Patient execution: After brief lull, Jazz return to NBA's elite club

So here they are again, the Utah Jazz have clinched a playoff spot and are about to clinch another division championship. With five games left in the regular season, they have already collected 51 wins and are once again among the elite teams in the NBA.

This has become routine for the Jazz; so routine that it's easy to overlook what the Jazz have just pulled off.

The Jazz have undergone a complete makeover the last few years, one that was so smooth and quick that it has gone almost unnoticed. In three short years they tore down one of the NBA's best teams and built another one in its place.

Remember all the years of misery they supposedly would have to endure after John Stockton and Karl Malone retired? It turned out to be a bump in the road.

Great teams don't reload this quickly. To wit:

• After the great Celtic teams of the '80s were dismantled, it went into a steep nosedive. Larry Bird retired in 1992, McHale retired in '93 and Robert Parrish in '94. Beginning in '94, the Celtics failed to make the playoffs seven times during the next eight years.

• When the stars of the Houston Rockets' Hakeem Olajuwon era began to fade and retire in the '90s, the Rockets endured a 10-year span in which they failed to make the playoffs five times and exited the playoffs in the first round five times.

• As Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer neared the end of their careers, finally retiring in 1994, the Detroit Pistons suffered for it for the next 10 years ('92-01), failing to qualify for the playoffs five times and exiting the playoffs in the first round five times, exactly like the Rockets.

• After Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson left the Chicago Bulls, the Bulls failed to make the playoffs seven straight years.

Now consider what the Jazz have done. After thriving for nearly two decades with the John Stockton-Malone duo, the Jazz lost both players in 2003. The following season the Jazz were 42-40. A year later they slipped to 26-56, and the year after that they were 41-41.

In 2007 — a mere four years after the Stockton-Malone exit — they won a division championship with a 51-31 record, returned to the playoffs and advanced to the conference finals.

This season they have already equaled last year's victory total and are again atop their division.