SALT LAKE CITY — Deron Williams had hoped to quiet his former fans with a win Saturday night.
Instead, it was the Jazz, and the hometown fans, who had the last laugh.
Thanks to road-weary legs, a 3-point shooting barrage from Utah guard Randy Foye and sloppy ball-handling, the Nets found themselves on the short end of a 116-107 loss to the Jazz in front of 18,008 at Energy Solutions Arena.
After the Nets (42-31) took a 54-52 halftime lead, Foye went off, going 7-for-8 from behind the 3-point arc and finishing the game with 26 points on 8-for-9 shooting from long range to pace the Jazz (38-36), who shot 55 percent from the field as a team.
Though the Nets also finished the game over 50 percent from the field — they were led by 27 points from Brook Lopez, along with 20 from C.J. Watson — the combination of Foye’s 3-point shooting and 17 turnovers that led to 19 Jazz points doomed the Nets to a second loss in as many nights following their loss in Denver Friday.
The loss dropped the Nets to 4-3 on the West Coast portion of their eight-game, 17-day road trip, and sending them back East on a sour note.
In addition, it also put a severe dent in their chances of catching either the Knicks or Pacers for the second and third seeds, respectively, in the Eastern Conference. The Nets fell to five games back in the loss column behind the Atlantic Division-leading Knicks and four behind the Pacers with just nine games remaining.
But the story of the night was Williams returning to face his former team for the second time in Utah. Williams acquitted himself well, finishing with 21 points and 11 assists in 35 minutes, but it wasn’t enough to keep him from dropping to 0-4 against the Jazz since the blockbuster trade that sent him to the Nets in 2011.
In an ironic twist, former Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, who regularly attends home games, was in the building to watch his former team go up against his former point guard.
Williams received a mixture of cheers and boos when he was introduced — a far cry from the thunderous round of boos he received in his last trip a year ago. Before the tip, he exchanged handshakes with several of his former teammates on the Jazz, including Utah’s starting big men Al Jefferson and Paul Millsap.
Once the game began, Williams was hit with a chorus of boos whenever he touched the ball, though the fans seemed to forget about doing so as the game went on, to the point where it barely was audible in the second half.
But that didn’t stop the crowd from going wild late in the second quarter when Gordon Hayward blocked Williams’ fast-break layup. Williams nearly exacted a measure of revenge at the end of the first half when he faked out Hayward with a nice crossover dribble, but his 3-pointer at the buzzer was off.
Both teams seemed disinterested in playing any defense during the first quarter, as the Jazz took a 28-23 lead thanks to finishing the quarter a scorching 15-for-22 (68 percent) from the field, while the Nets weren’t far behind at 11-fof-18 (61 percent).
It then looked as if both teams — who also were in action Friday night, seemed to run out of gas in the second quarter, with the Nets managing to go into the halftime break with a two-point edge behind 17 bench points in the quarter from C.J. Watson, Andray Blatche and Kris Humphries before things went south in the second half.
tbontemps@nypost.com