"I don't know why," he said when about his stroke not being what it was during the regular season, when the big Turk averaged 17.2 points and established himself as a first-time All-Star regarded as one of the league's top long distance-shooting big men.

"They are all good shots that I was making during the season," added Okur, who hit four last-minute game-winning shots for the Jazz early in the season. "I need to work on my shot, and I can't give up."

Yet it may take much more than that, and who knows if the remaining games of the Jazz's first playoff series since 2003 will be enough to rectify what another talking head sees as the true root of Okur's postseason problems?

"Mehmet Okur is playing terrible, but that's what happens when you become a standing jump shooter," former NBA star and current TNT commentator Charles Barkley told viewers. "That's why he has to diversify his game.

"He's got to learn to post up, and he's got to learn to put the ball on the floor," Barkley added. "When you become one-dimensional you become easy to guard, and it doesn't show up until the playoffs."

But now the Jazz are in the postseason for the first time since they signed Okur away from Detroit in the summer of '04, and now Barkley's assertion has evidently reared its he-really-may-have-something-there head.

And that's an issue even Mark Eaton — who, long before dishing out fine food and long before being one of the NBA's top defensive big men, was actually once an auto mechanic — could not fix now.

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E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com