Utah Jazz: What will be Jazz's win number?

Win any fewer than that, and it simply would not have been good enough to get into the NBA's Western Conference playoffs.

Forty-eight victory Golden State found that out the hard way, rather painfully so during a 2007-08 season in which three Eastern Conference teams — including 37-45 Atlanta — made it to the postseason despite not even having a winning record, and two more got in with far fewer than 48 wins.

This season in the typically wild West?

"I don't know what the number is gonna be," Jazz All-Star power forward Carlos Boozer said. "I can't predict that."

But Boozer — who along with the rest of the Jazz opens the 2008-09 NBA regular season tonight at EnergySolutions Arena against Denver, which claimed that eighth and final Western berth for last postseason — was willing to ballpark a guess.

"It may be 50 wins. It may be 55 wins," he said. "I mean, who knows? Teams got better.

"Houston's improved. The (Los Angeles) Lakers are back again. San Antonio is San Antonio; they're always gonna be there."

From the '08 first-round Jazz-victim Rockets, who added Ron Artest to a cast that already includes Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming, to the second-round Jazz-conquering Lakers, who'll have promising young center Andrew Bynum back from injury, many in the West really do appear to potentially be even better than they were a season ago.

The list of them, in fact, is so long that big man Jarron Collins was worried about trying to name them all.

"I don't want to leave anybody out," he said.

Collins was willing to take a stab at the bar, however, saying he thought it would take "at least 50 wins just to get in" this time around.

Jerry Sloan, though, was even more reluctant than Boozer.

He was hesitant to project what it would take to get out of the West, and downright unwilling to predict what his own club's count might be.

"I can't afford to put myself up for 50, or 60 games," Sloan said.

Blame history for that.

"I've been in a situation when I was in Chicago we were supposed to do this and supposed to do that — and then somebody gets hurt," the ex-Bulls and current Jazz coach said. "Then everybody goes crazy — this guy's not doing his job, and this guy's not doing his job. Now your team just goes in different directions.

"You look around the league, and see how (many times) that's happened.

"You can really get yourself in a lot of trouble, because expectations have destroyed a lot of franchises," Sloan added. "Fortunately this one's hung together, because we haven't had (such) expectations. ... I mean, everybody's had their hopes and thoughts. But we've always felt like we have to win today, then go from there."

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