Utah Jazz: Month looms large if Almond joy is in Jazz future

BOISE — To say it's a big month for Morris Almond is like calling Mount Everest a speed bump.

That's just how huge the stakes are for Almond, the Jazz's first-round draft choice in 2007 — and someone who won't learn until an end-of-October deadline whether or not the franchise plans to pick up the $1.16 million, third-year 2009-10 season option on his current rookie contract.

For the sake of agreement, however, Almond is willing to concur with the understatement.

"It's a big month, especially for a player like me trying to stake a claim," he said.

Almond appeared in just nine NBA games as a rookie, and spent most of his first pro season out of Rice University with the NBA Development League's Orem-based Utah Flash.

The shooting guard had a couple of flashy 50-point games and averaged 25.6 points there but failed to establish the sort of all-around game that may make his Jazz career — or break it, should be it absent yet again.

Since training camp for the 2008-09 season opened Tuesday at Boise State University here, though, Jazz brass evidently has seen more of what it wants Almond to show on a night-in, night-out basis.

"He's looks more confident, and I think he's in better shape," Jazz coach Jerry Sloan said of Almond, whose body fat for this camp is at a team-best sub-3.0 percent. "And he's able to do other things other than be able to shoot the ball. That's what he has to do.

"He has to work on other things, because there are four other people playing with him. When he shoots every time he gets it that's pretty tough on the players that are with him. They can find him when he's open, but he's got to find them sometimes, too.

"That," Sloan added, "is one of the things we talked about before he finished the (Rocky Mountain Revue) summer league."

If Almond continues to do much of the same throughout camp and the preseason, perhaps the Jazz indeed will exercise the contract option.

For now, though, they're withholding judgment.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, general manager Kevin O'Connor suggested.

O'Connor notes that the team did the same last season with 2006 first-round pick Ronnie Brewer before it finally decided in late October to pick up his third-year option.

And now Brewer, after a strong sophomore season and solid 2008 summer, already has had the $2.7 million fourth-year option on his contract exercised.