Gasol confident Lopez will play with him in '05

Memphis Grizzlies star Pau Gasol thinks his countryman and good friend, Jazz point guard Raul Lopez, will play for Spain at the 2005 European Championships.

According to a report on the Web site for basketball's international governing body, FIBA, Gasol looks forward to reuniting with Lopez at the tournament in Belgrade, Serbia & Montenegro.

"In Belgrade we are going to have a team packed with good players that has to work," Gasol was quoted as saying. "We will have (DKV Joventut's) Rudy Fernandez, who is improving every day, and also Raul Lopez.

"If Raul plays we will be much better," Gasol added. "I think he will play with us again."

After consulting at the end of last season with the Jazz, who were concerned about too much wear and tear on his twice surgically reconstructed right knee, Lopez decided not to play at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.

The decision was somewhat controversial in Spain, which without Lopez made a quarterfinal-round exit from the Olympics.

Lopez, the Jazz's starting point guard for the past five games, did not miss a game last NBA season.

But he missed all of training camp, all of the preseason and 18 games early this season due to problems with the knee, which required Nov. 2 arthroscopic surgery to repair torn cartilage in the joint.

Had Lopez played in the Olympics, Gasol seemed to suggest, he might not have had the problems he did earlier this year.

"I have spoken to him and he has realized that four months without playing during the NBA break is a long time," Gasol told the Fiba site. "You lose your rhythm, and that can bring problems when you have to start again from scratch."

BAD START: Jazz coach Jerry Sloan seemed to sense why his team found itself behind by 18 early in the third quarter of its 98-86 loss at Toronto on Wednesday night.

"We did a terrible job (early)," Sloan said at the end of a five-game road trip. "We couldn't execute a couple of times. We couldn't execute against their zone. We couldn't get out and guard them. We turned the ball over. Had just too many things that we didn't seem to be alive on. Our bodies looked like about half-dead, and you can't play that way, when you're trying to fight from a deficit all the time.

"Finally we fought back a little bit and got the ballgame to where it looked like we'd have a chance," he added, "but then we keep making a mistake here and there that really cost us."