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 Wide-open race Post-Jordan playoff era begins with Jazz still ringless
Posted: Thursday May 06, 1999 09:49 PM
NEW YORK (AP) -- Contrary to popular belief, the player who took the final shot of last year's NBA Finals has not retired. And no, his shot did not go in. Long forgotten by the masses who watched Michael Jordan hit his final shot for the Chicago Bulls in Game 6 last June is the fact that John Stockton had a chance to win the game at the buzzer. His final try barely missed, Jordan had his career-defining moment and the two future Hall of Famers in Utah went another year without a championship. "That wouldn't have won the series, but it would have given us another chance to win the championship -- which is a lot better than the way it turned out," Stockton said. "I liked our chances in the next game, but that's easy to say now. "It's over with, and it won't do much good to dwell on it. I had an opportunity to make the shot and it didn't quite go. But I'd take it again if it happened again." Stockton and his running mate, Karl Malone, are a long way from having it happen again. It'll take 11 victories before they can reach the finals again to have another chance to capture the title that has eluded them throughout their otherwise stellar careers. Another year older, with Stockton, Malone and Jeff Hornacek on the last years of their contracts and no longer the No. 1 seeded team in the West, the Jazz will have to work their way through a postseason that looks an awful lot different than it did last year. The absence of Jordan, of course, is the biggest change of all. But scattered throughout both conferences are a number of younger, quicker, uppity teams who believe their chances are as good as anyone's in this first year of the post-Jordan era. No team signifies this change-in-progress era quite as much as Utah's first-round opponent, the Sacramento Kings -- the highest scoring team this season and one of the funnest to watch. Assembled from a cast of characters that includes a flashy, tattoo-adorned rookie point guard with a politically incorrect nickname (Jason "White Chocolate" Williams), a Serbian center who has been through past playoff wars (Vlade Divac), a man-child power forward with a checkered past (Chris Webber) and a loose cannon shooting guard coming off the bench who once helped the Houston Rockets to a title (Vernon Maxwell). "We've got a lot of respect for that team and what they're doing out there," coach Jerry Sloan said. "They're trying to build a winner, and that's something we can understand in our organization." The Kings and Jazz open their best-of-5 first-round series on Saturday -- one of four series that begin that day. Miami and New York renew their rivalry in the day's first game, and the other matchups are Phoenix-Portland and Detroit-Atlanta. The other four series -- Philadelphia-Orlando, Minnesota-San Antonio, Houston-L.A. Lakers and Milwaukee-Indiana -- begin Sunday.
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