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SALT LAKE CITY — The Jazz are getting love from every corner. From local to national, from smaller blogs to the Worldwide Leader, ESPN, people are hyping up the Jazz.
Here's a quick roundup, just so you believe me.
ESPN's Zach Lowe called the Jazz an offseason winner:
"This is a versatile, mammoth team that should win 50 games next season. Seriously, predicting 50 wins for the Jazz is not bold. They are that good."
The Deseret News had this to say, while unanimously grading Utah's offseason with an A:
"If everyone stays healthy, these moves should put the Jazz in a position to make a run at the No. 4 seed and home-court advantage in the first round of the 2017 playoffs."
Tom West at Today's Fastbreak wrote:
"The Jazz are easily enjoying one of the best offseasons of any team outside of Golden State so far, addressing needs for a good price to ensure they improve next season. And that kind of improvement could well equal a top five — or potentially even top four — seed in the Western Conference."
NBA.com's Scott Howard-Cooper highlighted the Jazz's moves:
"In the course of about two weeks, from just before the Draft through the early days of free agency, they will have added three players who can help with depth and in the locker room without giving up a single piece of the existing roster of great promise."
Jonathan Tjarks, of Bill Simmons' new site The Ringer, wrote:
"They don’t have a Steph Curry or Durant, but they are fully equipped to play strength-in-numbers basketball. If there’s a challenge to the Warriors in the near future out West, it’s probably not going to be from their peers. It’s going to be from the next generation, and no team has a deeper well of talented next-gen basketball players than the Jazz."
Believe me now? NBA analysts love the Jazz.
It's not just online, either. I recently traveled to Las Vegas for the NBA Summer League, the NBA's closest thing to an all-industry convention. There, a double-digit number of people approached me and with no prompting talked about how good they think the Jazz would be next year.
They predicted the Jazz would be better than the Rockets, Mavericks, and Grizzlies, sure. But I even heard from some who felt the Jazz would finish with better records than the Clippers, Thunder, and even the Spurs next season. Yes, those were the two through four seeds in the Western Conference last year. The Spurs won 67 games. It's madness, how much people like the Jazz.
It's all enough to make me a bit uncomfortable, actually. Last season, the question was whether or not the Jazz could successfully fight for a playoff spot. Even that level of expectation, though, made Jazz head coach Quin Snyder somewhat uncomfortable. In a pre-season press conference, he gave a nearly-three-minute answer that almost represented a "State of the Team" address:
"The thing about our team is, we’ve got some good players and we’ve got an opportunity to be a good team. But it’s not like anybody, or our team, has done anything. ... It’s not being down on our team, either — it’s just a realistic [assessment],” said Snyder. “I love our team... But that doesn’t mean we’re a good team yet. We were a good team for about two months."
Jazz star Gordon Hayward chimed in that day, too: "Guys like you [the media] were hyping us up, and hyped us up all offseason. We really didn’t deserve any of that."
The biggest thing that helps me feel better about the Jazz's hype this year? Looking at the statistics. The Jazz can realistically expect to be a top-five team defensively (they were 7th last year without Dante Exum all year and without Gobert for large stretches) and an above-average team offensively (16th offensively last year with upgrades on every unit). That's probably enough to make them a top-10 team overall.
The upgrade from a Shelvin Mack/Raul Neto/Trey Burke point guard rotation to a George Hill/Dante Exum one is gigantic, probably worth five wins on its own. The upgrade from Chris Johnson and Joe Ingles to Joe Johnson is worth a couple of wins too. So long as major catastrophe doesn't strike (long-term injuries to Hayward, Rudy Gobert, or Derrick Favors), the Jazz have much better depth to deal with their problems this year.
So, I'm in on the hype train. Like everyone, I'm bullish on the Jazz. They're a fantastic young team that's two or three deep at every position. With health and better luck at the end of games, they could have been a 45-50 win team last season, and that's before adding 5-10 wins with their moves this offseason.
And November's only a few short months away.
