Translated material
Mormon happiness
The Utah club reached the Western Conference finals
Russian national team forward Andrei Kirilenko set a season personal scoring record (21 points) in the fifth match of the Utah-Golden State series, where the Jazzmen reached the Western Conference finals for the first time since 1998, winning 100:87.Four years ago, two legendary basketball players who for many years defined the game of the club from the capital of the Mormon state left Utah - center Karl Malone, nicknamed the Postman, and playmaker John Stockton. The latter then finally retired, and Malone remained in the NBA for one more season to try to win at least one championship title in his career as part of the then mighty Los Angeles Lakers. But the Californians lost the final series to Detroit, and Postman left the big sport without the coveted ring awarded to the players of the best team in the overseas league. With Malone and Stockton gone, Utah has fallen on hard times. The team missed the playoffs three years in a row, something that hasn't happened to them since the early 1980s.
Our Andrei Kirilenko has been playing for Utah since the fall of 2001. He still managed to play with Malone and Stockton, and then the role of team leader fell on him. The Russian scored a lot, was among the best players in the NBA in terms of blocked shots, but the team result left much to be desired. This season is down on every major statistic compared to previous seasons, but Utah has won the Northwest Division title, something that hasn't happened since 2000, and will soon be in contention for the conference championship.
In Russia, it has recently become fashionable to criticize Utah coach Jerry Sloan, who has been working for the 19th consecutive season (an absolute NBA record), for the fact that he began to give less playing time to Kirilenko and uses him not as a scorer, but mainly to fight under the boards and cementing protection. Overseas, the view of Sloan's actions is completely different: in a poll for the title of best coach of the season, his colleagues put him in honorable second place.
The victory over Golden State, which in turn knocked out regular season winner Dallas in the first round of the playoffs, finally confirms the correctness of Sloan’s coaching concepts. And Kirilenko fired on time. Led by Don Nelson, the “Golden State Warriors” did not expect high performance from Andrei, focusing on guarding other Utah players, and the Russian took it and showed his scoring abilities.
Kirilenko scored his points with mid- and close-range shots, converting eight out of a dozen attempts. The Russian made all five free throws accurately and made 15 rebounds, six of them on offense. The last two numbers are also a personal season record for the St. Petersburg basketball graduate. It is unlikely that Sloan knows the Russian folk proverb “A spoon is dear to dinner,” although in the case of Kirilenko this is what happened.
For Utah, only Deron Williams was out of the game in the fifth game, for the first time in the current playoffs he did not score double-digit points. Only once did the ball hit the target, although Williams took 11 shots at the Golden State rim. But another shooting guard, Derek Fisher, hit the target four times from behind the three-point line. The visitors' bet on long-range shots did not pay off. Three players at once (Stephen Jackson, Jason Richardson and Byron Davis) made only one hit out of seven, but the Warriors attacked 30 times from beyond the arc, scoring 18 points in this way.
The hosts, thanks to the efforts of Kirilenko, Carlos Boozer, Mehmet Okur and Paul Millsap, who was in the second symbolic top five of the best newcomers in the league, won the battle under the shield with a colossal advantage - 59 rebounds to 35. Utah did not suffer a single defeat on its court in the playoffs , winning for the sixth time in a row, and Sloan prevailed over Don Nelson in a confrontation with the oldest mentors in the league.
“I don't think anyone coming into the season, including us players, thought Utah was capable of this kind of accomplishment,” Fisher said. “The opponents showed fantastic unity and skill in this series, we could not oppose anything to them,” Nelson noted. Sloan believes that the main factor in the victory was the excellent performance of his players under the shields: “If we had not secured the rebound, we could have had big problems.”
In the conference finals, Utah will meet the winner of the San Antonio-Phoenix series. Before the fifth game, which took place last night Moscow time, the score here was equal - 2:2. The league issued a number of punishments to basketball players who took part in fights and skirmishes during the fourth meeting. Robert Orry (San Antonio) is suspended for two fights. Amar Stoudemire and Boris Diaw miss one match.
The NBA has officially released the full results of the voting by journalists who chose the best player of the regular season. This, as we already reported, was the German forward of “Dallas” Dirk Nowitzki. The MVP title has been awarded since 1956 and is the first time the title has been awarded to a European. Moreover, for the third season in a row, a white-skinned basketball player has been recognized as the strongest (for the last two years, Phoenix playmaker Canadian Steve Nash has been out of competition). This has not happened in the NBA since the great Larry Bird, who held the trophy in 1984-1986. In 83 out of 129 questionnaires, journalists put Nowitzki in first place, as a result, the German scored 1138 points. Nash has 44 first-place finishes and 1,013 points. Next in the final table are Kobe Bryant (Los Angeles), Tim Duncan (San Antonio) and LeBron James (Cleveland).
Results. NBA. Playoffs. Conference semi-finals. "West". “Utah” – “Golden State” – 100:87 (series score 4:1). "East". “Detroit” – “Chicago” – 92:108 (series score 2:3).