That’s how it’s suppose to be done.  The Jazz led by only 6 after one, but they added another 6 in the second for a twelve-point lead.  And then the game was over a few minutes into the third when the TWolves couldn’t score until about the 7 minute mark.

You look at this game and think, “Are the Jazz that bad on the road?”  I can’t imagine how they lost to these guys last week.  They really are terrible.  They only had 15 turnovers, but it seemed double that.  In the second half it didn’t seem like they could go a possession without getting the ball stolen or deflected.  And they had the most airballs, shots that would hit the backboard and no rim, and all kinds of ugly shots.

Deron led the way again with 21 points and only 11 assists.  If you’re keeping score, that’s 50 assists over the last three games.  He nearly beat the TWolves as a team who had only 12 total.  He beat Telfair and anyone else they threw at him off the dribble all night.  At one point he had two consecutive shake and bakes that led to a lay-up and the foul.  It sure seemed like he had a personal vendetta tonight.  Maybe his pride was hurt from losing last time.  But his play reminded me of the Feb 4 game against Paul and the Hornets.  Someone needs to email him daily and tell him that [next PG opponent] is better than he is just to keep him angry.

Memo had 15 and has seemed a lot more aggressive inside lately.  I believe it was Bolerjack who has said over the past couple of telecasts that Okur has kind of taken to heart the knock on his inside game and defense.  He had a couple of great drives tonight that were reminiscent of those in the Mavs game.  Why does everyone have to play angry?

Boozer had 16 & 14.  He also had the clip of the game when the camera guy went in for a close-up following a missed lay-up (that he should have had) and a foul.  Instead of his And-1!, Aaaaah! or Get-in-There! shouts, he gave us the Christmas Story inspired, “Fuuuuuuuuudge!”  Only it wasn’t fudge.

And probably the player of the night for sheer entertainment value was Brewer.  He had dunk after dunk, not to mention 2-2 from the arc.  Who said he couldn’t shoot?  Here’s one of the aforementioned dunks:

Video Coming. YouTube was down

So the Jazz take care of business and never let this one get close.  The 17th straight home victory give the Jazz 40 wins on the year.  And now with only 20 games left, and 3.5 games back of the Spurs for first in the West, the Jazz are going to have go on quite a run to overtake them and hold off anyone else.  They’d also have to leap the Suns, the Lakers, Houston, and NO.  They’d have to finish about 17-3 to have a shot at that wouldn’t you think?  Especially with how everyone short of PHX is playing lately.

And a lot of those wins are going to have to come on the road.  The first of the those comes Friday against PHX.  They could actually pass them in the standings with a win.  And the Suns didn’t do us any favors tonight, losing to the Nuggets.  The Suns are limping now and the Jazz need to take advantage of that before they get rolling again (if they do).  And with Shaq, we’ll likely see a lot more Tree.  Could we also see a Fess call up?  But with this game on the road, I’m not very optimistic for a win.

Other blogs:

• Biased Fan (nothing yet)
• My Utah Jazz (nothing yet either)
• Frank Layden Fans
• No Siler recap yet.  Just an AP article.  Did he finally drop from exhaustion?

Other notes:

• Sorry about the outage.  Thanks to TrueHoop though for the link again
• The Suns are looking to Giricek to help out?  Now we’ll get to face him again.
• Don’t look now, but Deron’s averaging 19.1 points and 10.1 assists.  If he average 23 points a game for the last 20 games (and maintains his assist per), he would finish with 20 & 10 for the year.  A bit of a stretch, but doable.  He’s averaging almost 15 assists his last 5 games.

Well, it’s 1 p.m. MST and no trades announced for the Jazz. I’m more relieved than anything, not because the core is left in tact, but because we can finally stop hearing ridiculous trade suggestions and made up ones.

So you’ll get some links as we wait for possible Bulls/Cavs trade and see if Artest ends up anywhere.

• Here’s Simmons latest offering for the Jazz. Ugh.
• Please don’t click on any of these links unless you have tons of spare time. It will kill productivity. Most probably already know about this site, but there might be a few that don’t know. If you’re into stats or want to do player comparisons, check out basketball-reference.com. Here’s the main Jazz page and the 2008 page. They have player comparisons, head-to-head matchups, and other cool stuff. This link compares Boozer and Malone, Williams and Stockton in their respective years in the league. Williams and Paul in head-to-head matchups. Duncan usually played better than Malone while Karl had a slight edge over Robinson. Too much time wasted already.
• Jazz get some blog love
• One blog talks about ESPN’s roundtable. Here’s the original article. It scares me when Hollinger likes the Jazz.
• Someone stole my stability article. Not really. But he talks about the Jazz and stability. I’m the first one to ever write about that, right?
• Thanks Luhmy!
• Layden breaks down the matchups.

And finally, if you’ve read this far, it means you got past the basketball-reference link. Also, I’ve got an email interview coming up with Jonathan Rhinehart of the Jazz. He’s the Public Relations and Communications head man for the Jazz. You can see him sitting at the end of the court-level press table during games. He had a blog last year where he would give some insights into the Jazz life. He’s probably been a bit too busy because he hasn’t been able to keeps it up.

But if you have any questions you’d like to have him answer, leave it in the comments. I have a list already to go, but thought I’d send a few more his way.

And since I’ve started getting a few more comments, I’ve added a plugin that will allow you to reply to specific comments.  So try it out.

So I have to take back a little bit about what I’ve stated about the All-Star game.  I still think the Deron got snubbed, do doubt about it.  But really, the All-Star weekend turned out as well as you could expect for a Jazz fan.

First of all, we were pretty well represented.  Fesenko and Almond were in the D-League All-Star game.  Brewer and Millsap were on the Soph team that beat the Rookies.  Millsap didn’t have a great game, but he did have the block of the game.  Brewer played well and had a ferocious windmill dunk.  But the biggest non-story that made headlines was him wearing a headband.  Steve Luhm went off about how him wearing a headband disrespected Sloan as Sloan doesn’t allow them.  Why is he trying to make this into something that it isn’t?  Even Sloan didn’t seem to care,

I don’t have any control over that, if he wants to wear a headband when he’s there, I guess he can go ahead and do it. Nobody telling him he couldn’t

Why is he trying to create news?  Like one commenter said, if the headband had said “Sloan Sucks,” then you have an issue.  There are a lot of things players wear that don’t make a difference in their shot, but they wear them for fashion or whatever.  I thought it was funny though that Millsap wouldn’t wear one because he was scared of Sloan.  And Brewer though that he was going to get fined.

We didn’t have anyone in the slam-dunk contest or the three-point shootout.  I though KK could have been in the 3P contest, but they were showing stats and guys were shooting 46% from 3 but were only 7th in the league.  K3 is below that so it’s hard to make a case for him.  Brewer could have been in the dunk contest, but when they only have a field of four, it makes it tough.  I love how Malone was one of the judges though.  He absolutely didn’t want to be there.  He never wanted to be at any of the All-Star games when he was a player.  And they thought he would want to be there for this?  The best part is when he went after Barkley for making fun of his draft-day suit.

And of course Deron was in the PS3 skills challenge.  He squeaked into the the finals when defending champ Wade put on an embarrassing show by losing a dribble out of bounds, missing shots, and then showing that he really didn’t care by missing 2 lay-ups at the end.  He even went as far as just chucking up the last two balls from the jump-shooting portion just so he could go on to the next station.  He didn’t want to be there at all.  And Kidd couldn’t hit a jump-shot to save his life.

That left Williams v. Paul for the final.  And once again we learn that 8>3.  And not only did Deron win it, he posted the event-record, 25.5 seconds.  It was great to hear the media spin on this.  The announcers basically stated that Paul was amazing and it took a record time to beat him.  Not that Deron won, but that Paul only lost because Williams pulled a miracle out of his butt.  Unbelievable.  I also like the following quotes,

Not moving at full speed, Williams clocked 31.2 seconds in the first round

And then for Paul,

Paul, the All-Star point guard of the host New Orleans Hornets, posted a strong final-round time of 31.2.

Paul’s 31.2 was clearly superior.

And finally, Boozer got to play in the All-Star game after missing last year’s with injury.  He posted 14 points & 10 boards in only 18 minutes.  He was part of the West’s comeback, but was taken out after they had tied it up.

So as I was saying, we got to see 5 Jazz players participate in the All-Star festivities.  No one got hurt.  Williams didn’t feel totally left out.  And although he’s stated that he’s over the snub, you know he’s going to use it as fuel for the rest of the season.  And that’s a good thing.

So let’s get ready for the second half of the season with GS tonight.

Other AS notes

• Kobe playing only two minutes so as to not get penalized for not playing is ridiculous.  Does the NBA not have anyone in charge of common sense?  It’s like suspending the Suns players last year for leaving the bench and going back.  How does him playing make sense?
• Does anyone at Getty check for errors with captions? - This isn’t the first time.  Do they have editors that know sports?
• Brewer and Millsap pics from the R/S game
• What’s Malone eating?  The boy next to him looks like he could use a bite.
• Why was Michael Bivins a big part of the AS festivities?  Turn back the clock night to 1993?  I grew up on BBD.  It was just weird to see him again.
• Yahoo Jazz images

GS game blogs

• Biased Fan
• My Utah Jazz
• Golden State of Mind

Morris Almond lost out to Lance Allred of the  Idaho Stampede in the return of HORSE to the NBA’s D-League.  Morris won the first round with a HO.  But in the finals, Almond got beat down by a HO when Allred nailed the patented Harpring jump shot from the left elbow.  He did call out Harpring Sucks though when he shot it.  Mo wasn’t able to match that.

And apparently if you’re white, you have an advantage in HORSE.  That coming from both Almond and Allred.  Did we ever see either Bird or Jordan win? And is the reason why the league capped the games at 5 minutes because they didn’t want players yelling out HOR! when the other guy missed?  Isn’t that the best part of playing HORSE?  You progress from HO, to HOR, and then to HORS (with a z sound).  I guess they’re trying to attract as few groupies as possible.

Millsap and Brewer played in the Soph/Rookie game tonight as well.  Brewer made the most of his 17 minutes going 6-6 from the field and finished with 13 points.  Millsap didn’t do as well.  He only got up four shots in 22 minutes.  He only had two boards as well.  Daniel Gibson won MVP going 11-20 from the three-point line.  And those were the only shots he took.  I don’t think he even crossed the arc.

So tomorrow night we’ll get to see Williams embarrass Paul, Wade, and Kidd in the skills challenge.  No word yet on whether Kobe is going to still play in the All-Star game.  We know Kidd likely won’t be traded now before then due to George and Stackhouse.  So if Mamba can’t go, there’s a good shot Deron could get the call.

We had no Korver, no Boozer, and no zone in the second half, but the Jazz pulled it out. This game could be the game where this young team crosses over into the veteran, championship-type team. We saw how they overcame poor night from Booze, Millsap and Okur fouling out, a hostile environment, two all-stars, and what seemed like all the calls going against them, yet still walked away from Denver with the 118-115 W.

And it was all Deron tonight. He continued his revenge tour with another 29 & 11. His biggest shot was his three in regulation to tie it up. How many of those have we seen and how many more will we see? He also played great D on AI in OT when Iverson was taking the potential game-winning shot. Williams finally seems to be stepping into and earning that leadership role. I didn’t see that early in the season, even when the Jazz started out well. Here was my comment on my halftime post. You could just see that Deron was going to take over and not let the Jazz lose this one. Him getting snubbed was the best thing that happened to this team.

We also saw why the Jazz have won 10 in a row and 16 of their last 18. Kyle Elliot Korver. He was cold in the second half, but made two huge free throws to seal it (after missing two in a row earlier). He finished with 27. A quick thought on Korver’s arrival. I wonder if his affect on the women here will result in a spike of babies come September. I guess in Utah it would have to be pretty significant to be noticed. I’ll have to find out the stats.

Boozer was atrocious to say it nicely. He missed numerous bunnies and even more jump-shots to finish 3-15 for 8 points. Memo was solid with 15 & 10. AK didn’t have his best game. He was trying to take Melo off the dribble. That’s not his game at all. And Harp had a solid game. He added 13 but his biggest contribution was getting into the heads of Melo and Martin. Why does he attract all the crazies? First Artest, and now the two Denver head cases.

How about those thugs on the other side of the ball tonight? The biggest scare came when Kenyon went head-hunting on Brewer. He had no chance at the ball. And even after he nailed him in the head, he held on to his shoulder and pulled him down. Brewer landed right on his tailbone. He returned but left a short time later. The latest is that it’s a bruised coccyx. So he might miss a couple. And hopefully Martin does too.

It was rough all night. Harp was his usual self, banging with Melo and Najera. Deron got leveled when Carter went for a head-fake and crashed into Willie. AI was hammered by on the same type of play by Millsap. The bench looked like the bench of old with 50 points compared to Denver’s 10.

It’s amazing that there’s still star treatment in the NBA. Melo and AI were pushing off or hooking their opponents all night long. It was the only way they could get separation from their defender.

The Jazz let the Nuggets back in the game in the second half by having a ton of turnovers and not running the offense. I’m not a basketball play guru by any means, but I can tell when they Jazz aren’t running their offense right. They weren’t getting cutters or layups. They also couldn’t grab a defensive board if they would have been the only ones on the court. But then there would have to be someone else to shoot it. Okay, so if there were 5 Jazz men and 1 Nugget. And what happened to the zone defense in the second half? They were shutting down the Nuggs with it and then went away from it.

With the Jazz win and PHX’s loss tonight, the Jazz are only 2 1/2 games out of first. Who saw that coming a month and a half ago? We’ll see what happens with the arrival of Shaq in PHX. I don’t think it drops the Suns that much despite Shaq not having any legs any more. How many games can he play in though for the rest of the season? And once they get to the playoffs, will he have enough juice to be a factor?

Other notes:

• No Kleiza repeat. He finished with only 9.
• Korver didn’t seem to have any hair product in the first half. But he was all done up for the second half. Maybe it left his hands a little greasy. That would account for the two missed FTs and 0-fer from three-pint land.
• Does Harp hit from anywhere else other than 16 feet out? It’s either from the elbow or the baseline.
• Speaking of Harp. Instead of $50 for every three for Habitat for Humanity, they should give $5 for every Bolerjack football reference on Matt. New Orleans would be rebuilt by now.
• Shouldn’t we rename the ESA Coke Court? It would add to the rivalry with Denver. Although a caffeine sponsorship would only be surpassed in the amount of furor by Hillary winning Utah.
• The Jazz have been nailed for quote a few clear-path fouls this year. Yet Najera grabs AK on a sure fast-break dunk and nothing. At least the refs were consistent with the rest of the officiating.
• How much does it say that Collins stayed on the bench when Memo fouled out? Sloan went with AK in the middle. Maybe Sloan is coming around.

Other blogs

• Biased Fan
• My Utah Jazz
• Pick Axe
• NuggDoctor

First of all, congrats to Brewer and Millsap for being selected to the Rookie/Sophmore game.  I’ll actually have a reason to watch it now.  I would have liked to have seen Brewer in the slam-dunk contest.  The Sophs should dominate this game, especially when you see that Roy and Aldridge and the others are on the team.

Tonight we get to see that train wreck that is the New York Knicks.  Is there anyone outside of NY that wants to see Isiah fired?  He’s got quite the list of accomplishments.  How can a man run so many franchises into the ground, make some of the most unbelievably terrible trades, and offend so many still have a job?  Where else in the real world could you mess up so badly and still be drawing a paycheck?

Jazz fans are especially hoping he sticks around to ruin things even further.  Ross Siler has an article about the upcoming 2010 draft pick we get from NY that could land Utah a very high pick.  So if he can stick around a little longer and sign some more untradeable bad contracts, we could be set.  It would be great to hear some fans tonight cheer “We love Isiah” instead of the usual fire cries heard at MSG.

They Jazz should take care of business at home tonight.  Starbury won’t be in action this time around.  If we lost to this sorry excuse for a team, it kills whatever mo we’ve built up the past month.

Blogs

• Knicks
• Biased Fan
• My Utah Jazz

Before some links for today, I just wanted to post a late follow up on the AK pictures from Masha’s blog.  Ross Siler was finally pressured into comment on the “provocative” pictures from the Kirilenko’s New Year’s party.  According to the chaperone, “all of the photos were staged.”  He also said that there were kids running around and that he had brought his mother-on-law to the party.  But as the kiddies on the internet say, “Pics or it didn’t happen.”  That may have all been true, but I’m sure they were all tucked away. 

And if an invitation to next year’s party isn’t a contest on utahjazz.com, I’ll be disappointed.  Wouldn’t a live blog of next year’s party be in order?

And on a related note, the deadspin link was to this site.  It took me down in less than five minutes.  I survived a TrueHoop link, but deadspin showed me what high traffic was.  After a few hours of back and forth with my webhost, I finally got back up.  They wouldn’t unsuspend my account until I had fixed it to not use so much CPU.  But they locked me completely out and I couldn’t fix it.  Anyway, here’s the traffic since it hit Deadspin:

The 14th probably would have been higher if not for that downtime.  Anyway, on to some links on a slow Jazz news day:

• 4%? - Isn’t Ron Paul polling better than that?
• AK and Masha visiting the Huntsman Cancer Institute - It’s amazing how much a visit from a Jazz player can boost the spirits of those that are going through something incredibly tough.  Masha’s rockin’ the
• Kemp > Malone? - The all-90’s team from a Sonics fan
• Lang’s Links - Another All-star ballot.  Is it wrong that I’m hoping Deron gets left off?  I would absolutely love to see him go on a vengeance tour for the second half of the season.
• Harpring’s series of tubes are clear to move internets around again (Reference for those that don’t get it)
• Turkey isn’t the only bird Memo likes
• He didn’t give Korver the “Hard Worker” seal of approval yet, but it looks like Jerry’s got another disciple.
• How Carlos handled Carmani’s situation
• Are Carlos and Deron taking away votes from one another?
• 8>3, Can’t wait until 2/4/08
• Super Sophs