Utah Jazz choose Boston assistant Will Hardy as next head coach


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SALT LAKE CITY — The wide-reaching search has come to a close.

Boston assistant Will Hardy has agreed to a five-year deal to be the Utah Jazz's next head coach, KSL.com has confirmed. ESPN and The Athletic were the first to report the hire.

With the move, the Jazz are placing a long-term bet on a young and still mostly unproven coach. At 34, Hardy will be the youngest coach in the NBA and among the youngest coaches ever (aside from the player-coaches the league experimented with in the 1950s and '60s). Hardy is even younger than two players on the current Jazz roster: Rudy Gay and Mike Conley.

The Jazz interviewed as many as 15 coaches, casting a wide net that featured former NBA coaches, longtime assistants and some up-and-comers in the industry. In the end, Hardy was selected from a group of finalists, according to ESPN, which included fellow Celtics assistant Joe Mazzulla, Raptors assistant Adrian Griffin and Jazz assistant Alex Jensen.

Hardy's selection may come as a surprise due to the lack of connections he had with the team — his time in Boston didn't overlap with Utah CEO Danny Ainge's tenure with the Celtics, and the Jazz chose him over the likes of Jensen and former Jazz assistant Johnnie Bryant, who have close personal ties to Utah's All-Star players.

Hardy replaces Quin Snyder, who stepped down earlier this month after eight seasons in Utah. Snyder had a 372-264 record during his tenure in Utah and made the postseason in each of the last six years.

Hardy spent most of his NBA career with the San Antonio Spurs. In 2010, he was hired as a video intern by the team; he then served as a team video coordinator from 2013-15 before being promoted to assistant. He was hired in Boston by fellow former Spurs assistant Ime Udoka before last season.

His time in San Antonio helped shape him as a coach, and it's a culture he'll try to bring to Utah.

"What helped me in San Antonio was access, transparency. They let me be in film sessions. There's pretty much an open-door policy with the assistants that you work with," Hardy said at a coaches conference in 2020. "Brett Brown, when I worked with him in the video room, I sat in his office all day and almost watching him go through his process, asking him questions, he'd ask me questions and starting to learn how he was getting to his answers, how he was evaluating a team we were going to play, and how he was figuring out what he was going to do for the game plan. So, I try to do that for any of the video guys that work for us now."

"If you're not actually doing all those things every day, then your culture is nothing," Hardy added. "So it's always been about being selfless. Coach Pop says all the time, 'Get over yourself. It ain't about you.' No one person is bigger than this, and that goes from him all the way down."

Hardy's door to the NBA opened up unexpectedly after being a Division III player at Williams College. He had a fine career but wasn't a pro prospect; but a couple of weeks before he graduated, he got a call from his former college coach Curt Tong. It turns out that the late Tong, unbeknownst to Hardy, was a close friend of Spurs coach Gregg Popovich and mentioned he should apply to be on the staff.

"I told Curt I was looking for somebody in the film room and that I needed a smart guy, and I knew there were a lot of smart guys at Williams," Popovich told The Boston Globe. "I asked if there were any players there that showed an affinity toward coaching, or seem to have a natural ability. He immediately told me, Will Hardy. And I respected the guy so much that I said, 'OK, done deal.' And out came Will."

Hardy took that small connection and ran with it — impressing the legendary Popovich, Spurs players and most everyone else that came along his path.

An injury during his college years helped him prepare for such a chance. Early in his junior season, Hardy suffered a sports hernia injury. To help him stay engaged with the team, coach Mike Maker often brought Hardy into his office while studying film and to game plan, according to The Boston Globe.

"He would just bombard me with questions," Hardy told The Globe. "He'd explain things and ask me things and say, 'Hey, I'm thinking about doing this. Do you think this would be too much for the guys? What do you think about this plan?' He was the person who really let me in on the process."

Hardy might be younger than all the other current NBA coaches, but his path isn't unique.

Of the current head coaches in the league, 28% worked or played under Popovich in San Antonio; more than a fourth of the league has either coached or played under Popovich. The others? Udoka, Milwaukee Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer, Phoenix Suns coach Monty Williams, Golden State coach Steve Kerr, Memphis Grizzlies coach Taylor Jenkins, Philadelphia 76ers coach Doc Rivers, and Sacramento Kings coach Mike Brown.

Budenholzer, Kerr and Rivers have won NBA titles; and Udoka, Williams and Brown have led teams to the NBA Finals.

Hiring Hardy wasn't the only move the Jazz made on Tuesday. The Jazz hired former New York Knicks coach David Fizdale as an associate general manager, according to ESPN.

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