Jazz guard Devin Brown, it seems, is just a bit bothered with the way he is being used.

Or perhaps that should be a lot.

Usual Jazz shooting guard Gordan Giricek sat out Friday's loss to Seattle due to Achilles tendinitis, so Brown got his third start of the season.

But he was replaced by guard Milt Palacio about 10 minutes into the opening quarter, then played another nine minutes the rest of the way, finishing with 14 points in 19 total minutes.

"You come out and you get a start like that and think you'll get more minutes, but then you don't," Brown said afterward. "It's frustrating.

"It needs to be more defined in what kind of rotation that we're going to have," added Brown, who joined the Jazz as a free agent from defending NBA-champion San Antonio this past offseason. "We don't have a defined rotation. It's just confusion."

Giricek has missed three other games this season, one due to a calf muscle strain on the same lower left leg and the other two because of tonsilitis.

With Giricek out, healthy C.J. Miles returned to the Jazz's 12-man active roster.

Giricek joined injured Keith McLeod (avulsion fracture, lower back) and Carlos Boozer (strained hamstring) on the injured list.

OSTERTAG INJURED: Jazz starting center Greg Ostertag exited early Friday and did not return due to an injured right knee.

Ostertag walked off the floor with just more than nine minutes remaining in the third quarter of Utah's 106-90 loss, and immediately signaled for a member of the Jazz's medical staff to join him in the lockerroom.

A Jazz spokesman afterward said the knee was inflamed, but no other extent of the injury was made known.

Ostertag finished scoreless with two rebounds in nine minutes.

With Ostertag out, Jarron Collins wound up playing 16 second-half minutes and finished with 13 points on 5-of-7 shooting in 32 minutes.

MISC.: Jazz owner Larry H. Miller? Absent, again . . . Former Jazz big man Mikki Moore, who has played only three games this season, again was on Seattle inactive list . . . According to proexposure.com, West Virginia product D'or Fischer — who played for the Jazz's Rocky Mountain Revue team this past summer — has been released by Wloclawek in Poland.

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E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com