Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Jazz's weekend of nostalgia was filled with glowing platitudes, tribute videos, and pleasant memories.
Concurrent with all the warm fuzzies, though, came some troubling signs and a few nagging questions.
Namely: Are the Jazz on a better path now than they were? And did they maybe blow things up too early?
Such are the thoughts that pop into your head as former point guard Mike Conley is drilling one 3-pointer after another to propel the Minnesota Timberwolves to a 119-100 victory and thus keep them within range of the Western Conference's No. 1 seed in the playoffs.
And also when head coach Will Hardy angrily berates his team's effort postgame with a rant insinuating that some of his players care more about stat accumulation than winning.
Yeah, that'll prompt you to revisit the previous iteration of the club and wonder if things were really that bad.
Each of Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert and Bojan Bogdanovic got to face the Jazz and make their respective returns to the Delta Center at various points during the past season. But neither ex-coach Quin Snyder nor Conley joined their new teams until February 2023, meaning Jazz fans didn't get to see them again until Utah's back-to-back games this Friday and Saturday.
Given the natural tendency on such occasions to reflect upon their time in Utah, it is equally natural to compare what is with what was, to say nothing of what might have been.
Gobert didn't play Saturday due to a short-term injury, but he's on the same Wolves roster that sat comfortably atop the West standing for most of this season before All-Star forward Karl-Anthony Towns' injury. Meanwhile, Mitchell and the Cleveland Cavaliers are in third place in the East, while Bogdanovic and his new team, the Knicks, are fourth there.
While none of them are perhaps favored to win a championship this season, that they are all winning to the degree that they are is, if nothing else, firewall against accusations of being more driven by putting highlight clips on Instagram than ticks in the win column.
That's a pretty inflammatory condemnation of this current roster.
To be fair, there were never high expectations internally of what this Jazz team might do this season. They got off to an expected mediocre start, and the minute they appeared to be gaining some traction in their uphill climb toward competence, the front office responded with a few precision excisions at the trade deadline that sent the team tumbling down the table again.
The 2023-24 Jazz are right now a team that will be judged by what it can do in the future.
Is there reason for optimism?
Each of the team's trio of rookies — Taylor Hendricks, Keyonte George and Brice Sensabaugh — has shown moments of promise and potential. They also have nights like Saturday, where they shot a combined 14-of-40 (35%) overall and 3-of-19 (15.8%) from deep, and posted five assists against eight turnovers.
Yes, this team was missing the likes of Lauri Markkanen, John Collins, and Jordan Clarkson. But it's not as though Utah was piling up the victories even with them in the rotation. And their presence was unlikely to prevent Hardy's frustration-bubbling-over outburst about the roster's general disinterest in passing and playing defense at the levels he expects.
Is the core of this roster or its cap space this summer or its haul of future draft picks — or some combination of the three — enough to convince you the team is on a more viable road to championship contention than it was?
Or does it have you putting on some rose-colored glasses and wondering if Danny Ainge and Justin Zanik pulled the plug too soon on the team's prior incarnation?
Lest we allow sentiment to obfuscate facts, that version of the Jazz had definite problem areas and prompted genuine concerns about its future viability.
Yes, at its peak, it was a team that posted the best record in the league one season, but was that peak also its ceiling?
The dissatisfaction with the present direction should not create a hazy glow that softens the edges of the real deficiencies that existed. This was a team, after all, that was deconstructed in the aftermath of a listless first-round loss to the Mavericks, that had some bad mojo permeating its core, and, frankly, appeared to have run its course.
Was total annihilation of the roster the right call, though? Or was this, perhaps, a team that might have been salvaged and resurrected with some swapping out of parts and a new voice leading the way?
Snyder did infamously note in his resignation statement that he was stepping aside because, "I strongly feel they need a new voice to continue to evolve."
Could Hardy — or someone else — have gotten more out of a core featuring an elite scorer, a generational defender, a heady floor general, and a premier sharpshooter?
Did they need to break up the whole band, to the point that only Clarkson as the flamboyant and charismatic lead guitarist remains? Or might they have returned to chart-topping status by also retaining the lead singer and bassist, but maybe swapping out the drummer, keyboardist, and manager?
It's an intriguing hypothetical, and, sadly, one impossible to answer unless someone out there is willing to share the secret recipe for manipulating the space-time continuum.
But until the Jazz consistently show some form that doesn't elicit four-letter words from their coach postgame, such questions can't help but be asked by a fan base that only has modest recent glories to cling to.
