Even with a latter-day Stockton and Malone and the same coach who guided the originals, the Cinderella Jazz will be hard-pressed to stop a Spurs team gunning for its fourth title since 1999

	Ginobili (20) has averaged 27.3 points, 8.3 rebounds and 6.3 assists in his last three games, including a 23-point, 10-assist performance in Game 1. John W. McDonough/SI

No, the Utah Jazz has not disbanded since John Stockton and Karl Malone took their short shorts and their pick-and-roll precision into retirement. Quite the contrary. The Jazz has reached the Western Conference finals, its furthest incursion into the postseason since 1998, when S&M lost to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the Finals.

Utah is still coached by that ultimate NBA old-schooler, Jerry Sloan, who collects tractors ("I haven't really counted, but around 65 sounds right," he says) and is still eminently capable of peppering his team with f bombs, as he did at halftime of Sunday's Game 1, which ended in a 108-100 loss to the San Antonio Spurs. It has a couple of lunch-pail veterans in the Sloan-Stockton-Malone tradition: Guard Derek Fisher, the owner of three championship rings from his days with the Los Angeles Lakers, and forward Matt Harpring, the owner of countless battle scars from a combative career with four teams. And it once again has a hard-nosed, steely-eyed quarterback in Deron Williams, a kind of 21st-century Stockton -- only with lots of skin ink.

Williams scored 34 points and had only one turnover in Game 1 against a defense that had frustrated Phoenix Suns All-Star point guard Steve Nash in the previous series.

The immediate problem for the Jazz, however, is that the Spurs are a version of their old selves, too, and that version won a championship just two years ago, and two years before that, and four years before that. Having emerged from a classic six-gamer against Phoenix, San Antonio has clearly become the favorite (if it wasn't already) in a final four long on pedigree -- the West's Spurs and the East's Detroit Pistons each have three championships -- but short on star power. In recent weeks Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, Dwyane Wade, Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash have been shown the postseason door. Sure, Cleveland's LeBron James lives on in the East, but in the West we will discover if the viewing public can invest in a duel between the relentlessly efficient Spurs ("a slow, positional team," as Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko says) and the Cinderellas from Utah, who were supposed to be eliminated by now, first by the Houston Rockets and then by the Golden State Warriors.

Plus, it's hard not to pine for more of San Antonio-Phoenix, one of the best playoff series in recent memory, one that featured, besides lots of great basketball, a Kafkaesque decision by the NBA that both mistreated the Suns and tainted the Spurs' victory.