But now that Portland has come into the picture, matching the Blazers' pending offer for Millsap would push the Jazz so far over the salary cap — thus costing them a pile of money in luxury tax penalties — that their lovable longtime owner, the late Larry H. Miller, would be torn and tearing up over what to do with his team these days.

Now, that critical decision-making responsibility falls on Miller's son, Greg, and the Jazz front-office hierarchy to determine what's the best course of action for this franchise to take in the future.

They must make difficult decisions that will shape the success — or failure — of this team for years to come.

But hey, it's not as if the Jazz are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic here. Utah has a solid roster which, when healthy, could definitely make another postseason run like the Jazz did in 2006, when they reached the Western Conference finals.

Of course, the key phrase there is "when healthy" — Boozer, Williams, Kirilenko, Okur and seemingly all their other key personnel spent at least a little (and in the case of Boozer, a lot of) time on the injured list last season.

Thankfully, Boozer will be playing for his next contract this season, so if he isn't traded away to another team, the man who once suffered from the slowest-healing hamstring in the history of hamstrings will likely play his big back bumper off in an effort to prove he deserves a big-money deal next summer.

But while the rest of the West is making roster moves in a quest to be the best, with several more signings certainly still to come as free agents shout "Show me the money!" Utah is forced to pretty much stand pat, watch and wait. They're already paying out too much money to too many guys, caught between a rock and a hard salary cap, with no immediate relief in sight.

Oh, sure, the Jazz could still swing a trade, but, with the salary cap shrinking by about a million bucks from last year and Utah still needing to sign a couple more players while well over the cap already, it's going to be dang difficult to revamp its roster.

So their hopes to overtake the Lakers, Nuggets, Spurs, Mavericks, Blazers and Rockets will hinge on how well the Jazz, as presently constituted, can play "when healthy" — because we've already seen that, without all their weapons, they're about as dangerous as a dud SCUD missile waiting to misfire.

e-mail: rhollis@desnews.com