Lakers vow to win for Malone

LOS ANGELES — The Jazz head toward Hollywood for a confrontation with one half of the dynamic duo that once did good deeds for them, and now sides with a despised adversary, but the whole show ends up on hold because the evening's star attraction cleaned the proverbial clock of some Canadian kid with a simple swing of one of the world's sharpest elbows.

Even in L.A., where true tales come to life and ones that are not nevertheless do the same, it could not possibly have been scripted this way.

Yet that's the story line for Utah's game tonight against Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers, who will be without ex-Jazz star Karl Malone in what would have been his first outing against the franchise he called his own for 18 NBA seasons.

It's not easy, but the Mailman tries not to make a scene about it all.

"It's just one of those things, and I'm gonna stop short of that, because, if not, it might cost me some more games," said Malone, who on Friday was suspended one game by the NBA for elbowing point guard Steve Nash in the mouth when the Lakers visited Nash's Dallas Mavericks Thursday.

"It's disappointing, but it's just one of those things that, probably when I finish, I'll talk more freely about it," he added, leery of further reprimand. "Right now, I have one goal, and one goal only, and I'm not gonna do anything to disrupt the team and what our focus is."

For the Lakers, owners of an NBA-best 16-3 record, that goal is a championship — the very lure that delivered Malone from Utah to L.A.

In doing so, Malone and 19-season Jazz point guard John Stockton — who retired after last season — left longtime coach Jerry Sloan with a stripped-down fixer-upper few expected to do much.

Perhaps it was about time, Malone suggested Saturday.

"Me being there and Stock being there — it probably maybe tied the coaches' hands at times," he said.

Do not, however, mistake Malone for someone who doubted what Sloan could do without those two.

Asked about just that a few months back, Malone — slipping a time or two by calling the Jazz "we" and "us" — said he responded thusly: "Coach Sloan and his staff are gonna have them ready to play. That's how we've been for a lot of years. When people counted us out, they always found a way to win."

Proving him right, the Jazz are 11-7.