For the Jazz, the most aggravating part of the current playoffs has to be that it's a relatively small, librarian-looking guard from Iowa State who is making them look bad.
Jeff Hornacek does not, on first impression, look like a back-breaker. He looks like he ought to be bagging your groceries. He's got this straight brown hair. He's pale. He's 27 years old but looks 17.He's 6-foot-3 and 190 pounds, which might be on the big side in an accounting office but not in the NBA. He isn't muscle-bound. He doesn't swagger when he walks. He's never won a slam-dunk contest.
He really is an accountant. That's what he got his degree in at
Iowa State, where he also starred on the Cyclones basketball team. At least he did eventually. In the beginning, the Cyclones thought so much of Hornacek's abilities they allowed him to walk on to practice. They didn't give him a scholarship for two years.
He grew up in Illinois, the son of a high school basketball coach. He learned the game from his father but didn't play for him. In high school it was the same as it would be at Iowa State. They didn't even notice him until he was a junior.
Getting into the NBA was just like high school and college. Maybe he did set a new Big Eight assist record by the time he graduated in 1986, and maybe he did become the first player in conference history to record more than 1,000 points and more than 600 assists in his career, but when the second round of that summer's NBA draft came around, Hornacek was still available. He didn't go until the third round was one pick away.
The Suns took him No. 46 overall. He was their fourth choice in that draft.
That he's still around four years later is a testament to second looks - to Hornacek's trademark tendency to wear on his teams. First they treat him like a delivery boy. Eventually they decide they can't live without him.
In the wake of the Suns' drug scandal of 1987, Hornacek is the only player they did not get rid of.
That makes him the team patriarch. At 27. He is also believed to be the only Phoenix Sun who mows his own lawn.
"Cotton (Phoenix Coach Cotton Fitzsimmons) keeps telling me to hire someone to do it," says Hornacek. "But I've been doing it since I was eight. Why change?"
Even at the projected $1 million-per-year contract he is expected to sign at the end of this season, Hornacek says he'll do his own lawn. The new contract, by the way, is the Suns' idea. They could pay Hornacek the $400,000 he's making this year again next season, but General Manager Jerry Colangelo told Hornacek that was an insult and they'd rip up the old contract and pay him what he's worth.
He has proven his worth to the Suns by steadily improving every year he's been in the league - to the point that this season he averaged more than 17 points a game while serving as the Suns' Designated Replacer.
When sixth man Eddie Johnson lost several games to injury, there was Hornacek, picking up the scoring slack. When point guard Kevin Johnson was out, there was Hornacek, playing the point with some effectiveness.
Now, in the playoffs, here's Hornacek, giving the Jazz grief. In two games he's scored 36 points on 15 of 24 shooting. He's added six assists and six rebounds.
As with the lawn, he tends to do it all. He has a sixth sense kind of ability to be where the ball is, for either a rebound or a shot. His specialty is being in the right place at the most opportune - to the Suns - time.
He is most effective as the Suns' second option. If Tom Chambers is double-teamed, there's Hornacek - the perennial second-rounder - to take the pass and get off an open jump shot. If Mark West misses a rebound, there's Hornacek. If Johnson is out of the lineup, there's Guess Who?
It's enough to have the Jazz talking to themselves. If they've got any chance at all in a best-of-5 series that saw them lose their homecourt advantage Sunday in the Salt Palace, they've got to do something about a variety of Suns' assets, not the least of which is this Hornacek, the player who is so invisible he was rated, by a recent vote of NBA coaches and general managers, as the most underrated player in the league.
By his own admission, he can't jump all that high and he isn't terribly fast. He's not tall and he's not exceptionally strong.
He doesn't look at all like the kind of player who can send you home for the summer; the kind who can knock your socks off. Literally. But that's the message he has so far been sending to the Utah Jazz.