推 CarlosBoozer:今年費神若能超越科科就有趣了 10/27 19:18
Steve Greenberg - SportingNews.com
Utah has arrived as one of the NBA's best teams
Posted: October 25, 2007
Someday you'll gather the grandkids around your easy chair and widen their
eyes with brilliant tales of the eighth-seeded Warriors' playoff upset over
the 67-win Mavericks. They'll ooh, they'll aah. And then, when it's time to
burden their lids with sleep, you'll describe for them, in the blunt manner
of a man named Sloan, how the Warriors were stuffed into a box and shipped
back to their irrelevant past by the plainly superior Jazz.
The Warriors had their 15 minutes, but the Jazz made the far bigger statement
in last season's playoffs. There was a big difference between a hot-shooting
upstart and a burgeoning contender that clearly arrived as one of the best
teams in the dominant Western Conference.
Learn it, love it (or not), deal with it: Old Man Jerry's Jazz will rule the
Northwest Division this season, next season and as long as the coach and his
nucleus of natural-born winning players stays together.
Are they title material right now? No. The Suns and Spurs won't let that
happen. But look a couple of years down the road: If Deron Williams, Carlos
Boozer, Paul Millsap and Ronnie Brewer are still together, the hardworking
Jazz will be so fierce that no one will want to go near it in the playoffs.
This season will be a tough-man competition for the Jazz, which head coach
Jerry Sloan still sees as too soft. Gordan Giricek got into the best shape
of his career to fight with Brewer for the starting job at shooting guard.
Mehmet Okur and Andrei Kirilenko are in danger of losing more minutes to
Millsap, perhaps the most underrated backup big guy in the game.
Kirilenko, the team's most physically gifted player, will be chewed up and
spit out of town by Sloan -- and by his teammates -- if he doesn't get with
the program. Sloan had to semi-apologize in training camp for his harsh
treatment of the sensitive Kirilenko, which was a joke. On a Salt Lake radio
program last month, Williams threw down the gauntlet: "(Kirilenko) is coming
off a screen on one side and Matt Harpring is coming off a screen on one side,
who do you think you're going to pass to? The guy you see every day working
in the gym? Or the guy who never works on his shot but wants to shoot?"
The words of a leader -- something Karl Malone would have said out loud or
John Stockton would have said behind closed doors.
The Jazz is headed back to the land of icons: The Finals. Maybe not this
season, maybe not next, but soon.
http://www.sportingnews.com/yourturn/viewtopic.php?t=295175
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