The Broken Promise of Patience: Jazz Fans’ Belief in Hayward Goes Way Back

Hayward was a symbol of patience. To some fans, now he’s a symbol of patience gone unrewarded. (Melissa Majchrzak NBAE/GettyImages)

In the winter of 2004, Gordon Hayward was attending middle school in Brownsburg, Indiana, and Tom Gugliotta was an overpaid former All-Star languishing in a low-minute bench role for the Phoenix Suns. Those two facts, seemingly unrelated on the surface, actually go a long way to explain why Hayward can expect an icy reception from jilted Jazz fans when he plays his first game at Vivint SmartHome Arena as a Jazz opponent.

This is a story about patience. Patience that almost paid off, until it didn’t.

Jazz fans — including the ones who plan to boo the former Jazz star, according to a Salt Lake Tribune article — understand that landing a star in Salt Lake City takes some work. Never a top destination for marquee free agents, Utah has had to play the long game more often than not: draft smartly, bet on the future, and seize the moment when opportunities arise. So for those fans, whether they consciously recognize it or not, Hayward doesn’t just represent a player who broke off a 7-year relationship with the fan base. Because Hayward’s relationship with that fan base actually started well before he arrived in Utah as a gawky 20-year-old in 2010.

In February 2004, nobody knew yet that the scrawny, tennis-playing eighth grader would become an NBA player at all, let alone that he’d crack franchise top-10 lists for points, minutes, assists and steals. Nobody knew he was on his way to being an NBA All-Star, and Jazz brass probably didn’t even know Hayward existed at that point.

And yet that’s when they traded for him.

What people did know in 2004 is that Gugliotta was no longer good enough to be making $11.7 million, roughly a quarter of the NBA’s team salary cap for that season¹. Gugliotta had once been a star, but by that point was averaging just 10 minutes per game for the Suns, who needed to reduce payroll. That meant they needed to find a team with enough salary cap space to absorb Googs’ hefty contract. The list of such teams was short, and right at the top was the team with the lowest payroll in the league: the Jazz.

The Jazz shipped two injured players out and absorbed Googs’ expiring contract, in exchange for which they received three picks from the Suns: a first rounder they’d use to select Kirk Snyder the following summer, a second-rounder they’d parlay into the future in a separate trade², and a New York pick that would be protected until 2010. And that’s when Jazz fans’ relationship with Gordon Hayward began.

For the next six years, fans would anxiously track the protections on that pick from the Knicks, and each year, it would kick forward based on the pre-negotiated protection levels. The half dozen years that fans on message boards and radio shows³ obsessively watching New York’s record is a perfect representation of the patience and longsuffering required of small market fanbases. Utah was good in those intervening years, but the promise of an unprotected draft pick from a perennially underperforming Knicks team was this lingering chimera, a prize dangled in front of Jazz fans but somehow just beyond reach.

That is, until 2010, which also happens to be the first time (some) Jazz fans booed Hayward. And that was probably inevitable, as Hayward was destined to be judged not on his own merits but against six years’ worth of dreams about what that pick could become. The pick itself had become a symbol of franchise-altering hope and the club’s patience, and it would be difficult for a floppy-haired youngster to live up to that hype.

As Hayward set about trying to measure up to that ideal, he became an embodiment of patience in another way. In fact, from his rookie year all the way through his 2017 departure, the trajectory of the Jazz as a franchise essentially mirrored Hayward.

His up-and-down rookie year was also an up-and-down year for the club, which started 27-13 but ultimately missed the playoffs after locker room tumult forced a shakeup. For the next couple of years, as Hayward hung out in limbo between being a promising young contributor and a part of Utah’s core, the team as a whole lingered in directional limbo, neither irrelevant nor wholly relevant, neither a veteran team nor a rebuilding team. Then the team struggled to grow into a winning outfit while Hayward struggled to grow into his role as its central weapon, and just as he reached comfort and stardom, the team reached the promised land of relevance. In other words, from 2010 to 2017, the Hayward narrative drove the Jazz narrative.

Once again, his arc was the one that defined the potential, the hope and ultimately the improvement of the team as a whole. Believing in the trajectory of the team meant believing in Hayward. He was no longer a faceless, nameless asset in the form of “draft considerations,” but in a lot of ways, he was still the personification of patience, a breathing, jump-shooting metaphor for the way some teams and fanbases have to bet on the come. Waiting, wishing, hoping.

Even if Hayward had managed his exit perfectly — and he most certainly did not — the frustration of all that waiting having been in vain is bigger than anybody’s disdain for Hayward himself. Especially because it seemed as though Hayward would fulfill that hope. The draft asset became a pick, the pick became a talented youngster, the youngster became a star and the star brought his team back to relevance. That’s the type of fairytale small market teams have to believe in, and the patience had finally paid off.

And then he chose to go work somewhere else, which in itself isn’t a horrible thing. Millions of people do the same thing every year, deciding that a new employer, different role or change of scenery will benefit them and their families. But with that decision, 14 years of hope evaporated.

It’s not his fault that NBA contracts work that way. It’s not his fault that Jazz fans had been waiting for him since the 2004 Googs trade. It’s not even his fault that Utah didn’t get anything in direct exchange for losing him. Had Utah wanted to exact a return via trade, they had the option of doing that by dealing him before his contract ran out. Instead, they chose to let his contract play out and let Hayward become a free agent, and that’s how free agency goes. Utah’s decision wasn’t even wrong, even if they miscalculated their guess as to Hayward’s ultimate intentions. The Jazz had built patiently and chose to believe in the narrative that they had created — which, again, was basically a narrative crafted by Hayward’s own. There is nothing wrong with having that belief in the program you’ve built, but that belief is the reason the Jazz “got nothing” when Hayward walked.

So no: not Hayward’s fault, but it also doesn’t help the sting that will agitate many of those in attendance on Friday.

Hayward didn’t help by botching the free agent process. By dragging the process out, he cost the Jazz an opportunity to speak to other free agents⁴, and made the process feel disingenuous. And he has had several moments since then where he appeared either to not grasp how a comment would play publicly or to not care. All of that makes it easy to kick up dust in a way that makes this feel personal. And that’s fine.

To fans, it is personal. It’s about him ruining Independence Day barbecues while he wrote a blog post. They’ll cast him as a villain and make fun of his new haircut, his “Daddy’s always happy” moment and those new Comcast ads. That’s fine. It’s more than fine. It’s fun. The contrived enmity will stir up an intense environment in the gym Hayward used to call home, and that will be great for the 19,000 people there and the national viewing audience.

But, truth be told, they’re not as mad at the haircut as they are at the thought of all that patience yielding a single All-Star appearance and an awkward goodbye. They’re mad at all those nights they spent monitoring the Knicks pick, or about arguing whether Hayward would ever be a top option on a good team.

Luckily for Utah, other bets paid off in the meantime. In the 2013 and 2017 drafts, the Jazz went after players they thought could be franchise cornerstones, and they are consequently back to being very good. Now, the hope and patience of the fanbase are invested elsewhere, and the present and future look bright.

But the sight of Hayward in green is a symbol of past patience gone unrewarded. And that angst will likely be behind every boo, every wisecrack about hair product, every angry comment. Jazz fans have been believing in Hayward since before they knew who he was.

However fans react to Hayward on Friday night, they’ll also be reacting — consciously or otherwise — to all that hope. To fourteen years of waiting for a pick to turn into a player, and a player to turn into a star.