And now, just in from a thrilling extended visit to Planet Fracas, we bring you the members of the Utah Jazz. They're fractious. They're tenuous. They could blow apart any minute and bring to a combustive end one of the great 20-year runs of any NBA franchise. Which is to say: They've got the playoffs right where they want them.

On paper, a Kings-Jazz series looks nowhere near as interesting as it should settle out in real life. The hoop facts are fairly straightforward here: Sacramento is the deeper team, coming off a better regular season, with a far more serious shot at making a deep playoff run, preparing to face a first-round opponent it dispatched 3-1 in a best-of-five series last year.

But there's an old basketball saying: Never discount a team that includes a respect-craving Karl Malone, a potentially retiring John Stockton, a peeved team owner Larry Miller and a prototypically intense coach Jerry Sloan.