No whining in (sorta) wine country, and Deron's rollover minutes

SACRAMENTO – Coach Jerry Sloan gave the Dallas Mavericks something of a free pass for their blowout loss to his Utah club on Thursday night.
Sloan’s Jazz, however, best not be hoping for the same should they fall tonight.
“In all fairness to them, they’ve had a tough schedule,” Sloan of the Mavs, whose four-game win streak came to a close in Salt Lake City. “They’ve been out on the road, they’ve come home, go back out on the road and come home, and then have to come up here after the game (Wednesday night vs. Portland).”
The Jazz, who also face Golden State in Oakland on Sunday night, head into tonight’s game against Sacramento with a 1-11 record in the second game of the back-to-back sets.
“We haven’t done very well in those situations, obviously,” Sloan said.
Obvious indeed.
It could in part be because of some tough travel issues that the Jazz have endured themselves, like flying from Salt Lake to Houston for a back-to-back treated by schedule-makers back East as if it were as simple as hopping the train from New York to Philly or having to play in Sacramento one night after a game that started late because the world revolves around television ended so late its very star did not speak to non-network reporters until 13 minutes before midnight.
But even if it is, Sloan doesn’t want to hear about it.
“Everybody faces those things,” he said when further discussing Dallas’ recent rough slate of games. “We run into it – and hopefully we don’t complain about it.”

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Much has been made in the blogosphere – which evidently is something different than the world of the former Illinois governor, who just won’t go away – about how about a combination of deadlines and Thursday’s late-starting (and coyly aforementioned) TNT-televised game between the Jazz and Mavs denied readers of newspapers (yes, those really do still exist; it’s an old-school thing) the opportunity to read in print the thoughts both Utah point guard Deron Williams, who merely finished with 34 points, 12 assists and five rebounds, and teammate/shooting guard Kyle Korver, who dropped 20 in his first start for the franchise.
Jody Genessy provided some of Korver’s missed words in an earlier blog entry (which is not to be confused with walking into any ex-gov’s federal pen cell, which is further not to be confused with pens that can complete phone calls, since those haven’t been invented quite yet, and really would be quite useless once they run out of ink and/or rollover minutes not preserved with a payment every 90 days).
Here, according to the Associated Press, is some of what the masses missed from Texas-raised and Illinois-educated Williams (who missed Monday’s win over Charlotte due to a deep thigh bruise and related knee swelling) over their morning bacon and eggs (or, in certain cases, Pop-Tarts and Frosted Flakes):
“I love playing against (the Mavs), but more than that, we really just needed a win right now, so I came out and gave it all I could;”
“It’s still a little swollen, but my knee is stable and the doc said it was good to go. I felt ready, right from the start;” and
“We knew they were tired playing (Wednesday) night and flying here, so we wanted to get out and run and make it as difficult as we could for them.”
And now, after three missed calls and one text message that just won’t open on a nevertheless still-favorite pen, we return to our regularly scheduled journalism.

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