DENVER – I dislike being the bearer of bad news; I really do. I carefully avoided a woman I dated before becoming engaged to another. Even then, I didn't spill the story to her; someone else had to.
Cowardly, I know.
So it is with great reluctance I announce the Jazz have scant chance of advancing beyond the first round of the playoffs. And that was before we knew Mehmet Okur had ruptured his Achilles and would be out for the season.
The Jazz delivered their Okur news Sunday before practicing at the Pepsi Center. The team forecast is for stormy weather, so batten the hatches. It's going to get choppy.
Not only is Okur gone, and Andrei Kirilenko out with a strained calf, and C.J. Miles nursing a jammed finger, and Carlos Boozer babying a strained oblique muscle, and Deron Williams pushing through a wide assortment of nicks, dings, dents and scratches, but there's that other thing, too: They're toast, statistically speaking.
For that matter, Chicago, Miami, Milwaukee and all other teams with the misfortune of losing their first playoff game are probably history, too. It's an unavoidable but annoying reality, like aging, taxes and Rosie O'Donnell. The facts say that even if the Jazz weren't as depleted as they are, they have nearly an 80 percent chance of being eliminated by Denver in the playoffs. Jazz opponents are 15-4 (78.9 percent) all time in series in which they beat the Jazz in the first game. League-wide, in seven-game series, the winner of the first game wins the series 78.3 percent of the time.
Beating Denver was tough by itself, but now the Jazz have to play while holding themselves together with duct tape and chewing gum.
"Hmmm … tough," said forward C.J. Miles, when asked about his reaction to Okur's injury. "I mean, I was like, shoot! Man, basically it was like, 'Another man down' with A.K. out, and now we're missing two major guys."
That, of course, didn't prevent the Jazz from delivering the usual rebuttals and qualifiers. And it shouldn't. As Jerry Sloan likes to say, that's why they play the games.
Asked if he pays attention to statistics such as those cited, Miles replied, "Not at all, because you've still got the 20 percent that win their series. Why can't we be that 20 percent?"
Other than the fact that they now have a gaping hole where Okur and Kirilenko used to be.
While I may be cowardly about delivering bad news, I usually try to point out the bright side, too. Fact 1 is that fans may at least get to see the series continue for awhile. Of the 393 seven-game series that have been completed, 104 actually went seven games. By comparison, only 53 were sweeps.
In other words, they have nearly twice as much chance of taking the series to seven games as they do getting swept.
But if all you care about is the bottom line, unplug your cable line now.
My final Negative News Nugget of the Day is this: The team with home-court advantage wins 75.6 percent of the time. So that loss last week to Phoenix was a killer for the Jazz in several ways. It not only kept them from playing injury-beset Portland in the first round, but cost them home-court advantage.
That's not to say the Jazz have never pulled off a surprise. In 2007, they opened on the road against Houston, losing their first two games, yet coming back to win the series. They lost Game 1 to Houston in 1998 — in Salt Lake, no less — yet went on to play in the NBA finals. In 1994, San Antonio beat Utah in Game 1 but lost the series 3-1. And in 1988, after losing in Game 1 to Portland, the Jazz went on to win the series 3-1.
But for every comeback, there are four times when they failed.
I figure Jazz fans should watch this series the way people watch tearjerkers like "Beaches" or "Titanic."
The ending may be sad, but that doesn't mean you need to skip the film entirely.
e-mail: rock@desnews.com