Burying that losing feeling

Compared to most other seasons in franchise history, the last stuck out like a sore thumb.

Which may be the only health woe not incurred by the Jazz sometime in 2004-05.

In all, 251 man games were lost due to injury. Based on a 12-man active roster, that is roughly a fourth of the entire season. Virtually no one was exempt, with big man Mehmet Okur being Utah's only player to make it through the entire 82-game schedule unscathed.

Gone, indeed, are the days of John Stockton and Karl Malone.

Andrei Kirilenko, an All-Star in 2003-04, played only half of the season, missing 41 games due to a sprained knee, a broken wrist and a sprained ankle. Backup point guard Raul Lopez, now playing in Spain, missed more than half of the season with knee issues. Carlos Boozer, the Jazz's leading scorer, started in each of the season's first 51 games but missed its final 31 with a strained foot. Forward Matt Harpring gutted his way through 78 games, but underwent microfracture surgery on a previously surgically repaired knee just days after the season ended.

The list goes on and on, so much so that the Jazz can't imagine enduring another season as trying on the health front as the last.

"It will be very unlucky," Kirilenko said, "if we've got the same situation as last year."

Yet it will take much more than lady luck for the Jazz to rinse the sour aftertaste of a season in which so much went awry.

Utah finished just 26-56, its worst record since going 25-57 in 1981-82 — pre Stockton-and-Malone.

With Kirilenko hobbled, the Jazz had no All-Star Game selection for just the third time since Pistol Pete Maravich first went in 1977.

Boozer got blasted by owner Larry H. Miller for uninspired play in February, coach Jerry Sloan was at his wit's end by March, and no one seemed too sad to see the whole ordeal come to an abrupt end with, go figure, a loss at Golden State on April 20.

Some with the Jazz had losing at the tip of their tongues much of that time, a reality Sloan has addressed over and over again.

"Jerry says that a lot, where we accepted losing," Harpring said. "I know I never accepted losing. I'm sure there are a couple of players on that team last year that didn't."

Still, in the next breath, Harpring adds this: "I'm sure there are a couple of players who did."