SALT LAKE CITY — As bad as they’ve played at times, it might come as a surprise that the Utah Jazz can even their record with a win tonight.

One guy that won’t get in their way: 7-foot Andrew Bogut .

The Milwaukee Bucks center and former University of Utah star is not with the team and won’t play tonight because of personal matters.

Mike Dunleavy (groin pain) and Ben Udrih (left shoulder pain) will also miss the Jazz-Bucks game.

“We have an opportunity to improve our record to 3-3 tonight, but it’s not going to be easy,” Jazz coach Tyrone Corbin said after his team’s morning shootaround. “Milwaukee’s a good ball club. We’re going to have to compete against them as if they’re coming in here to win.”

Both the Jazz (2-3) and Bucks (2-2) are coming off of games Monday night. Milwaukee lost in Denver 91-86, and Utah edged New Orleans 94-90 at EnergySolutions Arena.

That location tidbit makes tonight’s showdown an anomaly. This is the first back-to-back set with two home games for the Jazz since Nov. 2008.

This was Utah fans’ only chance to catch an up-close-and-person glimpse of the former Ute standout, who is averaging 14.3 points and 10.0 rebounds this season.

Earlier today, Corbin credited Bogut for being a solid passer with strong low-post moves.

“He’s a versatile big guy who’s continued to get better and learned this game,” Corbin said.

This game (7 p.m. MT tipoff, ROOT Sports) will conclude a six-games-in-eight-nights beginning of the season for the Jazz. It’s also the second of three home games Utah has this week and one of 12 contests at ESA in January for the young team.

Utah will go with the same starters as Monday: Devin Harris, Raja Bell, Gordon Hayward, Paul Millsap and Al Jefferson.

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San Antonio • The Jazz’s locker-room door opened Saturday night and C.J. Miles sat hunched down in a chair, studying a box score, while Paul Millsap eyed rows of statistics over his teammates’ shoulder.

Utah had fallen 104-89 to the San Antonio Spurs. The Jazz shot just 37.1 percent from the floor, 12.5 percent behind the 3-point line, distributed only 11 assists and scored 21 points or less in the first three quarters.

With 9 minutes, 52 seconds left in the fourth, Utah (1-3) was down by 27 points and the team’s third blowout in four games to start the 2011-12 campaign was already in the books.

But what wasn’t in the box score were words such as effort, energy and communication. They were the same problems that plagued the Jazz during back-to-back road embarrassments to open the season. And they were the exact issues Utah coach Tyrone Corbin hammered home after watching San Antonio (3-1) run the Jazz out of the AT&T Center via a 20-8 second-quarter run that featured 11 consecutive points from Manu Ginobili, who scored a game-high 23 and drilled 5 of 6 3s.

Al Jefferson led Utah with a team-high 21 points and 11 rebounds, while reserve Josh Howard added 18 points and seven boards.

Corbin knows this will be an at times rough, at times joyous season for the Jazz. Utah’s young and rebuilding, but still trying to win games with veterans such as Devin Harris, Millsap and Jefferson. As a result, unpredictability will rein.

But the one thing Corbin’s squad can control is its nightly effort. And after seeing the Jazz lose three games by an average of 19 points – all featuring big-time, game-changing runs by the victors – consistent effort could be the one trait that keeps Utah moving forward even if defeats pile up.

“We need to keep searching for who we are. We just need to make sure we understand that we need to keep working to get better,” said Corbin, who kept the locker room closed longer than normal for the second game in the three contests.

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He added: “We just need to make sure the guys understand that it’s a long season. We need to stay together and work.”

Sticking together was again a familiar postgame refrain. Reserve forward Derrick Favors said it’s the Jazz’s primary problem when on-the-court play falls apart, while veteran backup point guard Earl Watson said Utah’s shown a tendency to cave when it falls behind on the road.

The Jazz have trailed by double-digits in all four games this season, and Utah had to come back from 13 points down Friday to knock off Philadelphia at home.

“We’re a different team on the road. It’s obvious, for whatever reason,” Watson said. “But you can’t sit there and look for the reason why. You have to look for the reason how to win on the road. First, we’ve got to start getting close.”

The Spurs made that goal almost impossible. San Antonio ran a shooting clinic during the first half, burning Utah on rotations that left the Jazz’s perimeter naked and allowed the Spurs to drain 80 percent (8 of 10) of their 3s.

After Utah was lifted by its youth movement Friday, Saturday was a replay of blowouts to the: poor defense, a methodical and lethargic offense, and energy that occasionally spurted but never became in vogue.

Now, the Jazz return to Salt Lake City staring at a cushion of 12 of 15 January games at EnergySolutions Arena. But two months of brutal road travel follows, and Corbin’s more concerned with his team’s progress and evolution than random home wins.

“It’s going to be up and down for a while until we get [settled],” he said. “It’s just not the way that you lose games – it means something the way we play in a losing ballgame. For the most part, the 48-minute effort that we’re looking for, we haven’t gotten in the losses.”

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SALT LAKE CITY — Get off the ledge, Jazz fans, and breathe easy. There’s no need to jump — your favorite NBA team is not gonna go 0-66 this season.

Not if Friday night’s effort is any indication of things to come.

After back-to-back beatings on the road, the Utah Jazz returned home and conjured up visions of glorious victories from the past with a gritty (and much-needed) 102-99 thriller over the Philadelphia 76ers at raucous EnergySolutions Arena.

It wasn’t clear whether Friday’s drama-filled win was one which brought about great joy or simply a sense of relief. After all, in their season-opener — a 25-point loss to the Lakers — the Jazz were The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. And in Game 2 — an ugly 17-point defeat at Denver — they looked like The Gang That Couldn’t Play Defense.

But in Game 3 on Friday night, they became The Gang That Refused to Lose at Home.

With four starters — Derrick Favors, Devin Harris, Gordon Hayward and Paul Millsap — scoring in double figures, and two of them — Millsap and Favors — coming up with double-digit rebounds as well, this lineup looked much more focused and cohesive than the one that got slapped around in those lopsided losses at L.A. and Denver.

And with critical contributions off the bench from Earl Watson, C.J. Miles, Josh Howard and Enes Kanter, the Jazz gave their fans a wonderful, albeit a little late, Christmas present — hope.

Hope that this team will rise above all those preseason predictions that have them languishing among the worst teams in the league.

As for now, though, it’s doubtful that any team in NBA history has ever been happier to be 1-2.

And Utah coach Tyrone Corbin was mighty glad to that first victory.

“We needed a win, first of all,” he said. “The first two games on the road, we didn’t really feel good about how we played.

“We made some mistakes again tonight, but I thought our energy level was up on the offensive end of the floor and defensively we did a great job communicating with each other. … The guys did a good job of not falling apart but coming together more and encouraging each other and pushing each other.

“We’re growing; we’re getting better,” Corbin said. “We’re still a young group of guys, and we’ll keep getting better, keep fighting and keep trying to figure it out. And as long as we stay together as a group, we have a great chance to get this thing worked out.”

Before the game, shooting guard C.J. Miles — who, at the ripe old age of 24, is the longest-tenured member of the team — thanked the fans “for sticking with us through the lockout” and commended them for being the “best fans in the NBA.”

DENVER — The Pepsi Center hoops appeared to be bigger than the ones at Staples Center.

Unfortunately for the Utah Jazz, that went both ways.

A night after their offense was nowhere to be found in a lopsided loss against the Los Angeles Lakers, the Jazz hit some shots and scored just fine.

But their defense disappeared.

Rotations, team help, effort and any chance at winning all evaporated in the thin Mile High air on Wednesday night, too.

The result was another embarrassing 117-100 blowout — this one by the Denver Nuggets.

“We have to get better. … We’ve had two tough losses,” said Jazz coach Tyrone Corbin, whose team lost by an average 21 points in back-to-back nights. “We’ve got to get back together and continue to work and fight. We’ve got to learn to trust each other on the defensive end of the floor and get it figured out.”

Utah did hit 48 percent of its field goals in Denver’s building after missing a whopping 61 shots while shooting 32 percent against the Lakers in an awful offensive showing, so there’s that.

But Denver had its way with Utah’s restructured defense, which resembled a church-ball team.

The Jazz gave up 68 points in the paint, allowed Nene to score 25 points, watched Andre Miller dish out 12 assists and Al Harrington drop in 18 points off the bench, cranked their necks as speedy Ty Lawson burst to the hoop time after time, helplessly permitted the Nuggets to shoot a sizzling 53.5 percent, and let the home track team run and jump all over, around and above them.

That was one long paragraph — and an even longer night — for a deficient defense.

Giving up lobs, drives, backdoor cuts and transition baskets disgusted Corbin.

“That’s unacceptable,” he said. “That’s just effort. That’s disappointing.”

The second-year coach had a longer-than-usual postgame chat with his team, taking an extra 10 minutes or so to try to impress on them the need to play harder and together.

Sure, they’re a work in progress. They’ve got an odd mix of inexperienced talent and capable veterans. But they lack an identity and consistency, with the offense and defense trading turns at stinking it up.

“We’ve got to get things figured out quickly,” Corbin said. “The effort we got for the most part today wasn’t satisfactory, so we wanted to have a discussion about it.”

Things started somewhat promising for Utah, which is in the midst of a rough six-games-in-eight-nights stretch.

Center Al Jefferson scored 10 of his team-best 19 points in the first quarter after missing 14 of 16 shots against the Lakers. But Utah’s starting five of Devin Harris, Raja Bell, Gordon Hayward, Derrick Favors and Big Al still didn’t completely click, falling behind 28-23 after the first 12 minutes.

SALT LAKE CITY — Back in the early 1960s, or about 20-30 years before most members of this Utah Jazz team were even born, there was this great television series called “Route 66.”

The TV show was about a couple of young men, Tod and Buz (and later a dude they called Linc for the series’ final season), two buddies who spent their time traveling around the country. They moved in and out of the lives of people, helping them deal with their various adversities as this Corvette-cruising couple of guys passed through various cities throughout America along “Route 66.”

Well, the Utah Jazz have their own version of “Route 66″ — an arduous schedule of 66 regular-season games, crammed into a four-month time frame because of the NBA owners’ lengthy lockout that essentially wiped out almost all of the preseason and most of the first two months of what would’ve been the 2011-12 regular season.

Much like those two young men back in the ’60s, the Jazz will be playing “Route 66″ as they’ll visit a couple-dozen cities among their 33 road games, most of them with just enough time to check into a hotel, go to the arena for shootaround, play the game that night and then quickly head for their next destination.

And now, instead of playing 82 games in a season stretching over almost six months, NBA teams will play 66 games in four months’ time. If you do the math, it only comes down to an average of about three more games a month than what they’ve typically played in the past. That may not sound like much, but it’s a schedule that offers them less rest, less time to bounce back between games, less time to recover from injuries and less time to prepare for the next opponent.

But on this “Route 66″ — a wild and rugged journey the Jazz hope will lead them to the NBA playoffs — there will no doubt be a few bad bumps and chuckholes in the road, maybe a blown tire or two, and plenty of need for a rest stop whenever they can find one. Don’t be surprised if they run outta gas along the way, too, maybe more than once.

And these guys won’t be able to call AAA for any roadside assistance, either.

“We want to compete as hard as we can every night we step on the floor,” Jazz coach Tyrone Corbin said. “Everything else will take care of itself.”

That seems to be the team mantra this season — come out and compete every night of the season because, with this team of role players and no real superstars to speak of, they can’t afford to take nights off.