Build lead in third, turnover the ball and miss free-throws in the fourth, rinse & repeat.  That’s all I have to say for the two weeks.  Oh, and I forgot about strategy of play poor against the zone and foul on defense.

You’ve seen it a hundred times in movies.  An airplane is in a nosedive and heading for a mountain.  All seems lost until someone steps in and pulls hard on the controls and pulls them out of it.  My question is who is that guy for the Jazz?  We’re two losses away from crashing and burning.  And going up against Orlando and Miami next, it could well happen.

Tell me who the leaders are on this team?  Williams and Deron claim to be.  And they very well may be the only leaders, but I haven’t seen anything yet that tells me that they have everyone behind them.

Where are all the crafty veteran moves that are so famous in the NBA?  When you are up double-digits and all of the sudden the momentum is shifting, it’s the veteran leader that steps up and gets points no matter what the cost.  They get to the line, they find the open man, and they silence the crowd.

And as much as it pains me to say it, but losing Fisher has taken a much bigger toll than I thought it would.  Maybe there’s something to this veteran leadership thing.  Boozer and Williams have claimed the position but I don’t know if they’ve earned it.

We all know though that if Fisher were here he would still be starting.  But would having Brewer coming off the bench be such a bad thing this year?  Not if you look at how poorly they have performed. 

The big story of course is Giricek’s fight with Sloan which led to the inevitable banishment.  In what was likely Gordan’s last game as a Jazzman, he was booted to the locker room after drawing Sloan’s ire for some unknown reason.  He was then told that he wouldn’t be with the team for the remaining two games of this trip.  So likely we will see him shipped off and get almost nothing in return.  Because so much goes on in the locker room and behind closed doors, it’s hard to say how Gordan fit in with the rest of the team as a teammate.  But outside of Okur, it didn’t seem like he was friends with anyone else.

I don’t know if we have anyone on the team right now that can pull the Jazz out of this horrendous slump.  So should Giri get traded, let’s hope it brings in a vet that can show the others the way.