By Paul M. Banks
You’ve heard the term “NBA hell” before?
It describes a franchise just good enough to make the playoffs every year, but never get past the first round. Teams like this are also not bad enough to qualify for the lottery, and possibly win the chance to land a franchise player. This is where the Utah Jazz reside; sort of.
They’re a 53 win team with a lottery pick (they possess the Knicks’ selection). However, it’ll take more than a stellar rookie to help this team get past the New York Yankees of basketball next postseason. Utah’s needs a seismic change to occur in both the Los Angeles Lakers and the Western Conference landscape. Otherwise, this is a team running in place on a treadmill.
As soon as I saw the Jazz matched up with the Los Angeles Lakers yet again this postseason, I wondered if I should even watch a minute of that second round series. After the Lakers eliminated the Jazz in both ’08 and ’09, the outcome (a four game sweep this time) was more certain than the ending in a big-budget Hollywood action film. You’ll see the villain kill James Bond before you see the Jazz take down the Lakers. And I’m sure that in Salt Lake City, Kobe and co. are considered more evil than Dr. No and Goldfinger combined. The Jazz need to find a way somehow add a third big piece to their nucleus (which will looks nearly impossible given their cap situation), or consider blowing the roster up and rebuilding around star point guard Deron Williams (a somewhat likely scenario).
Otherwise, the end result will be yet another mind-numbingly boring playoff series; exactly like the one that just concluded.
2010-11 Projected Depth Chart:
C: Mehmet Okur/Kosta Koufos/Kyrylo Fesenko
PF: Carlos Boozer/Paul Millsap
SF: Andrei Kirilenko/C.J. Miles
SG: Wes Matthews/Kyle Korver/Othyus Jeffers
PG: Deron Williams/Ronnie Price/Sundiata Gaines
NBA Free Agents:
Fesenko (UFA)
Matthews (UFA)
Boozer (UFA)
Korver (UFA)
Jeffers (UFA)
Gaines (UFA)
2009-10 Team Salary: Approximately $54.8 million
2010-10 Expected League Salary Cap: $61 million
NBA Offseason Needs:
1. Super Size me – The always blunt head coach Jerry Sloan lamented his team’s lack of size. “Even when we’re healthy with our bigs, we’re small.” And you have to feel for him, or any guy coach forced to start Kyrlyo Fesenko in an actual NBA game. Injuries in the postseason to AK-47 and Mehmet Okur only worsened the situation when it counted the most. And we all saw how the Lakers DOMINATED the Jazz on the front line. Los Angeles is a gargantuan roadblock for Utah exactly like the Detroit Pistons were for the 1980s Chicago Bulls.
If Carlos Boozer walks, concerns over depth will get even worse. He looked vastly undersized in the LAL series, and he’s certainly not actually the 6-8 he’s listed to be. However, the team believes Paul Millsap can step in and provide Booze’s front line scoring and rebounding. That idea has some validity; but Millsap is at least an inch or two shorter than Boozer. So Utah needs to embrace the cliché “go big or go home,” as every postseason they “go home” when they encounter L.A. I hate to belabor this point, but I have to until they can do something about it.
2. I’ll see you in Health! What is up with this team and injuries the past two seasons? Kirilenko, AK-47, Kyle Korver missing half the season, and even Williams was out for a few more games than usual. And then there’s the team’s second biggest weapon, Carlos Boozer. “The Scores Report” summed it up best:
“The 28-year-old forward averaged 20-11-3 this season and shot 56% from the field. Of course the Jazz want him back, right? Not so fast. This was one of Boozer’s “healthy” years. He appeared in 78 games, which marks just the fifth time in eight years that Boozer has played in 52-plus games.”
3. A Third Piece – Deron Williams made his first All-Star appearance and second all-NBA team appearance last season. D. Will is the premier player on this team, and he is currently running the point better than anyone in the league right now. He, along with Boozer, manifests a star point guard-power forward combination reminiscent of John Stockton-Karl Malone.
But those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Stockton-Malone reached their primes in the early ’90s, not the late ’90s. The reason the Jazz team won the Western Conference in ’97 and ’98 was only because every other West team had declined in power by then. The Jazz weren’t at their best when Malone and Stockton were in their primes, they just got lucky (in a sense, because if they were really lucky they would have somehow beaten Michael Jordan) that no one else was good enough by that point. I mean how many other legitimate NBA Finals teams have had to start a useless waste of space like Greg Ostertag?
Had Stockton and Malone ever played with that elusive third piece, they might have won it all. The Jazz have only one losing season in the last 27 years. They have the best coach in league history never to have won it all. However, they won’t find a higher ceiling without a legitimate third star.