It wasn't a great night for the Portland Trail Blazers against the Utah Jazz on Thursday night.

More specifically, it wasn't a great night for the Blazers' starters.

The Jazz led Portland by as many as 32 points after an abysmal night on both sides of the ball from the Blazers starting unit before Portland's bench rallied the team to a “looks much closer than it actually was” 122-114 loss.

Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups summed it up postgame, “Defensively, we were horrible.”

It was just one of those nights for the Blazers. Shaedon Sharpe shot 1-12. Anfernee Simons went 3-8. Matisse Thybulle 1-5. DeAndre Ayton was 7-13 but limited to 20 minutes of action after having to go back to the locker room to have his troublesome right knee checked out before reentering the game.

Toumani Camara was a lone bright spot offensively among the Trail Blazers starters. He finished with a career-high 18 points with three 3-pointers on 7-10 shooting.

But even then, Camara struggle defensively as much as anyone else in a Blazers uniform as Utah got whatever they wanted. The Jazz shot 56 percent through the first three quarters and racked up an impressive 72 points in the paint.

Billups was not pleased with his team's effort, “We're trying to establish ourself as a defensive-first team. And it's been a couple games, to be honest with you, when we start getting a couple of our offensive players back and it looks so sweet and cute out there when we're making shots. But that's not who we are. That's not who we're trying to be. We're a defensive team. We've got to get stops in order for us to play well. I thought our starting unit, they got us off to a very poor start, defensively. [The Jazz] were just blowing our doors off the entire time. Could never get control of them. We tried every defense we had, and nothing worked.”

That certainly explains Billups' reasoning for pulling the starters late in the third quarter. End of the bench reserves Skylar Mays and Kris Murray played 16:43 on Thursday night. Duop Reath played 12:41 despite Moses Brown earning the initial backup center minutes in the game.

Said Billups, “It led to all of [the starters] getting sat down. There comes a point where, sh*t, I don't want to keep looking at that. I'd rather let the young boys get out there and play and scrap. They came in and played the right way. Played hard, did the best they could. I was willing to run out of timeouts to get them rest but keep them in the game.”

After briefly being a top-10 defense this season, the Blazers have slipped to 16th in points allowed per 100 possessions, according to Cleaning The Glass. Some of that may be slippage. Some of it may be Ayton being absent or hampered for the past several games. And some of it may be Anfernee Simons rejoining the lineup after returning from thumb surgery.

But Billups is correct that this group of players needs to hang their hat on playing defense in a connected, scrappy way. With players like Camara, Ayton, and Thybulle in the rotation, there's little excuse for a performance like Friday's other than, sometimes games like these just happen.

The Blazers will need to turn it around quickly. Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks visit Moda Center on Saturday. Then Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors are in town on Sunday.