So, how about Michael Jordan? To steal a line from SportsCenter, "The replay confirms what we already suspected, he's a prick." Russell is ready.
Was it the weekend of the d-bag?
The original estimate was $10,000, but it turns out Deron Williams and Kyle Korver will be donating at least $15,000 and possibly as much as $20,000 to The Christmas Box House shelters for children from the charity dodge ball tournament they hosted Saturday.
A list of pics from around the blogosphere of the event (I didn't link straight to the blogs because they're almost all family-type blogs that probably don't want the attention), here, DWill, Ronnie P, Korver, Deron, Korver, and Korver.
The Jazz close out the season with 6 games in April. I don't think it's as brutal as last year's finish, but any games on the road are brutal for the Jazz. They're home against OKC and PHX and travel to LA, Houston, NOLA, and GS. I say we'll take the two at home and get at least one on the road. They've seemed to play well at NOLA and Houston for some reason. They should be able to take GS, but finishing out the season 3-3 might be seen as a plus.
So if you've been keeping track at home, that's a 52-30 prediction for the season. That's 4 games better than last year and would have put us 6th in the west. Were the injuries only worth about 4 games? 52 wins will put us right in the thick of things again where we could finish anywhere from 2nd to 7th again.
I've been trying to avoid the topic because it's about to become all you hear about in a week or so. That's right, Boozer is going to be back soon. Even mentioning it here is overkill. I don't think there's some magic deadline that you can look at before Boozer gets traded, if he does at all. We saw Iverson get traded a couple of games into the season.
The only real deadline will be the trade deadline. That's when the Jazz would have to trade him by in order to save any money under the salary cap. It wouldn't be the worst thing for the Jazz for his money to just come off the books.
Besides the obvious reasons of wanting to trade Boozer, my biggest reason that they do something now is so that we don't waste a year of Deron just sitting at the status quo. He's going to have a lot of years ahead of him. But without a shooter (maker) at the two and/or some defensive help in the middle, I don't see how we're getting past the second round.
That's why I hope that O'Connor can pull something off and acquire somebody early for Boozer. It would be nice to have that someone play with the team all season instead of trying to have to pick up things in the middle.
So while the opening weekends of college and NFL football cooled my thirst a bit for sports, it only whetted my appetite for the NBA. So as the Jazz season starts to get underway (thank goodness the Jazz start camp earlier than usual), I want to hit on what the biggest Jazz stories of the season will be.
So what will be the biggest stories for the Jazz?