You keep telling yourself that. Also, in other news, when the Jazz are 100 percent healthy, they are championship contenders.
Um, Vinyl, the notion of Utah being contenders with last season's team is as much the Jazz FO's line as any JazzFanz's.
But the two claims are related. As has been pointed out by other posts in this thread, Fes didn't get enough minutes to develop; practice and/or the NBDL aren't enough. Even with his poor physical condition, raw offense, and subpar off-court work ethic, Fes alongside Boozer or Millsap was still better defensively (and usually net offensively) than the matador D by Booze and Okur or the undersized defense of Booze and Millsap. Sloan's poor in-game strategy (see screen name) did not take into account how often putting Fesenko, even if he didn't score much, alongside a PF worked during the regular season and the playoffs alike. And if Fes had gotten more burn, he could've contributed more than that.
Koufos's situation is less clear IMHO, but his rookie scoring rate was only 4 points per 30 minutes less than Okur's, his rebounding rate was similar to Okur's, and his blocking rate was better. It's not clear what happened to Kouf from year 1 to year 2, but I can't help but think that his progress and morale were curtailed when he was nearly completely benched in February of 2009 and then saw his playing time slashed from about 7 minutes per game available to about 3 last year. His game is still raw also, but he rebounded at a higher rate than EVERYBODY during the regular season by a significant margin, including Boozer, and his steals, assists, and blocks were at a similar to higher rate to Boozer and Okur, too. Maybe much of his minutes came in garbage time, but he could've easily felt that he wasn't being rewarded for his production on the court and his purported effort off the court. Sloan evidently wasn't into even trying to develop these bigs; he was too enamored with throwing an extra 5 minutes or 10 minutes to Millsap or the supposed threat of a slow-footed Okur making a trey every once in a while. Fes and Kouf are far from Perkins' level, but if K-Perk had been healthy for Game 7, it's very possible that the outcome would've been different.
In other words, I don't buy that Sloan is a particularly good in-game strategist or player developer. It seems that Deron, Millsap, and Matthews developed as much from their own initiative as anything that Sloan did for them. Boozer and Okur have improved only naturally since coming here, and the centers are underdeveloped, as it has been described here.
