Mo is grateful to Jazz, glad to be with Bucks

MILWAUKEE — Last season, as an NBA rookie, he could barely get playing time in Utah. This season, as an NBA sophomore, he is not only playing regularly but also starting at the point in Milwaukee.

Mo Williams is living the good life and loving every moment.

"I'm getting more and more comfortable each game," he said, "especially with my teammates and a new home."

Williams received a bargain-basement offer sheet worth $5.5 million over three years from the Bucks last August, and the Jazz — with fellow point guards Carlos Arroyo and Raul Lopez both in their long-terms plans — opted not to match it.

Now, in part of because of early-season injuries sustained by both Arroyo and Lopez, the point is perhaps the Jazz's least-stable position this season.

There are even times, Jazz coach Jerry Sloan said before his club's Saturday-night visit with Milwaukee, when he wonders 'what if?'

"But there's nothing you can do about that," Sloan said. "You go on about your business."

Which is precisely how Williams, a second-round draft choice from the University of Alabama, took the Jazz's decision not to match Milwaukee's relatively paltry offer.

"I think everything happens for a reason," he said Saturday. "I understand this is a business before anything, and there's a lot of things you don't want to do personally — but, from a business standpoint, you've got to make that decision."

Williams had nothing but good to say about his one-year stay in Utah. He spoke of his "respect" for Sloan, said he wanted to thank "the whole coaching staff" and called Jazz basketball operations senior vice president Kevin O'Connor "a great GM."

Sloan, likewise, gushed over Williams, whom he called "the odd man out" among three points.

"I told him, 'That's a great opportunity for you, and I hope you do well,' " Sloan said of a call he made after Utah made its decision, "because I really have a lot of respect for him.

"He was a wonderful guy. He never complained," Sloan added. "If anybody should have been upset, in my mind, last year with our team and the way I played them — and I told him, and the team — he (had a right to) gripe. Because almost every time I put him on the floor, he gave us positive results.