"Man in Iron Mask. Jason. Mike Myers. And now me," Kirilenko joked, ticking off some famous mask-wearers of cinema history. "You remember guys in masks."

He's going to have to make this month a memorable one, though, because Kirilenko doesn't intend to wear the clear-plastic guard over his face for long. After another week or two - perhaps three or four preseason games, he figures - the Russian forward will decide his broken nose, suffered at the European Championships last month, will be healed.

And then? "Maybe eBay," he laughed. "It's good for my memorabilia collection."

Kirilenko said he had considered painting the clear mask, molded from his face, to look like a superhero, though he is worried about cutting down his peripheral vision. And he is mulling various hairstyles that work with the strap that goes over the top of his head, he said.

The mask fits well, now that the eyeholes have been cut bigger, though it still restricts his breathing slightly. "But I can't breathe in my nose right now anyway," he said.

He can't wait to see if there is a benefit to wearing the mask during a game, something he suspects Detroit's Richard Hamilton already realizes. "I think referees treat you like an injured player, so sometimes if somebody plays hard against you, they call a foul," he theorized. "If they think it's dangerous, that helps me."

Ready for preseason opener

The Jazz held their final two-a-day session of practices Saturday in their training facility in Salt Lake, and they took Sunday off. They travel to Toronto on Tuesday for Wednesday's preseason opener, and coach Jerry Sloan said he isn't certain yet whether all 19 players in camp will make the trip, which continues Thursday in Indiana.

The preseason is a little shorter than usual; for the second straight season, the Jazz play seven exhibition games, rather than the eight they played annually from 1990-2003. Sloan figures the shorter schedule might help his team, since subtracting a game and a travel day "means we have more chances to practice, which is good for all the younger guys."

Besides, the coach said, "seven games is still quite a few. We don't really put the team together until the last three or four games, so seven is plenty."

And the schedule still includes the scenarios Sloan believes are most important: A couple of back-to-backs, so players get used to playing and traveling on the same day, and a stretch of three games in four days. "Let them experience a day off in there, and see if they can keep themselves ready," Sloan said. "It's important to see if any of them try to take the third game off."

Bell on the blog

Former Jazz guard Raja Bell is writing a blog for the Suns' Web site, and wrote something that Sloan found interesting last week. Bell said he was having difficulty adjusting to the Suns' offense, which is "completely opposite of what I've been used to the last two years" because it allows "almost free reign within [the offensive] structure."

"The last two years in Utah were a lot more methodical, a lot more structured with rules within that structure," Bell wrote.