Lopez out for 3-4 weeks; Arroyo to miss 5 games

The Jazz have set Raul Lopez's timetable for being out at 3-to-4 weeks, the team said one day after their backup point guard underwent arthroscopic surgery to repair torn cartilage in his twice surgically reconstructed right knee.

On the long end, that means Lopez could miss 15 games — all the Jazz have scheduled in November.

Lopez is on the injured list along with starting point guard Carlos Arroyo, who has a sprained left ankle.

Arroyo has said he will not return until he is 100 percent healthy, but the Jazz feel that should not be longer than the five games he must sit out after going on the injured list.

Besides Wednesday night's late-starting regular-season opener against the Los Angeles Lakers, Arroyo will miss games Friday night at Golden State, Saturday night at Denver, Monday night at the Delta Center against Denver and Wednesday night at home against Toronto.

He is eligible is to be activated prior to the Jazz's Nov. 13 Delta Center game against the defending NBA-champion Detroit Pistons.

LUCRATIVE WORK: Agent Marc Fleisher worked with the Jazz to sign three of his clients this year to either new contracts or extensions — shooting guard Gordan Giricek (four years, $16 million), center Mehmet Okur (six years, $50 million) and small forward Andrei Kirilenko (six-year extension, $86 million).

Assuming the usual agent's commission of four percent, that may mean Fleisher will make a little more than $6 million indirectly from the Jazz over the next seven years. Add in the roughly $2.6 million he could earn from the six-year, $66 million extension client Tony Parker signed with San Antonio on Monday, and it seems safe to say Fleisher's done okay the past few months.

SI FUN: Writing on the magazine's web site SI.com, Sports Illustrated's John Hollinger compiled a list of the NBA's top-12 most noteworthy games this season — and the Jazz earned mention in two.

Here's Hollinger's tongue-in-cheek account of what will happen in Utah's most-obvious entry on the list, a March 15 visit to Jazz forward Carlos Boozer's old Cleveland club:

"Cleveland celebrates the return of . . . Boozer, who is greeted with a predictable cascade of boos for his backstabbing routine in the offseason. . . . As for the game itself, it passes without incident until late in the fourth quarter, when LeBron James offers Robert Traylor 'some of that Nike scratch' to take a flagrant-2 on Boozer, and the Tractor obliges by flattening the ex-Cav — stopping only long enough to contemplate the irony of a guy named 'Boozer' playing in Utah."