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"We suck. ... We suck."

-- Larry Miller, Jazz owner, April 2007.

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So here are the Jazz, 25 years after the "You Gotta Have Heart" playoff series captivated the state, looking completely like a team that's lost, struggling and simply searching for the finish line of a once-promising season.

Six weeks since they vowed to honor the memory of franchise owner Larry Miller, whose candid evaluations of his beloved team were based almost entirely on effort, the Jazz are playing with none of the passion Miller so valued.

They're done. There's no other way to view these guys, especially now that they have brought the Los Angeles Lakers upon themselves in a first-round playoff series.

No heart? That's too harsh. Yet there's no question that whatever qualities enabled them to overachieve for much of the season amid staggering injuries have gone missing at the most critical time.

For the Jazz to have finished 48-34, considering all the games that Carlos Boozer, Deron Williams and others have missed, is fairly impressive. But here's the illogical part: If they could go 24-17 in the first half of the season, when I credited Jerry Sloan and his staff with some of their best coaching ever, how could they go just 24-17 with a mostly healthy roster in the second half?

I never believed the Jazz were as good as their 12-game winning streak in February and March suggested, owing to scheduling advantages. I also never imagined they could look as bad as they do now.

Is this team fixable? Not soon enough, and certainly not against the Lakers.

The Jazz recovered from a late-season slump two years ago, when they had lost 12 of 18 games and given away home-court advantage against Houston in the playoffs. It was after the third-to-last game -- the equivalent moment of last Saturday's embarrassing loss to Golden State -- when Miller issued his succinct critique.

The Jazz responded with veteran guard Derek Fisher publicly answering Miller's criticism, and they played seven solid games against Houston before emerging and eventually reaching the Western Conference finals. Such a recovery seemed as unlikely then as it does now, which is why Sloan said this week, "We'll see where we are at the end of the year. Let everybody else be the prognosticators, try to judge. "

I will, thank you. After all they accomplished the past two seasons, competing in 29 playoff games and supposedly learning from the experience, the issue this spring is not whether the Jazz can win a series, it is whether they can win a game.

They battled the Lakers for six games in May, winning twice. After the first quarter of Game 1, the Jazz outscored L.A. by eight points for the series and gave themselves a chance in every game -- and that was with Boozer playing adequately only in Game 3.

So history would say this series will be competitive, but that's ignoring what has transpired recently. Everything's different now. Last year, the Jazz went 38-12 to close the regular season, then won the first two games of the playoffs in Houston. They're staggering now, having lost seven of nine games to fall from fifth to eighth in the Western Conference.

Tuesday, the Jazz gave up 125 points on 55-percent shooting against the Lakers, and that's nothing new. This Jerry Sloan-coached team cannot stop anybody, whether that's the fault of its design or the coach's failings or the players' lack of effort.

"I never had a coach in my life [who] could make me play harder," Sloan said.

Yeah, but he was Jerry Sloan, for goodness sake.

His players need something, and right away. Maybe this kind of dire, Woody Paige-style forecast will rally them. It happened 25 years ago, when the Jazz responded to the "no-heart" accusation by winning an elimination game in Denver and returned home to finish off the Nuggets at the old Salt Palace, where fans were issued heart stickers before the deciding game.

Can you picture a Game 6 against the Lakers at EnergySolutions Arena, with thousands of fans waving fresh, untoasted slices of bread?

I can't, either.

kkragthorpe@sltrib.com