’re done.”

Then they got Deron Williams in that 2005 draft and were back in the Western finals by 2007.

“We talked about remodeling, not rebuilding, when we did this three or four years ago,” General Manager Kevin O’Connor said. “We knew what we were trying to get to. . . .

“I don’t think we’ll ever be in a situation again where we’ll have two guys play 18 years together and miss 38 games, total -- and some of those were suspensions by Karl.

“I think because the last couple of years we’ve been successful, people look at us and say, ‘They’re a good veteran team.’

“Well, through most of the year, we started four guys under 24 years of age.”

Living legend or not, Sloan now is asked why he won’t sit the struggling Carlos Boozer, amid speculation that Boozer will opt out this summer and that the team is OK with extending Paul Millsap to assume his role.

This led to an animated response from Sloan, who’s usually scary enough when he’s merely taciturn.

“That’s like taking Karl Malone and he’s missed -- he never missed any games -- but say he missed 40 games,” Sloan said, “I’m going to sit him down and not play him?”

Realistic or not, that’s the standard Malone and Stockton left behind in Utah.

No one imagined they would even approach it again, but they brought in another great tandem, with Boozer, a 20-10 machine, although he’s anything but low maintenance, and Williams, a Hall of Fame member in the making.

Where this leads, nobody knows, but first they have a series against the Lakers.

“I just thought it was an interesting transition, to have those two guys leave and see what happened,” Sloan said last week of the second phase of his coaching career.

“But that’s what makes it exciting. It’s like having guys out of the lineup. We played Golden State the other night, they had seven guys and they came in our place and kicked our butt. I think that’s what’s good for basketball.”

The towering Lakers, who played the game over the Utah players’ heads Tuesday, may turn out to overmatch the Jazz, and a lot of teams better than it is, but before you can shock the world, you have to be determined to shock the world.

Right now, the Jazz players just want to know, who you calling dessert?

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mark.heisler@latimes.com