Howland's pet peeve

Howland despises the jump pass, which can often lead to turnovers. But with five freshmen on the team, it's something he's seen on the court much more than he'd like, especially because Howland preaches about this in practice.
``Jumping in the air to pass. We talk about it all the time,'' Howland said. ``We want our players to get better at not doing it. You can see that all of Jerime Anderson's turnovers came off that. He's got to be able to learn. He gets excited, and all of a sudden he wants to leave his feet. It's funny, I had a really nice conversation with Norm Nixon this year, a former Laker at a July 4 get-together. He was talking about how all the players today do that, and he never did that. I said, `Wow, this is really great to hear, Norm.' He was one of my favorite players for the Lakers. He was always very fundamentally sound.''