Asked if he enjoyed playing only 13 first-half minutes so he could rest up for a strong second half in a recent game, Karl Malone scoffed at the suggestion.
"No," the 37-year-old Jazz power forward said. "I hate it."
Why? "Because I want to play."
Understandable.
The NBA's second-leading all-time scorer prefers participating to watching, and there seems to be nothing wrong with that.
Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, however, has a different take.
Sloan takes it upon himself to monitor the Mailman's minutes, along with those of 39-year-old point guard John Stockton, and it's a task he does not take lightly.
"It wouldn't make any difference if we played them 48 minutes a night — they'd still compete the same way," said Sloan, whose 49-24 club plays host to the Los Angeles Lakers tonight in a meeting of two teams that later this month will open play in the NBA postseason. "But I still think you have an obligation to a player, in those situations, to try to protect him as much as you can, as long as you can."
Sloan sticks firmly to his guns on this matter — even if it might make a workaholic like Malone crazy, and even if it might drive nuts the fans in the stands who never have, and never will, understand why the coach won't go to his bread-and-butter sooner, especially when opponents are toasting the Jazz's second-teamers.
"They haven't always accepted the fact that I take them out of games," Sloan said of Stockton and Malone, two future Hall-of-Famers for whom he has the utmost respect.
But Sloan does manage their minutes, he insists, for their own good — even if their competitive nature blinds them to that reality.
Doing so, Sloan adds, has helped make the duo as durable as they have been throughout careers spanning more than a decade-and-a-half for each — especially late in the season and in the playoffs, when bodies might be more apt to break down from sheer wear and tear.
Yet even now that their playing days are winding down, with no more than a few seasons left for each, Sloan won't bend.
"There's been a lot of times when I could have played (Malone) 47 minutes a game, from a selfish standpoint," he said, "but I've always felt there's more to that than one or two games."
Sloan, who also likes the fact that rotation-regular reserves generally know when they're going in, looks at the bigger picture.
He said he has never regretted keeping Stockton or Malone on the bench too long, even after losses when hindsight suggests the Jazz might have won had those two played longer.
"We may lose one or two games because of it," he said, "but we may win some down the line because of it, too."
The coach does sometimes kick himself, though, when he plays either one too long.
Sunday's victory over Vancouver, Sloan said, "was a perfect example."
"I probably played Karl (Malone) a minute-and-a-half longer than I (should) have at the end of the third quarter," Sloan said. "Now, he goes back out and struggles about three or four possessions.
"See, I always question myself when I do that, because guys have to know . . . when they're going to be in the game. Then, they can get their rest a lot more. They're not always sitting up on the end of the bench, saying, 'Well, I'm going to have to go in there, I'm going to have to go in there.' That takes away energy from them."
Still, Malone — who is playing 36.2 minutes per game this season, which falls in line with the 34.8-to-40.6 per season he averaged since his second year in the league — doesn't always buy it.
If his anxious looks at Sloan when he is not playing in close games don't back that up, then his thoughts on the subject do.
It may sound like he's joking when he cracks comments like this one that he has made just the other day: "I'm an old man. I get stiff."
The truth, though, is that Malone is dead-serious when he says this: "I'm trained to play 48 minutes . . . so three, four, five minutes (of) rest don't do me any good."
E-MAIL: tbuckley@desnews.com