Expectations hard to assess for Jazz

Sports: FootBall

As long as the memories of an injury-ravaged season and April collapse are still fresh for the Jazz, Deron Williams and his teammates will avoid any talk about potential Northwest Division titles and deep playoff runs this preseason.

Asked about his level of expectations, Williams spoke simply of finishing as high in the Western Conference standings as possible, with the hopes of securing home-court advantage in a playoff series and making amends for last season.

"It was just a bad year for us," Williams said of last season's 48-34 finish and first-round playoff elimination, "and hopefully we can shake that loose, come back, hopefully have an injury-free year, and do some damage."

For all the attention paid to Carlos Boozer's return to Utah, assessing the Jazz's potential this season largely has been overlooked.

On one hand, the Jazz will bring back 12 players following one of their most disappointing seasons in franchise history, a team that went just 15-11 at full strength after Boozer's return from knee surgery and 1-12 on the road against the West's seven other playoff teams.

On the other hand, the Jazz have averaged 51 wins the past three seasons, have posted a 70-12 record at EnergySolutions Arena the last two seasons and return seven players from the team that advanced to the 2007 conference finals.

"If we stay healthy, we're a great team, if we have everybody out there," Williams said. "We've proven that. It's just a matter of getting better. We definitely have to get better defensively, be more committed to playing better on the road."

Added Kyle Korver: "Last year, we have the same team, everyone's picking us toward the top of the whole league. I think a lot of guys didn't have the years that they wanted to have. I think guys worked hard this summer. Hopefully, that'll show."

More than anything, the Jazz are hoping to avoid a repeat of last season, when they lost players to injuries for a combined 149 games, forcing them to use 20 starting lineups.

"I thought it definitely put a damper on our season," said Williams, who suffered a sprained left ankle in the preseason and missed 13 games before returning for good.

"We never got comfortable, we never got continuity with each other. It was just a tough adjustment for everybody to go in and out of different lineups and play with different roles. Nobody had a defined role for a whole season."

Although the Jazz dropped seven of their final nine regular-season games, including a crushing home loss to a seven-man Golden State team, general manager Kevin O'Connor opted to keep together the roster.

"If that had happened for 82 [games], then it would have been a different story," O'Connor said. "But you try and evaluate it and you try and look at it and you try and say, 'OK, how do we correct it?' and that's what Jerry spent a lot of the summer doing."

Nobody is a bigger believer in continuity than Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, who expressed his belief at Friday's media day that keeping together a team might be the surest way to a better record.

"Over the years that I've been in basketball, that's always paid off," he said. "You get three or four more wins than what you got last year. If you get injuries, you're going to drop off some. But you have a chance to win four or five [more] games, and that's the bottom line."

Asked about the prospect of diminishing returns at some point for a team that stays together, Sloan said the same thing was said about the Jazz with John Stockton and Karl Malone before their NBA Finals runs in the 1990s.

"This team is young," Sloan said. "They haven't had too many hardships. Last year was one of the few hardships they've had where they've had injuries since they got off to a decent run and had a couple things happen that were good for them a couple years ago."

Andrei Kirilenko praised the lack of turnover on the Jazz, saying, "It's a big privilege in this league to keep your team together for a long time. It's very good that we're getting older, we're getting more experienced and we kept our team together."

At the same time, the Western Conference hasn't gotten any easier for the Jazz, who finished six games behind both Denver and Portland in the division last season. The Jazz will host the Nuggets in Thursday's preseason opener.

Williams listed Dallas (Shawn Marion), San Antonio (Richard Jefferson) and the L.A. Lakers (Ron Artest) as all having made significant offseason moves. The three division winners plus the West's next-best team will earn top-four playoff seeds.

"Teams got better, so it just got more difficult to get up to the top tier," Williams said. "But if we stay healthy, I think we can compete with anybody."