Dodging Bullets...or in this case, Knicks

I've been watching the Jazz for a long time now. I think I officially became a fan after watching the Jazz take the Lakers to seven games during the '87-88 Playoffs, but even in the years prior to that series I remember the Jazz play Houston and Denver in hotly contested grudge matches during the era when it seemed inevitable that the Celtics and Lakers would show up in the Finals every year.

In all that time, I have noticed one disturbingly consistent trend with my team: they play to the level of their competition. Even after they had established themselves as perennial contenders, Stockton, Malone and Co. would still roll over a couple of times every year to some team that had no business competing with them. They'd always get up to play the Boston's and the LA's, but a cellar-dwellar or two would always sneak a couple of wins when they weren't looking. And even when they would beat the inferior teams, it wouldn't be a blowout. Often, they were a little too close for comfort.

Like last night. For the second game in a row, we let a 20+ point lead slide in the third quarter and had to rally to win a home game against an inferior opponent. With Phoenix, it was almost understandable. They had Shaq, Steve Nash, and a whole lot of desperation to stay in the playoff race. But the Knicks haven't had to worry about that in the last decade. They had no business making a game of last night's contest.

It kind of reminds me of the time I took a bowling class at the University of Utah. It was my first year in college, and I took the class mostly because I thought that taking a bowling class was the zenith of the higher education experience. I think I was right, too. Anyway, the instructor didn't spend a whole lot of time teaching us to bowl. Instead, every class was just spent playing games it pairs against other members of the class. I was one of the better bowlers in the class (meaning my average was in the low 100's instead of the 80's), but whenever I would play games against inferior classmates, I would always get lower scores, even if I still won. Maybe bowling just wasn't that important to me, but some motivating factor was missing that prevented me from slaughtering the team that was barely breaking 85.

There was one time this wasn't a problem for the Jazz. There was one period of time I remember when we played hard against the good teams and destroyed the pretenders. That was that window in the late 90's when we were going to the Finals.

Sadly, that's why even a bias-confessed lifetime Jazz fan like myself thinks that we're a second-round, borderline-conference finals squad at best right now. We can compete with anybody on every given night, but we're still not beating up on the pretenders the way we should. We're still letting teams like Charlotte and New York get under our compression shorts. I'm not sure what has to change to get over that hump, or if it can happen in time for this year's playoffs, but I think it does have to happen before we can really think about winning a title. We also need to get an interior defender and stop playing that stupid "everybody clap your hands" song during time-outs.

But that's another post...