Williams' night included a spectacularly emphatic dunk as he left Paul at a screen and slammed it home early in the third.

"Oh, that was a message,' Boozer said. "Willy sent a message tonight. He may not say it to y'all, but I'm going to say it to y'all n he came out and wanted to prove to you guys that he should be in the All-Star Game.'

"He ran the show, got us in the stuff that he felt comfortable with and he made some great plays passing the basketball, and guys made shots,' said coach Jerry Sloan, adding that Williams has played consistently well throughout Utah's January/February turnaround in which it's won 14 of 16 games to push the record to 31-18. New Orleans is 32-15 and second in the Western Conference.

But few of those wins have seen the Jazz shooting it like they did on Monday, not that Sloan was overly pleased with taking all the outside shots because they helped the Hornets build a 25-19 halftime edge in rebounds and let them run to some easy baskets, even without Paul in the game.

The Jazz were 14-for-22 on threes, Korver making 6-for-8, Okur 4-for-7 and Williams 3-for-4. And they shot 51 percent from the field.

"D-Will did such a great job creating open shots for us, and just make it down, and it really felt good,' said Okur, who had 14 points, three steals and seven rebounds.

Boozer said he saw the rebounding differential and made up his mind to do something about it in the second half. "I put it all on my back,' he said. "I told myself I'm going to go out there and get all of them, get as many as I can get. I challenged myself to get every rebound I can get. I told the guys, 'You make them miss, I'll go get them."

The Jazz play at Denver Wednesday night at 7, and they are keenly aware of how badly Denver beat them on Jan. 17, 120-109, one of their two January losses.

"Yeah, they beat us to death,' said Sloan. "We didn't give them much of a battle. I was disappointed in the way we played and the way we tried to play against them. We tried those (long) kind of shots. They made their 3-point shots and made us look like we hadn't been in the ballgame. We have to try to get the ball inside to try to play against them, if that's at all possible.'

"We played pretty bad and got embarrassed on their floor,' recalled Williams. "This is going to be an important game to pick up two full games in the standings.' Utah has a one-game lead over the Nuggets in the Northwest Division.