Jazz great at sharing the basketball

They have a penchant, especially lately, for making the extra pass.

It's a trait among many typically common to Jerry Sloan-coached Jazz teams, and fortunately for Sloan this one — circa 2008-09 — is no different.

In fact, Utah currently leads the NBA in both assists per game and assists differential compared to its opponents.

Yet it's only the past two-and-a-half weeks or so — after Christmas, actually — that the 22-15 Jazz have gotten back to something from which for a short while they simply got away.

Sloan thinks he knows why they have, too.

"They can see that gives them an opportunity to have a chance to win," he said. "If somebody's open, give it to the guy that's got a better shot rather than just cast shots up."

From era to era, it's been a mantra by which the Jazz largely have lived.

And it all starts at the point.

"You know," Sloan said, "John Stockton got a lot of assists. Deron (Williams) gets a lot of assists.

"That kind of goes hand-in-hand," the Jazz coach added, "with other people seeing that, seeing how much it (helps) to make a pass to somebody that has a better shot."

Statistics, in this case, certainly support the assertion.

During a seven-game stretch prior to Christmas — one in which Sloan's team went just 3-4 — the Jazz were averaging 21.7 assists per game, with no more than 25 in any one game.

Over their seven post-Christmas games — a span in which they are 5-2 — they're averaging an above-usual 28.3, with 26 or more in each game.

The difference is both obvious and significant.

So, too, is the fact that in those seven pre-Christmas games they were assisting on 61 percent of their field goals.

In the seven since, that total is up to 68.9 percent.

No wonder Williams speaks so frequently about how important it is that the Jazz be "unselfish."

No wonder sixth man Andrei Kirilenko said after Saturday's win over Detroit — a game in which Utah assisted on 29 of its 38 field goals, an impressive 76.3 percent clip — that he really likes how the Jazz have been playing lately.

And no wonder sharpshooting big man Mehmet Okur, who scored a game-high 22 points and hit 8-of-9 from the field against the Pistons, credited his teammates afterward for doing "a good job creating open shots for me."

Sloan actually credits his club's many injury woes — 99 man-games lost and counting — for both the way the Jazz strayed throughout much of December and for how lately they've been more cognizant of the need to make that extra pass.