After four straight losses, Quin Snyder and the Jazz conclude they have an effort problem

Boston • Quin Snyder was blunt in assessing the current the state of the Utah Jazz.

Snyder knows they aren’t the Houston Rockets or Golden State Warriors, or even the Cleveland Cavaliers. They aren’t good enough to simply show up and win games. To win, Snyder said after Wednesday’s loss to the lowly Chicago Bulls, the Jazz have to be engaged physically and mentally. Even small lapses will lead to defeats.

The problem of late is they haven’t been. Heading into Friday night’s matchup at the Boston Celtics, the Jazz have lost four straight games, each defeat more eye-opening than the last. Losing to Oklahoma City on the road and Houston at home? That’s expected. Losing to Milwaukee on the road? Hey, the Bucks were a hot team at the time.

But there’s little excuse to losing to the Bulls. The Jazz know that’s unacceptable.

“We need to play better to win, obviously,” Snyder said. “We have to be better at the defensive end. We have to be more stingy, and we haven’t been there.”

For a Jazz team stuck at 13-15 with a brutal upcoming schedule, the questions are many. Why aren’t they defending well? Why have there been lulls in concentration? The answer among players is a unifying one: The effort hasn’t been consistent from quarter-to-quarter, even possession-to-possession.

And that was Snyder’s message to the team on Wednesday night. The Jazz have to claim more loose balls. They have to know the scouting report, and not surrender easy 3-point looks to good shooters like Bulls forward Nikola Mirotic. They can’t give teams like Chicago eight points worth of buzzer-beating shots and expect to win.

“At some point we’re going to have to figure out we’re a defensive team, or we won’t win anything,” Utah center Rudy Gobert said. “We have stretches where we play well defensively. We have stretches where we don’t rebound, we don’t get stops. We have to be more consistent.”

Utah’s margin for error this season is razor-thin. Last season, they could lapse for a quarter against the lesser teams, turn the defense on for a few quarters and walk away with a win. The Jazz don’t have that luxury this season, and it’s cost them in games like Wednesday’s.

At Chicago, the Jazz were passive and it showed. Chicago took 14 more free-throws. The Bulls were quicker to 50-50 balls. As guard Rodney Hood said, the Bulls were comfortable and simply fought harder than Utah did.

When April rolls around, if the Jazz are on the playoff tightrope, or if they miss the postseason, they are currently building a resume for the reasons why. Chicago marks the third bad loss of the year for Utah — defeats to the Phoenix Suns and Brooklyn Nets are the other two — and the Jazz don’t have many great wins to counter that.

That’s the mark of how inconsistent the defense has been. On paper, the Jazz are still fifth in the NBA in overall defensive rating. But they aren’t getting defensive stops when they need them. And when they are forcing misses, they are giving up offensive rebounds in key spots.

“We’re playing in spurts, and we have to change that,” Utah guard Ricky Rubio said. “We have a two or three minute stretch where the defense is what we want, and where we’re getting stops. And then, it just changes and we don’t play well. We have to be more aggressive in a lot of areas.”

There are a few positives. Jazz rookie Donovan Mitchell continues to be impressive. He scored 32 against the Bulls, and has become Utah’s leading scorer, averaging 17.8 points per game.

Hood came back and looked like himself, scoring 15 points off the bench. He told The Tribune, however, that his ankle is about 70 percent, so he’s not fully healthy. The Jazz figure to get Joe Johnson back on Friday in Boston. He went through shootaround on Wednesday, but was held out of the loss to Chicago.

But with the current losing streak, and the schedule that awaits, the Jazz are in a difficult spot. The season is still young. But the possibility exists that the Jazz could be in a big hole come the new year, one they will have to work hard at digging out of.

“We’ve got to figure out how to play 48 minutes,” Gobert said. “We all have to focus on the little things, boxing out, spacing, communication. All of those are little things that will make us better.”