Carlos Boozer's 36 points help Jazz beat Pistons, 103-93
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by CRS-ONE
This afternoon the Utah Jazz left the Palace of Auburn Hills with a win as they beat the Detroit Pistons 103-93.
The teams were pretty evenly matched through most of the first half of the game. The Jazz outscored the Pistons 14-9 in the last four minutes of the second to take the lead and didn't look back.
Utah's offense was powered by Carlos Boozer and Deron Williams. Proving why he's the second best point guard in the league, Williams had a filthy stat line of 21 points and 14 assists. More impressive was Boozer, who had 11 rebounds and 36 points, shooting 17-20 for the night. That's the type of stat line that both Jazz fans and fantasy owners like to see.
Detroit really had no answer for Boozer tonight, probably due to Rasheed Wallace not playing. He missed the game to to a sore knee. In my preview of tonight's game I mentioned how balanced the Pistons are. They got a lot of help from their bigs tonight. Antonio McDyess lead them in scoring, with 19 points, and pulled down 12 rebounds. I was personally glad to see McDyess have a good game tonight. It's a shame he has been as injury prone as he has been. He has overcame a lot of challenges and it's good to see that he can still play. Nazr Mohammad added 7 points and 14 rebounds; Jason Maxiell gave them 11 points and 6 rebounds.
I thought it was odd that Pistons coach Flip Saunders was ejected, picking up two technicals in an argument over a blocking call. Sometimes a coach will knowingly argue with a referee and risk getting the technical if it leads to the team getting motivated. Maybe Saunders thought that is how it would wind up. I'm sure he didn't plan on getting himself ejected. Maybe he wanted to leave the game and get a beer like Don Nelson would. Who knows.
The last bucket of the game was from Utah's Mehmet Okur, who shot one of his signature "I may be a center, but I can shoot from the outside because I'm from Europe where everyone dreams of playing like Toni Kukoc" shots.
Even though they won the game, I wonder how much of Boozer's dominance was due to Wallace not playing. He wouldn't have gotten as many good looks and would definitely not have shot 85% from the floor. The Jazz were also lucky that things continued to go their way in the second half Williams started getting too eager to set up his own shot, especially in the fourth. The Pistons didn't capitalize on that.
Still, a win is a win. It's definitely a confidence builder for them to see that they can play competitively against the top teams and confidently pull out a victory. This is also the eight time this season the Jazz have broke the century mark. I'm really liking this more offense friendly style that coach Jerry Sloan has implemented this year. They win and keep Andrei Kirilenko happy. And that's cool.
