Utah gets taste of things to come

It's good entertainment if you can find it.

If the Jazz were looking for excuses, there were a few of those. Williams played (in Game 4) with a case of the flu and in the process sprained his foot. He was also battling a neck stinger (in Game 5). By the end he was looking like a car with a light out, a cracked mirror, a couple of dents and a tailpipe hanging loose — but still gets you where you need to go.

With Fisher arriving at halftime Wednesday, because of his daughter's hospital appointment, Sloan was asked before the game if he knew whether he'd have a full team.

"Do I know?" said Sloan. "Not right now."

Turned out he didn't have a full team. But it had little to do with Fisher's arrival or Williams' injuries but everything to do with a team that requested an early checkout. If you ask Williams, it had much to do with a few teammates taking vacation.

Still, in the end it's hard to fault what happened. For a team that finished the regular season as flat as week-old soda, it made some noise. The Jazz fashioned themselves into an intriguing picture, from their spiky-hair small forward to their burly power forward to their star-bound guard to their 3-point center and beyond.

A team that now understands the vast difference between hoping to be there and expecting to go back.

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E-mail: rock@desnews.com

Column originally published May 31, 2007