Tonight the Utah Jazz will attempt to avenge an early season heart-breaking loss to the Dallas Mavericks. I’m not going to write much here because I have a bad head ache. So yeah, not tonight, honey . . .

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Sight Reading:

There is a lot of D in Dallas – they flat out shut down teams. They are big on steals and causing turn overs. Our side? We’re a little light on defense, but have a Top 10 offense right now. We try to not turn it over ever. Furthermore, we do play some defense by blocking shots. Ultimately, this is going to be a rebounding issue. We’re Tops in keeping the other team off the glass; and they are 5th best in getting rebounds.

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Much more info after the jump!

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When you lose a tough game, like the Jazz did on Wednesday night, the best remedy is to get right back at it and play again. At least that's what I've heard professional athletes say before. And the Jazz have that opportunity tonight, when they go to Dallas to take on the Mavericks. But will this game become therapeutic, or become a losing streak?

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interview here:

keep the convo polite

[EDIT: THINGS WORKING NOW!]

The good news about this play is that it was a very solid dunk, on a very solid night where the Utah Jazz beat the Dallas Mavericks 97 - 88. More than that, though, was that Kyrylo Fesenko had a very solid game as well -- 8 points (4/5 fg), 4 rebounds, 3 blocks, only 1 turn over, and only 3 fouls in over 15 minutes of action. The Jazz beat Dallas, in a game where we were without Carlos Boozer and Mehmet Okur -- and to be honest, a lot of that was because Fes locked it down inside.

Of course, there *is* bad news too. The bad news is that this game took place on December 26th, 2008 -- which was four seasons ago. Fes showed some good things when he was here, but was not capable, or available, or offered a serious opportunity to contribute regularly. If he had more games like this, and less non-games perhaps he would still be in the NBA today?

Captions after the jump -- rec your favs...

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We've seen it many times this season: the Jazz matching up with teams that are missing key players due to injury. Now it appears the impact of the shortened season is affecting the Jazz, too. Josh Howard has missed several games with a nagging quad injury, Big Al has missed two due to persistent tendinitis in his ankle, and on top of that, Steve Luhm reported yesterday that Raja Bell is a game time decision due to being 83 years old. Okay, its bad knees and back problems.

Mark J. Spears, of Yahoo! Sports, wrote a pretty sobering article on the number of injuries, many of them quite serious, that have befallen players during this season. You can find it here.

On Wednesday, Forbes magazine released the rankings of the value of all of the NBA teams, and to no surprise, the Lakers surpassed the Knicks as the the most valuable. This is due to that behemoth television contract the team signed last year with Time Warner last year. How big was it? The value of the team shot up a gargantuan 40% after the ink had dried on that deal.

The Jazz are actually doing quite well for a small market franchise, sitting at #16. The team is valued at $335 million and are above many other teams that operate in large markets. The info is pretty interesting, especially the listed $16.4 million operating loss.

There's been a lot of posts this week about how well Paul Millsap is performing and how he deserves to be an All-Star. The starters will be announced on Inside the NBA next Thursday, but none of use reasonably expect any of the Jazz players to be on the list. In the mean time, until all the participants, in all the events of All-Star weekend are announced, we here at SLC Dunk will be relentless in spreading the word about our favorite players, to help ensure they don't get overlooked. Starting with this fantastic article from our own Amar for Dime Magazine.

Next week I will be starting a weekly post titled "Media Busters", wherein I will attempt to find out whether there's any truth to the sometimes outlandish comments made by members of the National and local media about the Jazz or its players. A little preview:

During the Toronto game, or beloved Matt Harpring continually made the comment that Utah was playing into the Raptor's hands during that brutal 2nd quarter when Earl Watson came in and attempted to do what he has done all year: push the tempo. This may have been a valid observation had it been against the Nuggets, however, it doesn't serve when relating to the Raptors. Here why:

The Raptors rank 24th out of 30 in pace of game at 91.9. This means they are the 6th slowest team in the league. Further, they are only averaging 87.5 points per game. This can also be attributed to their horrendous 42.1 FG%, but it also means they aren't getting up a lot of shots.

Meanwhile, the Jazz have an average pace of 93.5, which doesn't seam like a lot, but that is almost 2 full possessions more and could have meant several more points on the board.

If you have heard or read something from the media that set off alarm bells to you and made you think, "That can't be right", send suggestions for Media Busters to me on Twitter @prodigal_punk.

Finally, the Jazz are about to embark on a brutal month of hoops this February. The motto of the month is "Lowered Expectations", so how do you feel about it?

Karl Malone will co-host the Gordon Monson show tomorrow on 1280 The Zone (97.5 FM) from 2-6 p.m. Karl called in today and invited himself,so it will be good!

Last night the Utah Jazz lost, at home mind you, to a team on paper we "should not have lost to": the Toronto Raptors. Did they play out of their minds? Did the Jazz play well below what we expect them to play like? Were the Raptors lucky? Were the Jazz unlucky? What do you take from a game where you lose in double over-time to a team that played last night? Was it just one of those nights? There are a lot of questions we can ask one another after a loss like that. But the Jazz season is more than one game (win or lose). And the Jazz franchise is bigger than one season (making the playoffs or not).

It is easy to get despondent when you analyze a single loss and try to understand ’just where the Jazz went wrong’. But one game doesn’t expose any great universal truths, there is no long term trend here. We lost to a team that, despite a number of disadvantages, played better than us. Was it luck? Or was it luck that the Jazz season so far has been an all-you-can eat buffet of home games, many of which were against teams a) on the second night of a back-to-back, and b) missing a key rotation guy or two?

If you do, click on to read more . . .

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Yesterday Amar explained to us how Paul Millsap is the Power Forward Terminator, a lethal power forward sent from the future to destroy any player in his path. Amar showed us the head to head match-ups and how Millsap has compared to these All-Stars. Amar did this using box score stats and averages amongst them. Today, I’m going to dig a little deeper and see how Sap matches up when we take advanced basketball metrics into account to see how he has surgically dismantled his opposition.

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