"They're still a young team. They should. They haven't had time to get sour on each other yet," said coach Jerry Sloan, chuckling and adding, "I think the biggest thing, the players have stayed together."

He notes the emotional difficulties Kirilenko had in Game 1 of the playoffs, moved to public tears over lessened playing time. His teammates "supported him. Everybody has tough times. They supported Fisher when he was gone (for his baby daughter's eye-cancer treatment May 14-16). That's the way it really is supposed to work."

"Oh yeah, other teams, that would have been a disaster," said Harpring about the Kirilenko situation. "Our team, Andrei is one of our guys. We feel for him. He's playing great now.

"We've got some great attitudes on this team. The Jazz have done a great job bringing in guys that want to win, that are hungry to win, that are good guys," Harpring added. "We like each other in the locker room, and that's important."

"Everybody tries to help each other on the floor, off the floor, which is good for us," said Okur. "Our chemistry has been great."

"Our atmosphere on the team is unbelievable," agrees Kirilenko. "We have a great group of guys."

Okur's thoughts about winning their first two series are that the Jazz used that awful stretch near the end of the regular season, when they lost seven of nine, as a teaching tool. "We took our lesson from those games. All of a sudden when the playoffs start, everybody came with 100 percent, best effort, because we learn from those games."

"Guys stepped up," agreed Boozer. "We realized we weren't playing our best basketball."

"I think we got a good spark off the Houston series," added Kirilenko, "because I think we really grew up a lot in that series."

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E-mail: lham@desnews.com