Jazzing It Down

The inevitable is finally on the doorstep, scythe in hand, unwilling to be put off any longer. Karl Malone and John Stockton aren’t getting old, they’re there.

In Philadelphia one forlorn night, four losses into an Eastern trip, the hardest-bitten loyalist of all, Coach Jerry Sloan, finally gives in, privately acknowledging the obvious to staffers: The Jazz is done. The ride is over ...

Of course, that was five seasons ago.

OK, so there have been a few false alarms. It always looks the same. The Jazz loses control of its iron-handed grip on the pace of games, which start going up and down too fast for its elder citizens to keep up.

They start losing. Everyone agrees they’ve had it.

Malone gets restless and looks around. (Remember the 1999 lockout, when he hung out in Southern California, guest hosting on talk radio and saying what fun it would be to be a Laker?)

Up to now, there has always been a happy ending, or a semi-happy one anyway: The Jazz rallies and everyone lives happily ever after, at least until the next season.

In 1997, a night after Sloan sang the blues in Philly, they managed to beat the 76ers ... starting a 41-6 season-ending run, then made the NBA Finals, and returned to the finals in 1998.

Of course, Stockton is 39 now, Malone 38 and none of their teams ever started this slowly.

“Up until this season, we’ve always started well and had kind of the reverse record this far in the season, from what we’ve got this year,” says owner Larry Miller, emerging from the Jazz dressing room at halftime of a recent game.

Miller has agreed to discuss his plight, little as he wants to, during a game with the Charlotte Hornets, a sub-.500 team that has just run up 61 points on the Jazz in two quarters.

These are exciting times here, with the Winter Olympics looming after years of capital improvements and IOC scandal, but not in the once-rowdy Delta Center, which seems to have been cobwebbed over.

The Jazz hasn’t sold out all season, not even against the Lakers, the first time that has happened since the early ‘80s. Worse, hundreds--presumably Californians attending Brigham Young and Utah--came dressed in Laker gold.

The Lakers won. Now the Jazz, which went 74-8 here in its two-season reign atop the West, is only 8-7 at home and 11-13 overall.

Never has there been so much speculation that Miller will break his team up and never has he acknowledged so freely that he’s considering it.

“We’ve actually been dealing with the question locally since these guys were 31, 32, nine or 10 years now,” says Miller, dressed in his usual outfit--polo shirt, casual pants, sneakers. “But this year, we have to try to figure out what the heck’s going on, whether it’s John and Karl finally getting old and showing it....

“What we hope ... I mean, you look at what happened to Boston when their big guys, you know, when [Larry] Bird and [Kevin] McHale and [Robert] Parish retired, you look at what happened to the Lakers when they went down for a few years....

“We’ve always hoped we could do careful rebuilding, careful drafting and not suffer the downturn. That may be wishful thinking. I think we’ve got to figure out the next 10 or 15 games, what we got going on here, and get back in the hunt or maybe then start making some tough decisions.”

The Jazz escapes with a victory that night and Miller goes to see Malone to tell him, finally, how much he wants him to stay. Malone, moved, says he will. Trade rumors die down and they win four of their next five.

Just in case, you might want to take a look at these guys. Whenever they do leave, there may never be anything like them again.

For the Record, They Tried Hardest

No, they never got their due.

As celebrities, they weren’t just out of the mainstream, tucked away in their picturesque Utah redoubt, they were on the dark side of the moon.

As competitors, they were too hard-bitten to be popular, or to leave the stage gracefully.

Malone was never one of the guys, chatting foes up. He was busy glowering at them and trying to scare them off, if he didn’t actually trample them. Stockton was no more outgoing and spent his career wiping out all comers on cross screens.

Nevertheless, their accomplishments were impressive, their professionalism exemplary and their grinding tenacity fearsome to behold.

Stockton, who’ll turn 40 this season, remains grim and unyielding, even as opponents send ever-bigger players, like Charlotte’s 6-foot-2, 210-pound Baron Davis, after him.

You wonder what Stockton will do in retirement, maim guys in pickup games at the Y?

The bionic Mailman is expected to go on for years, but where?

With fewer resources and no glamour--or reverse glamour, so that players they acquired, like Derek Harper, often refused to report--the Jazz has won 50 games 12 times in 14 seasons.

One of the misses was the lockout campaign of 1998-99, when Utah’s 37-13 record was the best in the West. Malone won MVP awards in 1997 and, at 36, in 1999.

Like everyone, however, the Jazz fell before Michael Jordan.

In the ’97 finals, the Jazz had a chance to go up, 3-2, in the Delta Center, before Jordan, so sick Chicago teammates were helping him off the floor, arose to score 38 on them.

In ‘98, the Jazz was about to force a Game 7 in the Delta Center until the Bulls came from behind at the end, with Jordan stealing the ball from Malone and hitting his famous push-off-Bryon Russell-wave-bye-bye shot.

The Jazz went the way of the Buffalo Bills, derided for finishing second. Of course, 10 NBA teams have never been in the finals and seven more haven’t been there in 10 years or more. Only four--the Bulls, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs and Lakers--have won titles since 1991. If being a two-time runner-up made the Jazz an object of scorn, what were the 24 other teams?

But every season, the Thorny Twins got a year older and the West got better. The Lakers, Spurs and Sacramento Kings are now the NBA’s elite, and bigger than the Jazz. Pigeons like the Dallas Mavericks and Clippers became respectable.

Last spring, the Mavericks ousted the Jazz in the first round, Utah’s earliest exit in six seasons. Then Miller, as concerned as fellow owners about the luxury tax, trimmed salary, resulting in the departure of wacky but handy Olden Polynice, one of their few big men.

Malone bristled, as he did whenever he sensed his title chances ebbing.

“We had discussions in June and July,” Miller says. “ ... And Karl had said pretty much what he’s said in the media lately, that if there was an opportunity for him to go someplace and play on a competitive team, is that something I would allow him to do?

“Now, I have to couch that in the context of, every year for the last four, five, six years, he wanted me to assure him, the best I could, either through trades or signing free agents, we’d be able to be competitive....

“This year, the way circumstances lined up, I was less sure we could and probably didn’t give him the kind of solid assurance that, yeah, we’ll be competitive, we’ll be able to sign a couple of guys, do this and that....

“He said, ‘Well, if we can’t be assured we’ll be pretty competitive and I can go to a competing team ... would you let me do that?’

“I said, ‘Well, it’d be pretty hard to deny you that, considering what you’ve done for and been to this franchise for 16 years.’

“But that was in late June, early July.... I don’t know why it came off the shelf four months later.”

Looking for Mr. Endgame

“ Some people, I think, have cashed it in a little bit on me. That’s a part of it when it gets a little bit tough, there’s always some guys who are gonna stay in there and fight.... I can lose just as easy, and feel better goin’ home if I’ve had guys play hard, than if I have guys just going out and trying to say, ‘I want to play over there next year.”’

--Sloan, two weeks ago.

*

Losing doesn’t go down easily with these guys and so, when they stumbled out of the gate, there was, as they say here, heck to pay.

Everything, it seemed, conspired against them.

As long as Stockton and Malone had been playing their two-man game, the Jazz controlled opposing offenses by running the clock down.

The new rules let opponents zone the pick-and-roll and Malone in the post. The pace picked up. The Jazz, No. 8 in defense last season, is No. 27.

Then Mark Cuban, the madcap Dallas owner, decided he was one piece away--Malone. This intrigued the Mailman, who would have been closer to his Louisiana ranch and surrounded by young stars like Dirk Nowitzki and Michael Finley.

The problem was working out an equitable deal, under salary cap rules, for a 38-year-old who was still a major star and made $17.5 million.

The answer was: It was impossible.

Utah would have to take back mere mortals, and high-priced ones, like Juwan Howard, or even less accomplished ones like Raef LaFrentz and Marc Jackson, in convoluted three-or four-way deals with Dallas, Denver and/or Golden State.

Trade talks were cursory and went nowhere, despite the din in the newspapers, crescendoing when the Dallas Morning News reported, “The Mavericks believe they have a shot to acquire Karl Malone in spite of their public denials, according to sources, as long as Malone urges Utah to trade him.”

By that time, Miller and Malone had already talked and Malone was no longer pressing to leave.

“Well,” Malone says, “I think everybody has their opinion, but I’ve played here for 17 years. For someone to say I want out, they have to talk to me about it.

“I’ve said this right here: I’m a professional athlete that would love to play for a championship, but.... Like it is now, it’s two ways you can go. You can demand a trade--and I have a no-trade in my contract. Or you can stick with it.

“And I’ve never turned my back away from a challenge and this is a challenge, to get us back to .500. And I’m not planning on going anywhere because that’s just the way I am.”

You can’t quite call it a happy ending because the Jazz is not even at .500 yet, much less Utah’s Karl Malone sets a screen for John Stockton, effectively taking care of Nick Van Exel in a 1998 playoff game against Lakers. -- PHOTOGRAPHER: Los Angeles Times contending for an actual title, which would be a Don Quixote type of challenge.

On the other hand, Malone could stay in Utah for another two seasons after this one, long enough to break Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring record.

There’s something to be said for accepting reality, especially one this nice. Malone remains a living legend in Utah. He’s to be one of the torch bearers for the Winter Olympics, accepting it, naturally, from Stockton.

How heart-warming will that be?

It won’t be enough for them, but it may have to do.