The Jedi Voodoo Mind Trick Hype Machine

It should come as no surprise that after the Jazz started to get a) some of their injured guys back, and b) allowed some of their banged up guys (who were still playing) to get well again that c) the Jazz would start to win some games. Similarly so, people all over the world would start lauding Utah again. This has been par for the course over the last few seasons. In the 2004-2005 season the Jazz won only 26 games. Why? Not because of any extra-ordinary amount of 'suck', but because of injuries. (AK and Booz were out almost all of the season EACH) The next year -- when healthy -- the Jazz almost made the playoffs. End result: people started to talk about the Jazz. Since that time, the Jazz have increased their wins in each of the successive seasons. Alas, it would be folly to suggest that the Jazz did better when they weren't flying under the radar.

They do. A small market team that no one likes tends to band together better with the 'us against the world' attitude that happens with multiple all-star snubs, and poor projected win numbers. When everyone is flying high with the Jazz bad things happen. (After all, that 2004-2005 season where the Jazz won only 26 games was supposed to be a big win season according to ESPN.com, they had improved themselves the most over the off-season in their power rankings) Perhaps being disregarded early (due to poor playing in December and January each season) helps the team mentally get ready to "show everyone" that they were wrong for counting out the Jazz.

After all, no one was talking Jazz at the All-Star breaks the last few seasons (except for last season maybe), but each time the team is able to have spectacular runs in the final 30 games of the season and have won their division twice in a row. The mental edge that some of our players hone due to being passed over may not be so sharp right now when everyone and their grandmother is counting the Jazz in this time around.

Hollinger, of ESPN.com, once suggested that the Jazz would be the team to watch in 2009. Even after the season of injuries that the Jazz have suffered so far, he contends that the Jazz can still win the division. Mark Stein, also of ESPN.com, moved the Jazz up to 9th best in the league in his power rankings, and in his chat later on this week suggested that he should have moved then up to 7th best.  Chad Ford, again, ESPN.com, chimed in yesterday that when healthy "the Jazz . . . are the Lakers biggest competition in the West." Skeets and Tas over at TheBasketballJones suggest that the Jazz *are* this good, and only injuries got in the way.

As nice as all of this sounds, even the most vocal, yet highly respected, detractors of the Jazz have gotten on the respect wagon of late. AOL's NBA Fanhouse could be my browser homepage, their contributors get the news out from all over the league onto the net almost faster than anyone else. They recently had a roundtable discussion on the Jazz, and anyone who knows their writers knows not to expect glowing reviews. Matt Moore has contested for quite a long time that the Jazz are paper tigers. [fair enough...] He, however, did recant somewhat on his own blog, the amazing Hardwood Paroxysm, with his post "In the interest of fairness". (SLCDunk.com quoted MM yesterday on his LHM tribute) Moore even suggests that reading the comments in the Fanhouse roundtable elicited him to dig a little deeper.

"But I read the comments on our round table today, which featured an amazing combination of actually lucid, intelligent commenters, and I realized that I just didn’t fully give the story."

I'm guessing he wasn't talking about the comment calling everyone a moron, but perhaps maybe this one started things off. That "Doc A" guy sounds really smart. Now only if he had a blog that he could post his thoughts on . . . one that properly formatted itself depending on the browser settings of the viewer . . . grrrr. [For those who didn't get it, I'm "Doc A"] Tom Ziller (you should know who this guy is if you like reading basketball on the internet) goes where no one else has gone before and even suggests that we should, collectively, "Fear the Utah Jazz".

The recent love for the Jazz extends beyond the reaches of ESPN.com's columnists or bloggers . . . Kenny Smith (who has two rings), despite not being able to pronounce Deron Williams' name, goes out and heaps praise on our, small market team. Charley Rosen, Phil Jackson's butt buddy, is an opinionated old coot whose analysis of games is limited to whatever game is on cable TV that month. Dude doesn't even go to games. Essentially, if you look past his mediocre success as an assistant coach in the CBA he has no greater insight into the game than anyone else with a remote control and a laptop. This week he found it within his back heart to say something nice about our players -- one in particular -- the same one that Kenny Smith can't pronounce despite covering him for at least two rounds in each of the last two playoffs. All of this must sound great if you are a Jazz fan, right? On one hand it either shows that the world at large is a) respecting our team, or b) had their head so far up their sigmoid colon that they merely overlooked the Jazz and their lower seed record as evidence that the Jazz were just a bad team. I don't particularly find much comfort in either answer.

The Jazz don't do well with hype. You can look back and see what happened in that eventful 2004-2005 season, or look farther back at what happened in the 1998-1999 playoffs . . . or still farther back to one of those 5 first round exists during the early Stockton & Malone era after looking so good at such a young age by taking the Lakers to 7 games in 1987-1988. Hype can dull the edge, or worse, completely remove the chip off of the shoulders of our hungrier players. By giving the Jazz too much hype, perhaps, our expectations for them will never be attainable? Partly because of our expectations, but alternatively, also due to the hype removing some of the focused insanity that motivates people when they feel disrespected. Utah needs all the focus they can get, just look at their road record vs. under .500 teams . . . they don't play well unless they feel like they have something to prove.

So please, for the sake of the Jazz, don't hype them.

Elie Seckback interviews Kyrylo Fesenko

If you don't know who Elie Seckback is then you suck. Really, this is the Internet age and I love his exclusive Fan House video interviews with NBA players. (One of the best is the one with Shaq where O'Neal starts to speak Hebrew) I love Elie's videos and so should you. (And again, if you don't then you suck) Here he is talking (for a good 4 minutes) with Kyrylo Fesenko. It's worth watching twice -- hilarious. There are cameos of Deron Williams, Andrei Kirilenko and Jarron Collins as well for those of you who are into that. Please watch it . . . it's absolutely hilarious. Thanks to BallHype.com for this info via Yahoo's Ball Don't Lie via AOL Fanhouse.

I've imbedded this video here so it gets more play . . . great work Elie! Love your stuff!

Chris Bosh is to Video as Gilbert is to Blogs

No offense to guys who occasionally blog (Morris Almond), or those who try to go viral on the Internet (Kobe, Nash and Baron), but when it comes to being entertained, you have to give it up to Gilbert Arenas and Chris Bosh. Gil's blogs have been legendary, though many people are sleeping on the talent that exists within Bosh's mind. He's just plain funny. Peep this video of him clowning guys playing in the NBA Finals as a reporter.

Anyway, Chris has a new video, it's about him training for the Olympics . . . watch it exclusively here.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!

While some other blogs may try to imitate, my blog is the one that started to bust out Shakespeare Quotes for this C.J. Miles drama from the beginning, and ran with it. Anyway, this is the official "CJ is Back" post to notify the world (5 days after the fact). After waiting the full time period allowed, Kevin O'Connor, Jerry Sloan and the rest of the Jazz Brass have agreed to match the initial offer signed by restricted Free Agent C.J. Miles for a reported amount of $15 million dollars over 4 years. So, sorry Northwest Division rival Oklahoma City Barons, no Ceejay for you! I'm not surprised by this news, and expected it after the whole Brevin Knight / Jason Hart trade. I also approve of this move, as you don't want to make the Utah Jazz some sort of college for shooting guards who are drafted right out of high school -- this team deserves to see some returns for this investment.

 

The Jazz got rid of DeShawn Stevenson, and now he's a solid NBA starting guard who can pass, score, shoot the three and be an athletic defender. (Isn't this exactly what we want, a potential mix of Brewer, Korver and Almond?) Part of the reason why the Jazz didn't let Ceejay go was because he is still the youngest SG on the roster (just turned 21), and has the potential 'upside' to become that Gestalt type of character that we need.

Furthermore, C.J. Miles is a Dallas area product who came directly to the NBA from Skyline High. He was drafted in the same year as Deron Williams (himself a product of The Colony in the greater Dallas area as well); and sees himself as an older brother type for the young Ceejay. (He even got Lil' John to come to CJ's birthday party!) The chemistry in the team is quite good and Miles is a part of this younger group of players who all get along with each other. If nothing else, this was an opportunity for Deron Williams (aka the face of the franchise) to flex some of his star power muscle.

Photo by NBAE / Getty Images

Miles' friendship with the star of the team may not be enough to guarantee playing time, and he knows it:

"It's been discussed that if I come in and work and show that I should play, then I will play, and that's what I plan to do." (Miles, 2008, ESPN.com)

It's funny, though, the number of outside observers who thought that Miles would be gone, or that, perhaps, Miles wanted to go. What Miles wanted was security. He has that. He gets paid the same to run around in the shadows of Kevin Durant / Jeff Green on a virtual expansion team as he does getting to play with his friends and win division titles and play deep in the playoffs every year. Which would you take? This is what C.J Miles said on the 1320 KFan shortly after the news happened:

"I don't have any hard feelings [about what Jerry Sloan said to the media] . . . I'm in Utah, back in a Jazz uniform where I belong, and I look forward to playing [with my boys Deron, Ronnie B, and Millsap] again." (Miles, 2008, 1320 KFan)

Both photos from Andrei Kirilenko's New Years Party (Dec. 31, 2007)

Miles also pointed out that he did not want to leave Utah, and that he does not feel like he was put in a situation where he had to leave, either. He would have to work hard, and fight for minutes on any team -- so why not work hard and get minutes on the Utah Jazz? So, now we get to see if he can be that guy that we need, a solid SG who can improve upon his work last season (48 fg%, 39 3pt%) and continue contributing where and when we need him to!

What is Denver doing?

So . . . Denver basically said "Smell you later" to Marcus Camby in a salary dump move. The Clippers get an expensive backstop who can block shots and does not like to play in the paint. If you take a quick look at how they were spending their money you can clearly see that this move was necessary for Denver. The key point is that the Clippers were so under the cap that the Nuggets didn't take anyone back. So in the last few days we've seen the Nuggets give up some of their only defensive guys (It was fun Eduardo, stay in touch!) and get significantly worse on paper. Matt Moore, via the Fanhouse suggests:

"When Nuggets fans hoped for a roster move to shake up a team that was woefully deficient at defense, and downright catastrophic at points in terms of chemistry, this is is probably not what they hoped for. This has to be considered nothing more than a cost cutting measure by the Nuggets, who are scheduled to pay over $13 million in luxury tax for last season. Both teams needed to do something with their rosters. They did something, but it says something very different about the future for both
squads." (Moore, 2008)

So, on the bright side, the Nuggets are avoiding the luxury tax -- and may get a nice pick down the line. Reactions to this move are mixed . . . at . . . best.

I know how I feel about it . . . I don't like it. Sure, it makes a potential Northwest division rival worse in the short term, but I think that there are serious flaws to the cap, and the cap rules. Money is ridiculous. It is a human convention which does not exist in nature; and thus, is not a natural phenomena. Adding to the unnatural-ness of the situation is the fact that it is so important. Stepping away from Aristotle for a bit and focusing on the Nuggets we can clearly see that money is at the root of this problem. As a Jazz fan I feel their pain.

If it wasn't for money then my best years as a Jazz fan would have been watching Mark Eaton getting a defensive board, outletting the ball to John Stockton who runs up the floor and has to make a decision on whether or not to pass to Karl Malone or Dominique Wilkins on the break. That is a reality that was never allowed to exist because the Jazz needed the money so badly that they had to sell their assets. If not for money, then the Jazz would have another jersey retired up in the Melta Center, the number #21 -- and who knows what else would be hanging up there today.

If the object of the league is to try to win the title then this move is downright backwards for the Nuggets. Maybe I have it all wrong, and that the key to success is to stock up young talent and avoid paying older guys money in order to have a shot at the ring. I guess that's why Danny Ainge is such a bad GM then . . .