---

By Chris Moon

When the L.A. Lakers tipped off their NBA season one week ago against Dallas, there was no way I was going to miss it. As a lifelong Utah Jazz fan, I just had to see Karl Malone in his first regular season game dressed in gold and purple.

The tendency among fans is to hope that people who have been great players their whole career without a championship win that elusive ring. Over the past decade we have seen an outpouring of love for Luc Robataille in hockey, John Elway in football, even Barry Bonds in baseball. If even Barry Bonds (still looking for the ring) can have people cheering for him to win a championship, surely Karl Malone will have millions hoping that the Lakers win the championship.

On the other hand I, like many other Jazz fans, will not be cheering for the Lakers this year. Why? For one thing, they are the Lakers. Karl could have signed with anybody else, but instead he signed with Utah’s most hated rivals. I know many Red Sox fans feel the same way about Roger Clemens signing with the Yankees. He could have gone anywhere else and it would have been okay, but instead chose to sign with the one team that Jazz fans love to hate.

Yet, watching Karl against the Mavericks I realized that it wouldn’t have been okay, no matter which team he signed with. Over the last three years it has been fairly recognized in Utah that the only reason that Karl Malone was the leading scorer for the Jazz was because he took the most shots. The Jazz were a good team last year, but they could have been even better. A sufficiently motivated Karl Malone, like the one I saw last night, could have added another five or ten wins. I know I can’t remember when Malone last had nine assists with only one turnover. Last year the Jazz offense stagnated whenever Malone got the ball at the top of the key, as he would look around for ten seconds and then hoist up a 20 foot fade-away. Karl felt as though he were the superstar and he wasn’t going to let anyone surpass him as the man who took the most shots.

Maybe it is easy for Karl to take less shots when Shaq and Gary Payton are on his team, but it should have been easy when Matt Harpring and Andei Kirilenko were hitting 50% of their shots also. Last night I saw the Karl Malone who was MVP in the 90’s, not the selfish player whose lack of faith in his teammates slowed Utah’s attack down to a crawl. Karl Malone likes to talk about how much integrity he has for accepting “only” one million dollars from the Lakers. Too bad 19 million dollars wasn’t enough incentive to play the brand of team ball that Jerry Sloan demands.