The Utah Jazz | as seen by Basketball John

Some quickie links for the night:

• Thanks to Scrumtrulescent for this link.  Booner absolutely dominates in HORSE.  He could probably take most players.
• Booz will be flashing some gold kicks at the AS game
• Don’t expect any more Jazz trades
• Even NO’s assistant coach agrees, 8>3
• Jazz own the Hornets
• Simmons likes the Korver trade

Thanks to this storm, I was sans power for most of the night.  So I had to follow the game on my phone.  But for those that were able to watch the game, did Bolerjack have to be rushed to the hospital?  I can’t even imagine what Boozer’s triple-double did to him.  Maybe worse for Boler would have been if Booze came up one assist or rebound shy of the TD.  And he very well probably came close as Boozer’s last assist didn’t come until :35 left in the game on a pass to Price for a dunk.

And let’s please put to an end all of the Boozer sucks comments that I’ve read on Jazz message boards.  He has a few bad games and everyone is calling for his head.  We have one of the best power forwards in the game and suddenly people want to trade him for pennies on the dollar.  Amazing.

The Jazz finally put this one away after letting the Sonics hang around for the first 3 quarters.  Utah went on a 12-2 run to start the fourth and it wasn’t close the reset of the way.  And thank goodness, because the last time we were there, AK had to make a game-saving tip-block for the win.  Boozer had his aforementioned triple-double with 22, 10, and 10 assists.  It was great to see Brewer back and add 16 on 7-11 shooting.  Memo hoisted another 17 shots for 20 points and added 10 boards.  And Deron added his typical 17 & 10.

Price continued his strong play with 6 points and 3 assists in 13 minutes.  I wish I could have seen the dunk on the pass from Boozer.  Anyone have a link?  And most importantly for all the Sloan-haters, Hart had his first DNP-CD of the year.  It looks like he’s finally come around.  There’s no doubt that Price has earned it.  Over his last 4 games he’s played in, he’s 10-15 from the field, 6-8 from three, and averaging 7.5 points to go along with his 2.5 assists.  It’s a small sample size, but it’s all we have for the most part.  And if you’re into per 48 stats, that comes out to 28 points and 9.3 assists a game.  And one of the most telling stats is that he only has 1 turnover in that same time period.  That’s 10 assists and one turnover.  Let’s hope he keeps it up to the point that Hart doesn’t see much time.

So now what to do for Jazz fans?  Brewer and Millsap will be in the Rookie/Soph game.  Deron will be in the All-Star skills challenge.  And Boozer will be in the AS game coming up.  And with Kobe maybe sitting out the AS game, we could see Deron as a replacement.  Kidd might still ruin this if his trade to Dallas goes through.  But thanks to George, maybe we’ll see enough of a delay where we won’t be traded for a few more days.

Having Wa in the All-Star game instead of Deron could be one of the biggest selection mistakes in recent memory.   Portland, now losers of 4 straight, sit 5 1/2 back of the the Jazz and are 4 games out of the playoffs.  If you take out their December stretch (as a lot of people did to the Jazz when they started 06-07 12-0), they are playing .384 basketball.  Ouch.  But even the Jazz are only 1 1/2 games from being out of the playoffs.  Denver is out after their loss last night to Orlando.  Portland would have to have another December-like month just to have a chance at cracking the top 8 in the West.  There’s going to be at least one team left out in the west that in most years would have gotten them in.

Should be a great finish to the year.

Other blogs:

• Biased Fan
• My Utah Jazz - Nothing up yet.  He too could have been hit with no power.
• Ross Siler
• Supersonic Soul
• SonicsCentral