No team has defied expectations quite like the Utah Jazz this NBA season. Left in ostensible ruin this summer after trading away Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert for a barrel of draft picks and underappreciated role players, Utah appeared to be on the ground floor of a painful and lengthy rebuild. Their over/under was 23.5 wins. The only team with a lower mark was the San Antonio Spurs.
But Utah’s rookie head coach Will Hardy didn’t believe the climb in front of him was as steep as everyone else seemed to think. He wasn’t leading a band of neophytes. This wasn’t like the youth movements in Houston or Oklahoma City. People assumed the pent-up frustration from several failed playoff runs would lead to a fallow period for the Jazz. But their incoming players told a different story. Before the season began, Hardy asked the team’s analytics guru George Rodman where his roster ranked in total NBA games played.
When Rodman told Hardy they were about 10th, Hardy had some evidence to counter the negative deductions he’d been hearing about his new team. “That’s not one, but that’s not 30,” he says about the ranking. “So everybody’s saying that we’re inexperienced, but it doesn’t look like we’re that inexperienced.”
Hardy also met with Mike Conley, the veteran point guard who’s almost a year older than his 34-year-old head coach. A chat about how they wanted to play on offense quickly evolved into a broader conversation about how complementary different lineups could be. What seemed like a pile of awkward puzzle pieces from entirely different boxes could actually be a snug fit.
There was overlooked young talent (Collin Sexton, Talen Horton-Tucker, and Jarred Vanderbilt) mixed with capable veterans on the back nine of their careers (Conley and Rudy Gay), and a few explosive scorers who can really shoot (Lauri Markkanen, Jordan Clarkson, and Malik Beasley). All they needed to exceed expectations that were saddled on them by the outside world was a collective buy-in.
“We’re not going to be bad at all!” Conley remembers saying before the season. “The more you sat down and kind of stood away from the situation, you realized how deep we were and how special it could be if we all come together and played a certain brand of basketball.”
That’s exactly what’s happened. Utah opened the regular season with a 21-point thumping of Nikola Jokic’s Nuggets. Seven Jazz players scored in double figures in that game. Two nights later, they went into Minnesota and dropped a whopping 132 points on Gobert’s head. Two nights after that they traveled to New Orleans and escaped with a one-point win, aided by Markkanen’s dominant 31-point, 12-rebound performance. Today, they have a top-10 net rating and a top-five offense.
“It was nice for us because you didn’t have to do a lot of guessing and checking and experimenting,” says veteran big man Kelly Olynyk, who was acquired for Bojan Bogdanovic in September. “The first thing we rolled out there kind of worked and the first plans we had kind of hit and stuck. … On any given night we can play with anybody and we have the players, the skill, and the talent—everything—to be at the top.”
Through the first quarter of a season that was expected to turn Salt Lake City into a way station, the Jazz have transformed on the fly in a way that’s made the highly improbable look like something everyone should’ve seen coming. Even after they were remade with a fleet of mercenaries—many of whom are in the last year of their contract—the Jazz still had depth, wisdom, skill, professionalism, and lineup versatility.
But a 14-12 record would not have been possible had they not learned how to trust each other in training camp, where Hardy confronted his team’s challenging circumstances by regularly reminding them that even though everyone had an understandably large chip on their shoulder, no individual could save the team. If they…
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