TORONTO -- Beginning this morning, the Jazz play seven games in 11 days -- all on the road, in two different countries, from the Snowbelt to the Sunbelt.
The first five come in rapid-fire succession, all in seven days. Today in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Tuesday in Washington, D.C.; Wednesday back up to Boston. Friday over to Indiana; Saturday down to Atlanta. Then it gets (relatively) easy: two games in three nights -- Dec. 20 in Orlando and Dec. 22 in Miami.Sound crazy?
It's cake compared to the trip Jazz assistant trainer Terry Clark will never forget, a month-long trek that no team -- not even one in the minor leagues -- deserves to be dealt. He was just getting started in the business. It was the 1980-81 Continental Basketball Association season, and the Anchorage Northern Knights were on a journey from, well, somewhere very south of Alaska.
"Nineteen games in 35 days, all on the road," Clark said. "And two got canceled because of the weather, or it would have been 21."
No fancy charter planes, either.
It was just nine players, the coach, a radio announcer and Clark, all crammed into one van and a station wagon for an on-the-road adventure that took them throughout the eastern United States, from Rochester, N.Y., to Bangor, Maine.
The wackiness actually started in Anchorage, where the team played a home game. Then there was a red-eye flight to Seattle, another flight to Chicago, and yet another flight to Philadelphia, where the two vehicles were waiting for the drive over to Wilkes-Barre, Penn., for -- get this -- the second game of a set on back-to-back nights.
That's right, back-to-backs in Alaska and Pennsylvania.
Yet somehow the Northern Knights won after their all-day travel affair. Sometimes you just do what you have to do, especially when you're in the predicament Anchorage was in.
"We were the only team west of Wilkes-Barre," Clark said.
So when the Jazz's trip is winding down 10 days or so from now, and they're trying to figure out whether the palm tree they're staring at resides in Orlando or Miami, maybe they will realize they don't have it so bad after all.
Still, it's hard to convince some of the hardened vets that the travel doesn't become a bit of a burden.
"The biggest thing is you get on an elevator at a new hotel," longtime NBA guard Jeff Hornacek said, "and you don't know what button to push for what floor you're on."
Some days you wake up and aren't certain whether you're in the next place or the last.
"I've had mornings where I got up and put my clothes on and didn't have anywhere to go," said Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, who has spent more than 25 years in the NBA as a player and coach. "You don't know where you are."
And sometimes you think you're somewhere, but you're not.
Veteran center Olden Polynice can attest to that, as he did when recalling one two-week trip that took him from Sacramento, Calif., where he was playing at the time for the Kings, to Cleveland, to New York, to Indianapolis, to Atlanta and finally to Orlando, all before heading back home.
"I woke up one morning and thought I was in Cleveland," Polynice said, "but I was in Indianapolis.
"I think that (when the schedule was made) it was one of those days where the guys in the league office said, 'Hey, let's get 'em.' "
The thing about this trip, though, is that the Jazz actually enjoy embarking on a lengthy pre-Christmas stay away from home.
And it's not much trouble, either.
Everyone packs a few more clothes and the travel bags bulge a little larger with extra sneakers and sweats. Clark said the Jazz will utilize an equipment truck, which typically is not the case on shorter trips.
Other than that, it's business as usual.
The players get out of the house, where holiday commotion can become a distraction. If their focus is where it should be, everything goes smoothly.
If not . . .
"If we don't approach the games like we're doing," Polynice said, "we'll come back from the road 0-7."
Sloan, whose club is riding a four-game winning streak, said the Jazz are merely continuing a practice started by his predecessor, former coach and current team president Frank Layden, who used to like to have his teams get away for a healthy stretch in December.
Layden started taking his teams out of town just before Christmas in 1985, the same year the Jazz played an all-on-the-road preseason schedule of eight games that started with two in Texas, picked up with one in Butte, Montana, and another the next night in Spokane, Wash., then took the Jazz down to Miami, up to Green Bay, Wisc., and finally all the way to Alaska for a couple of games in Anchorage.
(They went 6-2 in that exhibition season and, fortunately for them, opened that regular season at home).
It's all done with idea of bringing the team together at key time of the year, a strategy which can work one of the two ways.
"If you win," Hornacek said, "it always brings a team together."
And if you don't -- well, the rest is easy to figure out.
Sloan, however, believes that sometimes too much attention is paid to stretches like this one.
"The season won't be made with this trip," he said. "We still have over 50 games left to play, so that's not going to make or break you."
Going 7-0 would be nice. Making a death march would not. Reality probably falls somewhere in between.
Still, it's hard to believe the 12-7 Jazz wouldn't prefer to come back 17-9 as opposed to, say, 15-12. How easy that will be remains to be seen: Polynice, for one, knows you don't get from Toronto to Miami without facing a few roadblocks along the way.
"We're playing some tough teams -- that makes it doubly tough," he said.
So maybe the key should be just remembering where you are, which is perhaps easier said than done. For some, it doesn't matter whether you're playing seven road games in 11 nights or 19 in 35.
That sense of not knowing where you are? Hornacek has been around the block so many times that, he said, "That's all the time now."