Williams learns to stay aggressive all the time

Jazz point guard Deron Williams is coming off one of his best statistical playoff games and certainly the biggest victory in his second NBA season.

A day after his first playoff double-double, 20 points and 14 assists in Utah's 103-99 win over Houston, Williams said following Jazz practice Sunday that one thing he learned in that long series was to be aggressive all the time.

"Yeah, definitely. We can't let the game come to us," Williams said. "We've got to take the game. I guess we realized we had to do that because if we didn't, it was going to be over."

Some bounces went Utah's way late in the Saturday's Game 7, but the key was staying aggressive. "It just shows that we've got a lot of fight in us. We've got a lot of heart. Guys are not going to give up," said Williams, who like many of his teammates had never been in an NBA playoff before but got a rare Game 7 win on their first try.

"I'm happy for our team, happy for the organization, I'm happy for Salt Lake, for the city," Williams said. "It was good to win a series and move on."

To Kevin O'Connor, Jazz senior vice president of basketball operations, Williams' growth in the seven playoff games came on the defensive end.

O'Connor noted that, after Utah won Game 4 with Williams scoring 25, Houston point Rafer Alston "really accepted the challenge and played very well in Game 5 down there. And I think Deron, even though he didn't make shots in Game 6, was much better defensively."

Saturday, "He makes one of the big defensive plays of the game when we were down five, I think." Williams disturbed Alston's dribble, Alston grabbed the ball and tried to drive, "Deron cuts him off, he falls down and Deron picks up the ball and they go down to the other end. Those are the plays that the growth shows in. Maybe they don't score quite on the scoreboard, but those are the things we saw," O'Connor said.

But now Williams' task gets harder, trying to defend Golden State's Baron Davis, averaging 25 playoff points and shooting 54 percent.

"That's what the growing-up process brings to you," said Jazz coach Jerry Sloan. "The farther you go, the tougher it gets. The responsibility of what he has to do for us is very, very big, and you just have to let nature take its course."

Fellow guard Derek Fisher noted that Williams's game isn't merely scoring. "Deron has an ability to do whatever it takes for the team to win," Fisher said.