Last week, we asked 12 Jazz bloggers to rank all 15 Jazz players from best to worst in a project we’re calling JazzRank. Over the next two weeks and leading up to opening night, we will be unveiling those rankings one by one along with a brief sketch of each player, culminating with a post on the Jazz player voted the best on the roster. In the final post, we’ll even make sure to include the twitter handles for every writer that voted, so you can troll the ones with whom you vehemently disagreed (you’re welcome, Jimbo’s Uncle).

Here’s how the voting worked: Each writer submitted his list of the best to worst Jazz players ranked from 1-15, and we allotted points in reverse order, with the Jazz player listed as #1 on the list receiving 15 votes, etc. All votes for former Jazz players and/or current Jazz coaches (I’m looking at you, Brandon) were duly noted and immediately discounted.

In case you’ve read this far and you’re still unsure that dousing the already raging fire of the Jazz Twitterverse with arbitrary and divise rankings is a good idea, let us quiet your fears and assuage your doubts: it most definitely isn’t. Enjoy!

They’re playing a different game than we are.

There’s an imbalance here, right? We can all agree on that fact? That the rules for the Haves in the NBA are distinctly different than for the Have-nots? That on the court, players battle and it’s fair, but that in the war waged in front offices, the fairness ideal is a Maginot line? That in the end, when you consider the history of the league, you start to feel a little naive for ever believing otherwise? Because while some teams fight to stay relevant, and other teams fight to win a playoff series, still other teams fight for championships. Those teams fight for banners, for dynasties, and for a place in the Pantheon of Greatness. The Jazz are not one of those other teams. The Lakers are.

During the most recent playoffs, as I gleefully watched the Oklahoma City Thunder manhandle the Los Angeles Lakers in five games, I felt a certain inevitability to the Lakers return to prominence. I thought back to the last time the Lakers were not a legitimate contender for the championship–the Pre-Gasol Kobe Lakers–and I instinctively wondered what incredible feats of roster-assembling prowess the Lakers would achieve during the offseason. Who are they going to get? How are they going to get back into the Finals? They need speed and athleticism. How are they going to get it?

Shockingly, I never once considered whether they would do it. I never even wondered. There was no “if.” The Lakers were going to lure marquee players, either out of free agency or from another team’s roster, but they were going to do it. Had someone approached me with the possibility that the Lakers might not improve, but that they would slowly fade into relative obscurity until they could reload in the draft (the cyclical pattern for teams like the Hawks, the Hornets, and now the Magic), I would have openly scoffed at them. “The Lakers? The Lakers are never obscure! The Lakers don’t fade; they retool and return. Other teams’ rosters are the Lakers NBDL team. The whole NBA is Mitch Kupchak’s summer shopping catalog.” No, the Lakers will be back. They’ll be back, because they are playing a different game than the Jazz.

A couple weeks ago, after watching Team USA thrash another overwhelmed opponent in Olympic pool play, co-SCH writer Jackson Rudd and I attempted a list of our top 20 players in the NBA. 1-15 weren’t particularly difficult, and though the specifics of such a list would predictably incite healthy debate (read: vitriolic troll war) among NBA fans, most educated followers of the league would probably produce a similar list. According to our list and as soon as the Dwight blockbuster is made official, the Lakers will have 3 of our top 15 players (Kobe, Dwight Howard and Nash). The Heat have two of the top 10. The Thunder have 2 of the top 15, and the Celtics have 2 of the top 20. That list doesn’t include Pau Gasol (at least a top 40 player) on the Lakers, James Harden (top 30) on the Thunder, or Chris Bosh (probably top 30; however tempted I am to drop him lower) on the Heat. For those keeping score, this means that the Lakers, Heat, Thunder account for 7 or almost 50% of the top 15 players in the league, and with the Celtics, 9 of the top 20 players in the league.

Now one could make the argument that the assembling of super teams doesn’t necessarily translate to winning, but one would probably have to be an idiot to truly believe it. The Heat just won the title. The Thunder were the team they had to beat to do it. The Celtics were in the Eastern Conference Finals, and the Spurs (who have Tony Parker, a top 20 player, and depending on how you feel about either Manu Ginobili or Tim Duncan, probably have two top 30 players) were the other Western Conference finalist. Then of course the Lakers, assuming the Howard trade goes through and barring injury, will almost certainly be back in the Western Conference finals next season. In other words, you need really good players to make really good teams. Earth shattering.

This takes us to the Jazz. The most optimistic argument you could make for our current roster is that Favors is a future top 15 player, Hayward is a future top 25 player, and right now, Jefferson and Millsap are both top 40 players. When I call that optimistic, I’m really saying that it’s shamelessly homerism. Realistically, Hayward will probably end up in the top 45 range, and Favors probably in the top 30, which leaves the team with Burks, Kanter, Jefferson, Millsap, the Williams boys and the rest of our bench to turn into a couple more top 30 players, or at least one top 15 player. Because if history and the previous paragraph have taught us anything, it’s that you don’t have a puncher’s chance at reaching the Finals without two top 30 players, and without two or three top 20 players, you’re never going to sniff the trophy.

The popular response to this is that Oklahoma City, a small-market team, went from nowhere (literally nowhere; like the team didn’t even exist five years ago) to the Finals through a series of savvy moves and some intelligent drafting, but that thinking ignores that OKC also lucked into Kevin Durant, who happens to be a once-in-a-generation megastar that loves playing for a small market team and cares about nothing but basketball. That NEVER happens. As brilliantly as Sam Presti has played the last four years, the Thunder would still have been struggling for a playoff spot if it weren’t for Kevin Pritchard selecting Greg Oden with the #1 overall pick in 2007. So either you’re a great basketball market with a penchant for attracting great players, or you’re lightning-striking-50-times-in-the-exact-same-place kind of lucky.

Fortunately for Jazz fans, about 25 years ago, Utah really was that lucky. In back-to-back drafts, the Jazz used a 16th pick and a 13th pick to draft two of the greatest players to ever play the game, both of whom happened to fit perfectly into a system developed by a once-in-a-generation coach. After watching Stockton and Malone play together for all of my childhood, lucky seems like an inadequate word to describe how that goldmine was struck, but lucky it was. Out of that foundation, Jazz fans were treated to two magical trips to the NBA Finals, only to be defeated in consecutive years by one of the NBA’s Haves. Ever since, our appetites have been whetted, and our expectations have been sky-high. For awhile, I even naively believed the Jazz were in the elite community of NBA teams who were always contending for titles. While I still believe the Jazz could win a championship, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s a mile-wide chasm between teams who are always in the hunt and the rest of the NBA, who can do nothing more than buy and scratch at lottery tickets. Unfortunately, when the dust has settled after this four-team trade, I’m afraid I’ll finally feel the full weight of reality: that the Jazz are much more like the other three teams in last night’s trade than they are like the Lakers.

This is not to say there is no hope. As Kevin O’Connor and the Jazz front office have already shown, teams without championship tradition, sunny beaches, or the financial constitution to take the luxury tax on the chin, can still compete, consistently and seriously. If the Jazz are going to do it, they’re going to have to do it like the Spurs (somewhat lucky), not the Thunder (astoundingly lucky), and thankfully, the recent hiring of Dennis Lindsey shows that they’ve realized this. The Jazz are moving, however slowly, to the kind of team construction that a championship requires, and that’s reason to believe that this is a game Utah can eventually win. But one fact remains clear: the game the Jazz could one day win will never be the same game that teams like the Lakers always seem to win.

Jarrod Rudolph / Deseret News

“Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end, and only Might is Right.”

–The Great Pike, King of the Fish from The Once and Future King by T.H. White

With six minutes left in the fourth quarter of Thursday’s summer league game against the Pacers, Alec Burks craftily slid behind the Pacers front line, caught the alley-oop entry pass, swung around 180 degrees in the air, and banked a lay-up off the glass. For anyone who spent this last Jazz season watching Alec Burks impose his sheer athletic power almost on command, this lay-up was certainly nothing to write a blog post about, and only debatably worth tweeting about. In fact, it was almost unremarkable. Of course Burks would do that. Of course he would dominate summer league games. Why wouldn’t he score smooth, cool, easy 20 points a game against the likes of Ben Hansbrough. As a rookie, he frequently looked like the most athletic player on the court against legitimate NBA players, much less the washed-out and diluted talent of the summer league, so why wouldn’t he light up the future rosters of the NBDL? He’s Alec Burks, after all.

The tried and true seduction of the summer league has and always will be whether to draw enduring conclusions about players based on their performance. After all, Kevin Durant’s relentless assault on NBA defenses began in the summer league. Shouldn’t greatness be recognizable against whatever the competition? Almost all of the current NBA greats looked the part during their summer league debuts. On the other hand, so did Michael Beasley. On Tuesday, the brash outrage and sharp disappointment that flooded Jazz twitter over Enes Kanter’s underwhelming first summer league game was based around the same sentiment: If Enes Kanter is supposed to be our center of the future (and he better be, because we used a #3 pick on him), how is he performing so poorly against inferior competition? Doesn’t this have to mean something? Who cares if the game is in the summer or in the winter, are we really overreacting if our prized prospect is getting tossed around in the post by Andre Drummond?

And so that same cautionary rationale that talked us all off the ledge on Tuesday afternoon–led by the always reasonable voice of David Locke–should guide us now, right? Sure Burks is playing out of his head right now. Sure he’s putting up 20 points a game on 51% shooting, and making NBA prospects look like bench-warmers on your middle school’s C team, but we know better. We’ve learned to temper our expectations, to modify our perspective, to back away from twitter, to turn off our laptops before we type 1500 words on the Once and Future King of the Jazz’s backcourt. We’ve learned not to overreact, right?

But we’re not overreacting, or at least I’m not. Alec Burks does what he does in summer league games because of the brass, the athleticism, the swagger, the subtle spacial intelligence, and the competitiveness. Sure you can obliterate the competition in the summer league just because the competition is so weak, but not the way Burks is doing it, not with the power of the mind, and certainly not with the great pike’s ‘power of the body.’ Burks entire game is built around confidence, athleticism, and the sense for when to apply those attributes. When Burks failed to perform in the regular season, it was a combination of being misused, underused, or cold shooting. But what we’ve seen in this summer league is Burks’ response to those obstacles. He gets to the line when he’s shooting cold. He manipulates the offense to make absolutely sure he won’t be misused or underused. He gets his shots, in his spots, and he makes most of them. Burks is the poster child for passive-aggressive basketball. Unlike Hayward, who asserts himself and succeeds or doesn’t and fails, Burks succeeds just by knowing when to be aggressive and when to let the game come to him, and in this summer league, with the offense resting solely on his shoulders, he has done just that.

Maybe I have been seduced by the summer league, but I think what’s more likely is that we’re seeing what Burks can do when give the free reign to do it. This is bad, because that means his success will come down to factors he has little control of, and if I want Burks’ success to be controlled by anyone, it’s by Burks. But it’s also good. It’s good because what I’ve learned about Alec Burks this summer has nothing to do with summer league, and everything to do with Alec Burks, and Alec Burks is Might.

That’s right, we’re live blogging a draft in which the Jazz have no first round draft picks and almost certainly no prospects for changing that. But someone had to record the chilly reception the Jazz Bear’s Harley-powered entrance got from Jazz fans here at ESA. Don’t test us, Bear. We may be here without a first round pick, but we don’t have to be happy about it.

6:13 PM – Evan Hall (@the20thmaine)

We’re seven picks in here, and no one outside of the Washington Wizards war room is happy. The Blazers have just selected Damian Lillard, sending any Jazz fans who were holding out for a trade into the first round for Lillard into a temporary but nonetheless very real depression. Furthermore, the Golden State Warriors have been rewarded for their shameless tankapalooza by nabbing a free-falling Harrison Barnes with the seventh pick (who would, I should note, have perfectly fit many of the Jazz’s offseason needs this year).

6:19  – Jackson Rudd (@ruddsky)

Terrence Ross went 8th to Toronto, the pick that was rightfully Utah’s all along.  Unfortunately, after karma itself died of massive heart failure as Golden State went on to steal back their draft pick through a combination of deceit, ineptitude, and mockery of the game of basketball- which turned into a steal with Harrison Barnes falling- it ended up going to Toronto.  They might have reached on Ross, but at least he’s the best dressed guy in the draft room.  To honor the occasion of our lost chance at lottery glory, the Jazz Bear ran out onto the floor and sprayed everyone with silly string.  Thanks, Bear.

7:03 PM – Evan

We have yet to see a single trade during this draft, the Jazz front office appears to have decided on taking this one laying down, and Jazz fans at the ESA are shooting roughly 15% from the free throw line on the night. Surprisingly, of the three of those recent developments, I’m most disappointed at the third. Two hours ago, I confidently believed that in a head-to-head contest between a random selection of Jazz fans and Andre Drummond (shot 29% from the line in his freshman year) in a free throw shooting contest, the Jazz fans would win. I was wrong. Really, really wrong.

7:23 – Jackson

19 picks in and Perry Jones and Jared Sullinger are still on the board.  This doesn’t make any sense.  Now Denver might do something inexplicable and Boston could land both of those guys with 21 and 22 which might possibly be the most outrageous draft luck I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  The good news is that we are under 30 picks to go until we reach number 47, which is actually strangely exciting to me even though Scott Machado and Kim English will probably be taken by then and all my draft dreams will officially have been shattered.

7:40 – Evan

Point guards are dropping through the draft like rain. Tony Wroten Jr. and Marquis Teague are still on the board on Pick 23. Also, rumors are that the Mavs are shopping one or some of their three picks later in the round. Without a trade, Scott Machado (the consensus choice of Salt City Hoops writers for our #47 pick) could be available, and with a trade, Wroten or even Perry Jones III are on the board. Hope lives at the Energy Solutions Arena.

8:24 – Jackson

We have almost survived the first round even without any signs of life from the Jazz.  Perry Jones fell down to 28, and with every pick he dropped, all Jazz fans wondered if KOC would trade a future first to land him (because he could actually play SF in Utah, which is exactly what he wants and would thrive doing).  Of course, he ended up landing with the Thunder because the Thunder always do the smart thing.  I’m going to emotionally hibernate for the next ten picks for my own self-preservation.  Scott Machado is already number 8 on Jay Bilas’ list of best players available and that is certainly not encouraging.

9:13 – Evan

Kevin O’Connor just walked out and informed us all that the Jazz will be drafting Kevin Murphy from Tennessee Tech. Kevin Murphy is not Scott Machado, so give us a few moments to grieve before we wikipedia Kevin Murphy and scrounge together some analysis.

 9:22 – Evan

Kevin Murphy: Guard, played four years at Tennessee Tech University, shot 42% frm three during his senior season and averaged 21 points, 5 boards, and 2 assists. He isn’t on wikipedia. We struggled to come to terms with this pick, but in case you’re worried about a no-name pick, here’s a YouTube video that might convert you to Kevin Murphy. Or if not convert, at least console you.

Perhaps it’s because there has been no Jazz basketball for two weeks. Perhaps it’s because when I watch Manu Ginobili play, I feel a deep longing for what he could become.  Or perhaps it’s because I’m still coping with the devastating Spurs sweep. But most likely, I watched this video of Gordon Hayward’s high school state championship game over and over again, because I needed to be reminded that rooting for Gordon Hayward is almost always a rewarding pursuit. Following his disappearing act in the Spurs series, I temporarily forgot that the only reason we had even made the playoffs was because Hayward played all-star level basketball for the last month of the season. Then I watched this video, and I remembered.

The entertainment value of this video is driven by the amusing fact that high school Gordon Hayward and NBA player Gordon Hayward look like, for all intents and purposes, the exact same person. I”m sure he grew in his Butler years, both physically and mentally, but it certainly doesn’t look like it. Brownsburg High School appears to be trotting out the current starting shooting guard for the Utah Jazz as their starting point guard. The happy consequence of Hayward’s unchanged visage in this video was that I felt like I was watching him playing in some obscure summer league, or showing up to play in the kind of random rec game that was all the rage during the lockout. Furthermore, I felt completely justified in drawing conclusions about current Gordon from watching a grainy video about 2008 Gordon. Some of these conclusions:

1. Running Gordon Hayward at the point is absolutely a good idea. I realize that in the few instances when Corbin has tried that experiment, it has failed; but if the offense was re-designed with a facilitating Gordon Hayward in mind, much like the way the Thunder use James Harden with their second unit (a creative, ball-handling, scoring point guard in behavior but a shooting guard in size and court placement), the team could maximize Hayward’s prodigious passing ability. Obviously judging his abilities at point guard based on his performance against other high schoolers would give you skewed results, but anyone who watched the Jazz this season knows that when Hayward is playing well, the whole team is playing well. Putting him at point guard is just a potential strategy to optimize his skill set and ensure that his solid play becomes even more contagious.

2. “Mental toughness” is an overused and often misapplied sports phrase that I usually loathe. Still, Gordon Hayward showed serious mental toughness in this game. To play three quarters of atrocious, brick-laying basketball in a championship game would plunge most professional players (let alone teenagers) into a crippling case of self-doubt that would then marginalize their effectiveness (see: James, LeBron–2011 NBA Finals). At least in this game, Hayward did the complete opposite. He took over the fourth quarter on offense, and before he got into foul trouble, his defense was suffocating. From what I could count, he scored six fourth quarter points (a big deal in a game that ended 40-39), including the buzzer-beating game winner. That was mental toughness.

3. High School basketball needs a shot clock across the board. Sweet mercy.

4. Hayward played confident in this game. Another prevalent theme from Hayward’s sophomore campaign was his wavering confidence. When he finally regained it late in the season, he was a different player. All of his shooting percentages spiked, most notably his free throw percentage–a good indicator of confidence.  He started taking over games when no one else could score. Even in his post game interviews, he seemed more comfortable.

His turnaround jump shot at the 5:33 mark of the clip was a thing of beauty. The good news is that with his height and his vertical, Hayward could get that shot whenever he wanted it, even in the NBA. The bad news is that taking that shot requires confidence to break out of the offensive set–confidence Hayward often appears to lack. The Jazz need the offensively assertive Hayward to provide wing scoring when no one else can, and if this last season was any indication, Hayward just needs time to adjust to the added expectations and the superior competition in the NBA, especially in the playoffs.

Scott Winterton / Deseret News

Genuinely believing that the Jazz would beat the Suns on Tuesday night and clinch the final berth to the playoffs, I decided to invite over one of my friends to watch the game with me. Under different circumstances, I would choose to watch it alone and thereby free myself to express as much desperate sadness or indulgent exultation as I deemed cathartic. After all, there’s hardly any commiseration to be had when watching a game with an opponent’s fan. But this was different. This time, I realized that my emotional response to this game would be critically limited. As a Jazz fan, I could only experience what this game meant on a very self-interested level, and what I wanted to experience and appreciate was what this game meant for basketball. At least potentially, this game could mean the end of the Steve Nash era in Phoenix, and if the end of any era carried significance for the basketball cosmos, it was this end of this era.

So I invited this friend over. His name is Gerritt, and he’s a lifelong Suns fan. Over the course of the game, he admitted this season was more than a pleasant surprise. After the game, he even made a weak attempt to downplay the devastation of the loss, because “hey, we didn’t even expect to be competing for a playoff spot.” We both knew he said this less to portray an accurate sentiment and more to assuage some of my survivor’s guilt. This one hurt for him, and we both knew it. As the game wound down, I asked him if he wanted Nash back. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I would feel bad for him. He deserves better than this.” This obviously referred to the much-maligned supporting cast that the Suns front office has assembled for Nash, but it also suggested some debt owed to Nash–that someone, maybe the Basketball Gods, maybe Miami Heat GM Pat Riley, owed it to Nash to get him out of his Phoenix Fiat and into the driver’s seat of one of the NBA’s Lamborghinis.

I’m not presumptuous enough to conclude that because my altruistic Suns-fan friend can shirk self-interest and wish his team’s superstar a happier future somewhere else that every Suns fan feels the same way. But I’m also not cynical enough to think that a large portion of those fans–fans who have long been Nash’s strongest supporters–would have him collect dust on the shelf of NBA irrelevance. I’d like to believe that they recognize that whatever happens to their franchise player, it should not take away from the many years they spent enjoying him. Even as an unrelated bystander, I could not help but enjoy those years. Nash and his Seven Seconds Or Less Suns represented a way of basketball that thrilled me aesthetically and more importantly, that inspired hope within me. Every time I watched Nash’s teams play (and this Suns-Jazz game was no different), I felt imbued with an extra dose of optimism about the NBA future. After all, if this team that played in this way could be successful, maybe one day, I’d be watching a league full of teams willing to push the ball off of made free throws, only to shoot transition threes. It was a naively romantic notion, to be sure, but it fascinated me.

***

It’s a sad truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless than an artist’s audience rarely wants to experience the whole uninhibited power of his genius. Even in those cases when the audience claims to want it or impetuously demands it, they do so ignorantly. They actually want it on their terms; they want an altered, streamlined version of that whole genius, fashioned to their needs and their tastes. It’s why The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece and most unobstructed burst of brilliance, was also a commercial failure by his standards. It’s also why Kobe Bryant was most maligned during his seasons of gratuitous and unrivaled gunnery.

Nash’s artistry, on the other hand, was one of the few exceptions to this trend. Not only was Nash given a shackles-free offensive system in which to shine freely, but he was also blessed with a fan base that adoringly revered everything that he was. With fans like Gerritt, Nash enjoyed a relationship as great as any in the NBA between fans and a player. With Nash in Phoenix, we saw a rare combination of uninhibited but truly appreciated genius.

This is not to say that the players that comprised Nash’s teams were perfectly suited to draw out the legendary talent within him (a ridiculous thought when considered side-by-side with a mental picture of Channing Frye’s face). Fortunately, Nash didn’t actually need that type of specialization in his team. The beauty of Nash’s brilliance was that it could not help but manifest itself, and its brightness was made all the more stark by contrast with his deeply flawed teammates. In Nash’s earlier years, his critics could point to Amar’e Stoudemire’s athleticism or Joe Johnson’s dead-eye shooting as explanations for his astounding assist statistics. But instead of exposing Nash with their departures, Nash’s former teammates exposed their considerable offensive detriments. Most statistical measurements of Stoudemire, Joe Johnson, Shawn Marion, Jason Richardson or any of his other early teammates would show a distinct drop-off after their exodus from the vicinity of Nash’s contagious skill set.

Ironically, it was not until after their departures that we could see the true value in Nash as a basketball player. With this more recent motley crew as Nash’s collective sidekick, we saw Nash’s brilliance truly unleashed. Without the restriction of talented but entitled teammates demanding the ball, Nash achieved an even more transcendent level of statistical success. Not that his statistics were any better (though they weren’t worse), but that they remained static, even when saddled with the likes of Robin Lopez. Nash raised absolute nobodies to temporary levels of greatness. Nobodies like Marcin Gortat, Jared Dudley, and yes, even Channing Frye. Unlike other elite point guards like Rajon Rondo and Russell Westbrook, Nash did not need to be surrounded with blue-chippers in order to access his unadulterated genius. If anything, players of that talent level did and would detract from Nash’s accomplishments. Sad as it may have been to watch Nash direct his world-class symphonies with a high school orchestra, it was Nash’s true calling to do so. Steve Nash could make the most inexperienced violinist produce auditory gold and he could inspire even the sloppiest of cellists to play for stretches of clear, mistake-free beauty. In Phoenix, Nash received that opportunity, and every once in a while, we would get so caught up in the beauty of his performances that we would almost forget he was doing it with an inferior set of musicians. That such a thing was possible, that Nash could shine more brightly than he ever had before with players like this, proved his abilities in a way that being on a contender never could.

Now to the original point. Maybe Nash does deserve to move to a contender for a chance at that elusive grail, and maybe he does deserve better than this. Personally, I would love to see him playing in the postseason again. But whatever is decided about Nash’s future, Nash’s past should remain untouched by regret and his career should not be defined by a championship. Certainly championships are one form of success, but they are not the only form. At least in the case of Steve Nash, success was much more rewarding than a walk to a podium and a handshake with the President. In fact, in the case of Steve Nash, success was the rare unbridled expression of sincere brilliance, and that is what Nash deserves above all else: a standing ovation.

There’s a dichotomy, used in linguistics and in literary criticism, used to describe the relationship between words and their referents. The word we speak or write for referent is called “the signifier” while referent itself (the meaning of the word) is called “the signified.” For example, when I say the word “tree” to you, I’m using a symbolic formation of letters to refer you to the idea of a tree. I say the word, and you picture in your mind that tree. The word that I say has no inherent connection to a tree itself. It’s completely arbitrary. When I say “tree” to an English speaker, they will have a mental image of a tree similar to the mental image of a tree that a Spanish speaker would have if I were to use the Spanish verbal symbol for tree: “árbol.” That’s why if you went to elementary school with a dim-witted bully named Jerry (or if you watch Parks and Rec), you likely will not name one of your children Jerry. For you, the signified of Jerry is distasteful, and you don’t want that same signifier to be used for your newborn baby.

Typically, when we make associations with words, they hark back to the same mental referents. This is often not the case for proper nouns, like the name “Jerry.” Because they refer to specific entities in reality, proper nouns often carry loaded associations. In the case of professional sports teams, every baseball fan feels some connotation accompanying the proper noun “Yankees.” Thus, “Lakers” as a signifier has come to refer to a professional sports team that, depending on your loyalties, embodies either the totality of human evil as we know it, or the pinnacle of accomplishment in a sports organization. Even as a person who maintains a position closer to the former connotation than the latter, I would still not want the Lakers to change their name. After all, my signifier is already applied and functioning within my vocabulary. Why change it?

The same is true for the Utah Jazz. Now, the argument for changing the name for Utah’s professional basketball team is that it is nonsensical. After all, the word Jazz typically refers to a genre of music that emerged in New Orleans, and when the name of the team was conceived, it was conceived with that connection in mind. Then the team moved to Utah, the name stayed with it, and suddenly we have a team name with no apparent association with its location. Nonsensical, right?

Perhaps in the immediate aftermath of the relocation of the team, the decision to keep the name was nonsensical. But now, nonsensical would be to alter the present vocabulary of the NBA. To any NBA fan in the world, the word “Jazz” refers to a particular team located in Utah, not to Miles Davis’s art form. Within the context of the NBA, the signified of the word “Jazz” is the Utah Jazz–the team built by Jerry, John and Karl. The team with the tragic luck of reaching its peak during the Jordan era. The team that brought us Greg Ostertag. When Jordan pushed off on Russell (and he did push off), there was not a single person watching that game that considered the word “Jazz” emblazoned across Bryon Russell’s jersey a misnomer. It was the signifier for a collection of players about to have their heart broken.

This remains the case. The signifier “Jazz” still refers to Utah’s team, and maybe it doesn’t make sense to anyone only casually associated with the team, but it makes sense to those of us who have always heard the word “Jazz” and thought of our favorite basketball team. There is an entire construct of feelings and ideas associated with the team’s name, and the truly senseless act would be to erase those associations with a name change. While I acknowledge New Orleans contribution to the landscape of American music, I respectfully assert that the name of Utah’s NBA team matters far more to Jazz fans than it does to jazz fans. The borders of Jazz nation have long since changed.