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.

Top 5 Moves of the Summer (...so far...)

While the NBA has not been rocked by some four team, 16 player trade this off-season moves have been made which have changed the landscape of the league. October is just around the corner, 8 weeks away, and much can still happen. The market value for players has been relatively set by the offers and contracts signed by players like Elton Brand, Luol Deng, Baron Davis and so forth. There are a handful of interesting free agents left (Josh Smith, Andrei Iguodala, Ben Gordon, J.R. Smith and so forth), but with the NBA draft finished and most teams approaching luxury tax, the majority of moves will occur via trades. That said, what are some of the 5 top moves of the summer?

1. Elton Brand leaves the Clippers and goes to the Sixers: First of all, this basically destroyed the Clippers, they will continue to suck for a while. Getting Baron Davis is nice; it's nice that they traded for Camby and gave up nothing for him; and it's nice that they got Ricky Buckets . . . but Philly is just so much better right now with Andre Miller, Elton Brand, Samuel Dalembert and most likely Iggy. The Sixers have to be considered a top 6 team in the Eastern Conference right now. Brand will probably be an All-Star in the East this season as well. Great move for him, even if it splits up the really cool idea of him and Baron in Hollywood making movies together.
2. The European Evasion: NBA players are leaving the NBA to go play in Europe. When guys like Arvydas Sabonis or Sarunas Jasikevicius do it, no one really cares. When an American born kid like Josh Childress bolts everyone gets upset -- if for nothing else but the fact that Free Agents can now use real or imagined contract offers to use as leverage when negotiating contracts with NBA clubs. Other players who leave (or at least flirt with leaving) this off-season are Nenad Krstic, Sasha Vujacic, Primoz Brezec, Carlos Delfino, Jorge Garbajosa, Carl Landry, Jason Williams, Delonte West and others. Matt Moore postulates about a possible reaction by the NBA to this, methinks that this may come up in the next NBA Player's Association / NBA Team Owners meeting and a few tweaks of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) may occur. Let's not forget that plenty of NBA stars stole some money in Europe after their playing days in the NBA were done (like Magic Johnson, Scottie Pippen and Dominique Wilkins . . . not to mention European guys like Sabonis or Vlade). Why can't mid-level NBA talent choose to go where the money is? They can, and apparently are!
3. Golden State and Chris Mullin over-react to losing Baron Davis: First of all, they enlist some help from the Department of Redundancy Department and end up signing another swingman in Corey Maggette (what happens to Steven Jackson?); then they throw bags and bags of money at Andris Biedrins; they steal Rony Turiaf from the LA Lakers and then make a small move for Marcus Williams. All of this is still < Baron Davis. I take great pleasure in seeing this team do poorly, and love how all of their bandwagoning fans will be quiet on the Internet again. (Note: Not all "Dubs" fans are bandwagoners, but a large vocal majority of them that were loud during the 2006-2007 Playoffs were, deal with it.) At least they'll always have that one Baron Davis dunk over Andrei Kirilenko to keep themselves warm . . . oh wait! He's not even theirs anymore, he belongs to Clippers fans now. Well, now the Warriors are screwed money wise, just like they were when they paid Troy Murphy and Adonal Foyle tons of money a few seasons ago.
4. T-Mac and Yao get a Tru Warrier: Easily the Rockets have been one of the worst playoff performing franchises that regularly get in the playoffs in recent memory. In the 11 years from the 1997-1998 season to this last one (2007-2008) they have been outed in the first round 6 times. They didn't make the playoff at all the other 5 times. While T-Mac gets a lot of the blame for this, I really thing the issue is Yao Ming's inability to be a big game player. Now they get some help by adding Ron Artest for the low low price of Bobby Jackson and some garbage. Artest is an expressive individual who probably can be the best player on this team on any given night. Houston is a lot more dangerous now. This is big news for a team that's had a top 4 record in the Western Conference the last two seasons. I also appreciate how he and Yao are having a verbal fight over the phone and Internet already. This is the omega trade for high risk/high reward.
5. Brooklyn New Jersey keeps making moves for LeBron in 2010: LeBron James is quite a catch. He would be the best player in this new NBA to be put in a large media market. Eventually the Nets franchise will move to Brooklyn, and the New York market is huge. LeBron becomes a free agent in 2010. Noted scandal rags have suggested that LeBron signing with the Nets really depends on who the Nets have on their team at that point. A quick look at their salary situation strongly points to a loss of swingmen on contract at the end of the 2009-2010 season, at the price of nearly $13 million dollars. Another issue to mull over for LeBron is the whole China market issue. Yi Jianlian is now a Net, and he's the only other guy in the NBA who is from China. The Milwaukee Bucks even focused part of their 2008 NBA Draft strategy on this point by drafting a guy who grew up in China and Taiwan and HK. Too bad for them, Yi is gone. LeBron could make a ton of cash if he was on the same team as Yi. He knows this. LeBron wants to be the richest man in the world -- if he wants to really be that guy, he's not going to do that in Cleveland. Let's not even bring up the whole Jay-Z thing . . .

Time will tell if these moves will improve their teams, or elicit other reactionary changes in the landscape (like the whole slew of trades that occurred in the Western Conference last season -- Kover, Kidd, Gasol, Shaq, etc). Regardless if they are good moves, they do make for a much changed landscape in the NBA. Philly is good again, Houston may finally make it out of the first round, Golden State is crap again and the Nets are making moves.

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 . . .