Utah Jazz team preview

the jazz were a bit of a suprise last year if you only consider their two most recent iterations and forget the grandmaster that is jerry sloan.
frankly, he looks like he was hit in the face with a folding chair at a 45 degree angle; his nose perfectly continues the slant of his forehead in an almost cartoonish way. also, he's a bit of a racist asshole in the same way that all old ball coaches are. i don't mean racist in the way that he hates black people, because come on, it's not like he can avoid them in his line of work. i mean racist like if you come to practice wearing a gold chain...

just don't come to jerry sloan's practice wearing a gold chain, aight?

bottom line, he knows how to make a basketball team win some damn games. even when his supposed "best player" (the awesomely nicknamed AK47) is shitting the bed like a 96-year-old never nervous pervis he still squeezes a 51 win season out of his team. not as though the rest of the team is a bunch of slouches--boozer has overcome his negative karma from pulling the rug from under the cavs blind owner, memo okhur has let his wife show him the way to clutch greatness, and deron williams is staking a claim as the next great power guard (baron davis, sit down.)

but maybe that collection doesn't win 51 games in any other hands than jerry sloan's gnarled old ones. say what you will about him, he knows how to coach basketball.

that's why they could be headed to a better season than their last. forget all the other western conference teams, the jazz have a legit chance to add 3-4 wins to their record, which none of the others can claim. in a season where most of the teams are idling or in reverse, the jazz could be moving forward simply because of the logical progression of their talent. deron williams will only get better with age, same goes for ronnie brewer who will hopefully take the 2 guard spot for his own.

pretty much every other team in the conference has stood still, and none of them boast the promising youngsters that the jazz do. especially after they lose derek fisher, who was secretly dead weight as a shooter that can't really shoot the rock at all.

mark them down to keep the 4 seed, especially with kirilenko having a possible rebound campaign and maybe morris almond stepping up as this year's under-the-radar rook.

prediction 53-29, first in northwest division

your playoffs stink

my nba fandom is seriously in the at-risk category. if my fandom were a species it would be: endangered.

the warriors getting bounced was bad enough, although i can kind of rest easier at night knowing that they were done in by a team captained by the kind of hard-nosed visionary that deserves to have won more than zero championships in his career. i'm even willing to look the other way as every single replay showed carlos boozer shoving warriors in the back as he went for rebounds.

THAT'S OK BY ME.

as long as the players themselves are deciding the series, shit i can tolerate the disney-movie-villainy that the jazz call playoff basketball. the warriors WERE like an all-black disney movie, with matt barnes being the prodigy that nellie must save from himself. etc. i'm pretty disappointed in myself that i never saw the parallel sooner but c'est la vie.

on the other hand, the suns were done in by stupidity in the league office. yes, i'm aware that leaving the bench mandates a one-game suspension but jesus h: it's the playoffs. if anything, suspend them for the first game of the regular season or fine the shit out of them but don't take amare stoudemire out of the biggest series of the playoffs. STAT could have saved us from this hellish fate: four teams we can't help but rooting against battling it out for eventual supremacy.

i guess i have to root for the jazz and cavs, but in all probability we're looking at detroit and san antonio taking turns hosting the nba finals. just shoot me.