Jazz fans can put plans on hold

HOUSTON — This just in from the Travel Channel: Jazz fans may want to hold up on the five-day Park-Hopper pass at Disneyland Resort, wait on the beach-rental bungalow, too.

And for heaven sake, don't book the bus tour of Beverly Hills movie mansions yet.

That anticipated playoff match-up between the Jazz and Lakers is still in doubt.

Tuesday night at the Toyota Center, the Rockets embarrassed the Jazz, 95-69, to pull to a 3-2 deficit in their best-of-seven series. Which means the action swings back to EnergySolutions Arena, where the Jazz are almost invincible. Except, of course, if they're playing the Rockets, who don't seem to worry at all about that home court hoo-hah. They won one and came close to winning a second, last week in Salt Lake. All totaled, the Jazz have lost five games all year at ES Arena, two of them to Houston.

"It's not that we're not confident, but it shouldn't be only talk. We really need to be active and bring the win off," said forward Andrei Kirilenko. "Nobody going to give it to us."

So now the Jazz have a serious problem. They've let the Rockets think they're supposed to win and isn't that just begging for trouble? That's what happened back in 1994 and 1995 and you know what happened then — Houston rolled past Utah on the way to back-to-back championships.

Maybe it's just that the Jazz can't live with prosperity. They're better when people aren't planning vacations around them. In which case they may want to skip straight to Game 7, which would be in Houston.

Fact is, the Jazz shouldn't have let it get to this point. They led two games to none after shocking Houston on its home court. The series could have been over, and most experts predicted it was. Now it's getting dicey. The Jazz are playing poorly — try 36 percent shooting — and their All-Star forward, Carlos Boozer, is still AWOL. In five games he has scored 20 points only once. In the other games he scored 13, 15, 14 and 19.

At first his sub-par play was an aberration, then a concern. Now it's a full-on slump.

Asked if there was frustration over the way the Rockets have stunted his chances to score, Boozer retorted, "A little bit, but that's part of it; you just go play the game."