San Antonio • There’s no denying the season hasn’t gone as planned for the Utah Jazz.

After losing 119-97 to the San Antonio Spurs on Monday, the Jazz fell to 1-6 — tied for the third-worst start in franchise history through seven games.

In a season the organization wanted to actually try and win games again, the Jazz have stumbled out of the gate — to put it lightly.

And after four years of rebuilding, patience among the fanbase is paper-thin.

Injuries to big men Jaren Jackson and Jusuf Nurkic have played a role, but the biggest issue is the inability to play 48 minutes of quality basketball.

The Jazz outscored the Spurs by a combined four points in the second and fourth quarters. The problem? San Antonio outscored Utah by 24 points in the other two quarters.

For this young team, a five-letter word — focus — is what it needs most.

“Understanding who we’re playing and what each game presents,” Jazz coach Will Hardy said after the game. “There’s execution that’s needed, and sometimes that means doing boring things over and over again in order to generate good shots. You know, we can’t get tired of doing the simple things.

“I believe so much in our team and in our program. I know the work that’s going into it. I see things translating onto the court that have been worked on a ton in practice, and we have to be able to sustain that execution for 48 minutes.”

To Hardy’s point, every game seems to bring some progress. The Jazz had only 11 turnovers and 17 fouls committed (both season lows) on Monday.

There’s the optimistic outlook.

The pessimistic one? Well, Utah shot 35% from the field. That continued this trend: Whenever it feels like the Jazz have something figured out, another issue surfaces and costs them winnable games.

After years of losing, figuring out how to win isn’t exactly easy.

Only five players on the roster have made the playoffs before, and two of them (Nurkic and Jackson) aren’t currently playing.

Hardy has tried to prepare this team for the harsh reality that this season would be filled with ups and downs. The players understand that too, but it’s another thing when the losing actually starts.

The players knew there would be challenges, but perhaps nobody expected the Jazz to be tested this much this early.

According to Keyonte George, Hardy even told the team before the season, “Prepare like you deserve to win.”

“You kind of sit back and try to figure out what does that mean?” George told The Salt Lake Tribune last week. “Once you start to realize the little communication that we have at shootaround, that’s feeling like we deserve to win — watching film, watching the guards’ one-on-one tendencies, knowing some of the team’s top plays.

“I think those are things that fall into the category of feeling like we deserve to win rather than I’m just good at basketball and we can go up-and-down the floor, and we should win. No, it’s a difference between we should win and we deserve to win.”

So far this season, it’s been neither.

Still, the locker room in San Antonio wasn’t filled with pin-drop silence or sunken faces after Monday’s loss. There was a reason for that: The team believes it will figure it out.

Seven games don’t make a season, and the players and Hardy think it’s only a matter of time before the tide turns and shots start to fall.

It almost feels like it’ll take just one win in which the Jazz play 48 minutes of good, consistent basketball for the season to turn around.

That’s what Brice Sensabaugh thinks — or at least hopes.

“I feel like we’re playing good basketball; we just got to find it for longer stretches,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. “It’s going to click. It happens for every team. It clicks. We just got to keep working and keep chipping away until we find that.

“You see it a lot, like the Knicks last year — they took it all the way to a championship. For some teams, like the team we just played, they got it a couple of years ago, and it’s been flowing ever since. We just got to keep fighting.”