On the 5th day of Christmas, the Utah Jazz gave to me…

Western Conference Finals

With the Jazz slumping going into the playoffs, their run to the WCF had to be one of the most improbable in recent history.

Although they had the number four seed as winners of the Northwest Division, they lost home court advantage to the soaring Rockets in the final week of the season. In fact, they would play the Rockets in eight straight games, including the last game of the regular season.

So after dropping the first two in Houston , the Jazz headed home having never won a playoff series in which they were down 0-2. After an ugly game 1, Carlos Boozer made a small adjustment when being guarded by Yao. By getting a little more arc to his shot, he could pull the 7′ 6″ center away from the basket and shoot over him. Doing this made Yao guard against Boozer’s jump shot. And when Yao came out to guard him, Boozer would simply go right by. The series went 7 games, and the Jazz, who had lost 17-18 of their last road games in the playoffs, sent McGrady home in tears with a 103-99 win at Houston.

Up next, the rascally boys from Golden State. In one of the greatest upsets in playoff history, and not just in the NBA, the Warriors had knocked off the golden boys from Dallas in the first round. Besides not having to play the Mavs in the second round, the Jazz were also gifted with home-court advantage.

And here’s point 697 why in the NBA, match ups are everything. You see it almost every night where a good team gets beaten by teams that have no business winning most nights. Yet because of mis-matches created now with combo guards and combo forwards, some teams just don’t have the personnel or play type where they don’t play well against inferior teams. Would the Mavs have played better against the Jazz? Probably. But right after the Warriors were coming into the Jazz series with all the momentum and confidence in the world, they ran into a brick wall.

The Jazz manhandled the Warriors in five games. The series gave us cheap shots from Davis and Baron’s dunk over AK (which is still all you hear about from the series). But overshadowing almost the whole thing was Derek Fisher’s storybook return to game 2 . Of course at the time, no one knew that it would lead to his defection, but it was a moment to be remembered in Jazz history.

So the Jazz were off to the Western Conference Finals, their first trip since the push-off of 1997-98. Here they met the harsh reality that is the San Antonio Spurs. The Spurs won the series 4-1, with the one victory coming in game 3 at Utah (at which I was at in person, keeping my undefeated attending streak in tact. I’m now 5-0 lifetime). And I was just reading my game five preview, in which contained some inspired foreshadowing concerning family vacations. After the game 5 loss, both Williams and Boozer took shots at teammates for not having heart and for planning family vacations before the series was over.

Those comments would lead to an ugly off-season by the Jazz…