<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">It's been the talk all of October. "I told these guys at the beginning of the year: This team needs to make the playoffs," coach Jerry Sloan said. They haven't made them since 2003. They can't afford not to make them in 2007. The familiar refrain: "It's our goal," big man Mehmet Okur said. "If we stay healthy, if we do what we do like last year, if we play good defense, run on the floor, I think we'll be fine." On Tuesday, however, Andrei Kirilenko ratcheted the rhetoric. Playoffs, shmayoffs. Why not make a real run? So Kirilenko suggested on the eve of tonight's 2006-07 NBA regular-season opener against the Houston Rockets at the Delta Center, a game that marks the start of the Jazz's fourth straight crack at making it to postseason play without John Stockton and Karl Malone along to show the way. "I'm confident we can make it," Kirilenko said. "I know something could happen this year, like injuries, like all those kinds of stuff which we wouldn't control those. But I'm very confident, if we're healthy, if we play our game, we'll be there." The do-it-all forward from Russia was not finished. "Our main goal is the playoffs," he said. "Let's say like this: When you're in the playoffs, you don't want to lose. You want to get higher and higher and higher. I think we have the whole potential to be in the Western Conference finals."</div> <div align="center">Source</div>
