Utah Jazz: Boozer looks to get going

After watching him open 1-for-11 and wind up shooting 3-for-14 in Wednesday night's season-opening loss at Denver, Deron Williams' advice to Carlos Boozer would be to simply shake it off.

"It's the only thing you can do," the Jazz point guard said.

Yet that's much easier said than done.

Though it seemed as if he was fading backward on many of his missed jumpers against the Nuggets, neither Boozer himself nor Jazz coach Jerry Sloan suggested the woes could be attributed to anything mechanical.

And while it may have looked as if he were shooting with lead weights in his Duke backpack, as a certain ESPN commercial might prompt one to wonder, it wasn't that, either.

What then?

"There's a lot of pressure on him," Sloan said of the two-time NBA All-Star who surprisingly opted against opting out of the final season of his current $68 million contract with the Jazz — then spent the summer talking publicly about how much he'd like to play for other teams.

"I mean, you can play this game for 40 years, and you can play it for 15 years, and you'll see guys have games like that, and you'll say, 'Why did it happen?' Well, I'm sure he didn't go with the idea he wanted it to happen. That's just part of basketball.

"After having played myself, I had times where I couldn't throw it in the ocean or couldn't do anything. I was awful," Sloan added.

"So what do you do about it? You've got to see if you're tough enough to get ready to go the next day, and you find out who you are in tough situations. If I'm not in great shape, I better get in better shape, if that's the case. Or if I haven't done enough shooting, to work on my shooting, then that's what I've got to do."

But Boozer — who'll be back at it tonight, when the Jazz play their 2009-10 NBA season home-opener against the Los Angeles Clippers at EnergySolutions Arena — suggested he hasn't been feeling any pressure, even in what for him is now a contract season.

"Not really at all," he said when asked after Wednesday's loss about Sloan's pressure suggestion.

"I felt like I was just out there playing, trying to make things happen, trying to be aggressive, trying to do what I can do to help our team win. I mean, look . . . Sometimes shots ain't gonna go in, but we've got to play defense, and we didn't do either."

Defensive deficiency really was on Boozer's mind Wednesday.