Jazz preview 2004: The Inside Story

When Kevin O'Connor came knocking, not once but twice this past summer, Larry H. Miller answered.

When O'Connor put out his pail and asked for it to be filled so he could afford two desperately needed big men, Mehmet Okur and Carlos Boozer, Miller opened his wallet and donated a combined $118 million over the next six years. That is on top of the combined $32 million over four years he is paying for point guard Carlos Arroyo and shooting guard Gordan Giricek.

When O'Connor needed another $86 million to extend the contract of All-Star forward Andrei Kirilenko for six seasons, he eventually got the dough.

And when Miller — whose Jazz open the 2004-05 NBA regular season on Wednesday night at the Delta Center against the Los Angeles Lakers — pondered what he had done, he could not help but allow his thoughts to meander forward, not back.

"We're pretty young," the Jazz owner said, "and we should be pretty good for the next five to six years."

Boozer will turn just 23 years old next month. Kirilenko is only 23 himself. Arroyo and Okur are both 25, and Giricek, at 27, is the old money man of the new-cash crowd.

Relative youth is on the side of all, and with that comes raised expectations for a franchise that has shed stodgy and adopted chic as its image base for the future. But it wasn't just lowering the team's average age that was critical to the plan for meeting those high demands. Rather, it was finding a way to make their bigs exponentially better.

Goodbye, Greg Ostertag and Tom Gugliotta. Hello, Boozer and Okur.

"When we started (the summer shopping season), I said our biggest need was getting a big player who can score a little bit," said O'Connor, the club's senior vice president for basketball operations. "And I think we got a couple of them. I think we've addressed that."

He is not alone.

"If you had asked me at the end of the season what we needed to address," Jazz guard Raja Bell said, "I think what we addressed is what I would have said.

"I think they made the right moves."

Boozer, a meat-and-potatoes power player who feeds largely off the scraps of others, averaged 15.5 points as an NBA sophomore in Cleveland last season.

Okur, a big man who can actually take his shot out to the perimeter, was good for 9.6 points per game even in a somewhat limited role during NBA season No. 2 with Detroit last year.