Bold Jazz Takes Explored Part I: Big What Ifs & Alternate Reality Titles

Kirilenko’s uniqueness makes him a fun candidate for the “what if” game. (Image via utahjazz.com)

A while ago, I asked the Tweople to give me their boldest Jazz-related takes that they actually believe. The response was overwhemling, with responses that covered all eras of Jazz basketball. But the hardest ones to respond to were the ones we’ll deal with here in Part I: “what if” scenarios that imagine an alternate version of Jazz history branching off from a particular inflexion point.

The “what if” game is a little comforting in the same way the bargaining stage of the grief cycle is comforting. Mostly it’s just a bit maddening in retrospect. Ask single, 20-something Dan Clayton.

I spent most of my 20s schlepping between my job, school and the arena, and because of that, I didn’t have a lot of leftover free time for a social life. And if I did notice a girl I was interested in asking out — most likely someone from one of those three locales since that’s where I spent all my time — I had so few reps that I was fairly likely to bungle my approach when I did try.

A cameraman friend heard me talking about how every time I’d come across this one Jazz dancer — we’ll call her Michelle, to protect the innocent — she came across as really down-to-earth and interesting. Since he frequently interacted with the dancers in his baseline shooting lane, he took matters into his own hands. He told Michelle about her awkward admirer up on press row, and she told him she was single and that this mystery friend should just ask her out. I was ridiculously embarrassed when he conveyed this back to me, but he still kept encouraging me to go for it.

Then one night, an opportunity arose. After completing postgame interviews, I was waiting for the walk signal at the corner of 300 West and South Temple, and up walks Michelle. I instantly thought, Here’s my chance… to mess with my friend!

Yeah, instead of asking Michelle out, some part of my addled brain thought it would be more rewarding to respond to this gift from the universe by pulling a fast one on my buddy. I introduced myself to Michelle as the guy she had heard about, and then said, “It would be really funny if you told him we met and I asked you out.” I didn’t ask her out, mind you. Just asked her to pretend I had. About 10 minutes later as I merged onto I-15, I realized how stupid I was. Later, an incredulous Michelle would tell my friend, “I don’t get why he didn’t just ask me out.” She might have said no, or I might have gotten a yes but then bombed on the date. Who knows? But in some other dimension, a version of me who is not a moron asked the young lady out and got to find out what the result was.

That’s the type of moment we’ll reexamine in Part I of this “Bold Takes Explored” series. We can pretend to know what would have resulted from a single moment in Jazz history going differently. But mostly, it’s just an interesting and weirdly fun form of self-torture.

Let the torture commence… 

This Generation’s Jazz What-Ifs

Jazz would be legit contenders if Gordon Hayward had stayed. We all think the Jazz are better off now, but we could have a 7-man rotation of Ricky Rubio, Donovan Mitchell, Hayward, Derrick Favors, Rudy Gobert, Royce O’Neale and Joe Ingles right now.

@CCool_CCCool

Yeah, for all the complex emotion Jazz fans still harbor toward Hayward, this one is pretty plainly true.

More talent gets you closer to the top of the mountain, and Hayward is a star-level piece, regardless of how salty fans are about his departure and everything that led up to it. The big question here is whether Mitchell, who developed into a primary scorer out of necessity, would have had the same trajectory with Hayward still around. That said, talent doesn’t stay hidden indefinitely, and eventually the Jazz would have realized what they had in #45, even with Hayward still in the clubhouse.

The Jazz did eventually find a way to replace the departed star with what we can call an upper middle class man’s Hayward. Bojan Bogdanovic is older than Hayward and doesn’t defend as well, but both guys are legit NBA scorers with size who know what it’s like to be on top of the scouting report. That said, the pivot toward Bogdanovic cost Utah Favors and left the frontline uncomfortably thin.

That’s just one of several alternate timelines forking off the if-Hayward-stays inflexion point that we need to consider if we’re to buy Mr. CCCool’s premise about the current 7-man core. Would Utah still have Rubio at this point, or would they have eventually wanted to angle for a point guard upgrade anyway, like they did in this version of reality with Mike Conley? Would they have still moved on from Rodney Hood, Alec Burks and Dante Exum (moves that yielded them Jae Crowder, Kyle Korver and Jordan Clarkson, respectively, but also cost them picks), or would a more solid core rotation have afforded them the patience to not part with the assets that those deals cost them?

So it starts to get a little butterfly effect-y and I’m not sure we can just assume that all else on the timeline remains unchanged if Hayward stays in Salt Lake. But bottom line is that if Utah had gone into the 2017-18 campaign with Hayward under contract and all of the other tools and assets they had at the time (including an eventual star in Mitchell and one of the game’s most impactful players in Gobert), they’d most likely be in great shape today.

The Deron Williams vs. Jerry Sloan saga was a false dichotomy and the real party at fault was Kevin O’Connor and Greg Miller.

@IrwinMFletcher8

If Larry Miller had not died, he could have defused the DWill/Sloan thing that was above Greg’s level of competence.

@bwfanzzz

Right out of the gate we get to the two biggest “what ifs” of the modern Jazz era.

I don’t know if the elder Miller could have saved the relationship and prolonged the Hall-of-Fame coach’s career. Here’s what I do know: *well* before the conflict reached a climax with Sloan’s abrupt resignation, I had heard from trusted colleagues on press row that he was growing tired — in the figurative sense, the literal sense, and in just about every way in between. In other words, sooner or later, Sloan was going to step down anyway.

But it’s true that Larry and his son had different managerial styles. The former always made it clear that the basketball bosses held the final word on basketball decisions, while Greg did attempt to broker compromises on issues that had long been the sole purview of Gerald Eugene Sloan: things like practice schedules and road trip itineraries. That’s not to say that Larry was hands-off; far from it, the longtime Jazz owner notoriously did things like scold players in the locker room and address team matters publicly. But when players appealed to him on issues relating to basketball matters, he was generally pretty clear: go talk to Jerry.

If Greg had left Sloan in charge of basketball matters, would Williams have eventually fallen in line? Would the support have energized the reportedly tired head coach? It’s hard to know. But if I were looking for evidence to back up Irwin’s and David’s takes here, I’d point to the fact that Greg presided over the Jazz for a relatively short time. In 2015, the Miller family installed a “corporate structure” to run the franchise instead. 

Andrei Kirilenko is a Hall-of-Famer on this team.

@justalars

If alternate realities are your thing, AK is a fascinating figure, because he’s so dang unique that it’s fun to imagine how even a slight change in how he was deployed could have really swung outcomes. (And there are more AK-related what ifs coming farther down, since those sections deal more with the past.)

The gap between one-time All-Star and Hall of Fame entry is a pretty wide one, so this take might be a tad hyperbolic, but AK was special in a lot of ways that would have made him dangerous in an era that values smart, skilled players at every position. 

If we time-machined him onto the current team, would he play a big enough role to get himself enshrined in Springfield? He would probably need slightly better handles and a more precise pull-up game so that he could handle the ball more in pick-and-roll situations. Not that AK was ever going to become a Kevin Durant-style alpha dog, but his shot off the bounce is one reason we rarely got to see his creativity and decision-making on ful display late in his Jazz career. Even when he shared the court with two John Stockton and Karl Malone, AK used 19.3% of the team’s possessions, and then the figure spiked to 21.2% over the next three seasons. But after the Jazz loaded up in 2004 free agency and the 2005 draft, his usaged cratered to 17.2% over five remaining Jazz seasons. For a modern version of AK to reach megastar status, he likely would need to control possessions more often than he did, and that means he’d need to be better at scoring and creating with the ball. 

If we had Quin Snyder when Trey Burke and Enes Kanter were rookies, they would have worked out better. I don’t think Ty Corbin did anything for them.

I also wonder if the drafting would have gone differently on some of those years if we had Quin. Imagine if we had managed to grab Kawhi Leonard, Kemba Walker, or Giannis Antetokounmpo. I’m not saying that Quin has had everything to do with the drafting, but I’m sure he has some sway.

@bigd_84095

There were valid reasons why Kawhi and Giannis slipped to the teens, which is a solid reminder that the hardest part about drafting is guessing which players are going to develop in all the right areas, and which ones will get in their own way. Maybe Snyder would have had the foresight to guess right on those guys, but a lot of smart executives and coaches didn’t. Drafting is only an exact science when you get to do it with hindsight.

Which leads us to the Burke/Kanter part of your hot take. I give Snyder’s developmental program a ton of credit, but I’m not sure it drastically changes the outcomes for those guys. Both had plenty of opportunities, including a starting role and 32 minutes per game for rookie Burke, and steady minutes for Kanter that helped him progress into a solid NBA rotation player. The main problem with Kanter’s trajectory is not that he didn’t get better — he did! Instead, what happened is that someone else at his position *also* got better, becoming one of the NBA’s 10 or 15 most impactful players. Had Kanter been OK with that new pecking order, he could have provided the Jazz with the same stuff he gave OKC, Portland and Boston as a stat-stuffing, high-minute reserve big.

Also, both guys did play under Snyder.

Dennis Lindsey should have claimed DWill and Andrew Bogut off waivers in 2017.

@IrwinMFletcher8

I’m going to vote “nah” on this one. Those two combined for 60 total NBA games after clearing waivers that spring, so especially in hindsight, I think both guys were just kinda done.

Plus, there were financial implications at the time, too. The Jazz could have easily scooped up both guys with their remaining cap room that season, and it would have actually saved them money to do so since they would have only had to pay out their remaining salary, but the full year’s salaries would have counted against the Jazz’s team floor calculation. But even though claiming them would have saved the Jazz literal cash, it would have cut into their cap room, at a time when they were still hoping to use that money to renegotiate and extend George Hill. Hill wound up not accepting the R&E offer anyway, so in hindsight it’s moot, but that’s why they weren’t active on the waiver write that year. 

Alternate Reality ’90s Titles

If there’s no lockout, we win in 1999.

@caaanelson

With Michael Jordan in retirement for the second time, the door was open for the Jazz, who tied the Spurs for the league’s best record behind another MVP season from Karl Malone.

But in order to squeeze 50 games into just a couple of months, the NBA really had to compress the schedule, and there was always a concern about what that would do to teams whose stars were longer in the tooth. Utah struggled to put away a spry Kings team in the first round, then got upset by a very balanced — and mostly very young — Portland team. Of the Blazers’ top seven minute-getters that season, all except Arvydas Sabonis were between 24 and 28 years old. The 35-year-old Mailman, after averaging 25 points on 52% shooting over the regular season, dipped to 20 points and 43% in that series. It’s popular to think, like @caaanelson, that the aging Jazz just lost steam. (Eventually, a team led by a 22-year-old won that year’s championship.)

But let’s add a corrolary to this interesting what-if: could the Jazz have won with some simple load management? Malone averaged 37.4 minutes per game that season and used more than 30% of the Jazz’s possessions while on the court, making him the ONLY modern player at 35 or older to exceed a 30% usage rate on 35 mpg or more. If Utah had bought him a few nights of rest along the way, or at least spread out the scoring load when they could get away with it, Malone might have had more in the tank that spring. It might have cost him that second MVP award, but I think he’d probably trade in a Maurice Podoloff trophy for the Larry O’Brien.

If Karl Malone doesn’t completely choke in the clutch of “the Flu game” we win a championship.

@gabe_slc

Game 5 of the 1997 Finals was tied at 77 when Malone checked in with 9:01 left. His stats the rest of the way: one point, 0/2 shooting, one rebound, one assist while the Jazz were outscored 13-11. “Completely choke” might be a bit harsh; when I hear “choke,” I think of a 1-for-9 quarter with three turnovers or something like that, not just disappearing. But that certainly wasn’t a typical nine minutes of Karl Malone basketball. Dennis Rodman made the Mailman’s job a lot tougher, although without a full rewatch, I would hate to assume why he went uncharacteristically quiet for those nine minutes. 

Bigger Malone-related what-ifs in my mind include the “Mailman doesn’t deliver on Sundays” free throws he missed in a tied 1997 Game 1 with :09 left, and the late turnover in 1998 Game 6. The Jazz were up one when MJ tiptoed baseline to strip Malone, setting up his iconic capper to a sixth Chicago title. Get a decent look on that possession and there’s a good chance you host Game 7 with Scottie Pippen hobbled. C’est la vie.

But overall, I think Malone is an underrated Finals performer. I hear the word “choke” used a lot to describe his output on the biggest stage, and that’s pretty unfair. Someone who has the ball in his hands as much as Mail is bound to make some mistakes and miss some shots along the way, and scrutiny comes with the job description. But he averaged 25.0 ppg over his career, 25.7 in the playoffs, and 24.4 over those 12 Finals games against maybe the greatest team ever. He also averaged 10.4 rebounds and 3.7 helpers in the Finals, right in line with his career norms for regular season and playoffs. Does that look like a choke job? 

If Rony Seikaly comes to Utah, the Jazz beat the Bulls.

@justalars

Maybe. But let’s also not forget that Seikaly played just 18 more NBA games after that trade deadline, averaging a whopping 3.2 points. He was injured at the time of the trade — in fact, he swears that’s why the trade was called off — and he never got quite right again. It’s possible that the Jazz got more out of Greg Foster and Chris Morris — the two players who would have been shipped to Florida in that deal — than they ever would have gotten from Seikaly. (The draft pick they would have sent for Seikaly also eventually got them three years of Quincy Lewis, although… eh.)

If Brian Williams would have chosen the Jazz over the Bulls, Jordan would have one less championship.

@WalterG4

Walter later clarified: “Williams had a great season with the Clips [in ’95-96], but… sat out most of [’96-97]. I thought Larry Miller offered him $1 million and the Bulls offered much less, but be chose Chicago to play with Jordan, and then he ended up having a huge impact on the Bulls, and was a big difference maker in the Finals.”

Williams — later Bison Dele — had never made the playoffs before the ’96-97 season. He posted a negative net rating in the nine regular season Bulls games he played to shake the rust off. He then got it going in the playoffs, and saw his minutes quickly ramp up in the second round as the Bulls dealt with Dikembe Mutombo’s Hawks and needed another big body. From Game 3 against Atlanta through the end of the Finals, Williams averaged seven points and five boards. He had a pair of double-digit outings in the Finals, and consequently got a lot of pub for providing an unexpected spark.

But here’s the thing: both of those big scoring nights came in Chicago losses. In the four Bulls wins, Williams averaged just 3.8 points, 3.5 rebounds and 33% shooting from the field. So I’m not sure his absence from the Bulls changes the trajectory of history — unless the contention here is that he would have been better on the Jazz. Neither Ostertag nor Greg Foster had a great series, and Antoine Carr played sparingly in that first Finals. So maybe. 

Though I hated it at the time, the rumored Bryon Russell + Donyell Marshall trade for Keith Van Horn could have catapulted us back into contender status.

@IrwinMFletcher8

On the surface, this is an easy one to agree with. I think the only counterargument is that Marshall was actually a pretty efficient scorer in that role. KVH only had one season with a TS% above what Marshall achieved in his two Jazz seasons combined — and on the other hand, he never had as low a usage as Jazz-era Donyell until the very end of his career, so it’s perfectively conceivable that his shooting efficiency would have benefited from playing next to all-time greats and not being at the top of every opponent’s scouting report. 

Actually, my own related hot take here is that the Jazz held onto Bryon Russell too long. That was certainly not my view at the time, as a rather un-erudite teenage fan who liked Russell’s dunks and swagger. But if the blogosphere and advanced stats had been more fully deployed during Russell’s career, I think it would have been obvious to more folks that there was a point in time when his trade value exceeded his basketball value. 

More Historical What-Ifs

Kirilenko is a top-10 defender all time, and one of the most underrated players of all time (along with Peja Stojakovic).

@SacreBleu27

Hot take: If the Jazz don’t sign Carlos Boozer and keep AK as a 4 he goes down as one of the three best Jazz men ever.

@JasonForTheLove

As promised, more Kirilenko stuff. 

I loved watching AK. I loved covering AK. I still love imagining what could have been different about AK’s career if the Jazz didn’t totally luck into signing two eventual All-Stars in the summer after Kirilenko’s best season. The plan that summer had been to sign an under-the-radar big man who Jazz execs thought had some unexplored ceiling (they were always high on Mehmet Okur) and continue to use Kirilenko as a combo forward who would playmake and guard the other team’s best non-center. When the Jazz unexpectedly found themselves able to poach Boozer, too, they shifted their thinking, but that changed AK’s role, partially because it meant the fulcrum of the Jazz offense would now be the Boozer pick-and-roll.

Kirilenko’s best asset was always the speed at which he processed the game, on both ends. But retooling the Jazz around Booz’s rim dives relegated him to the role of a spot shooter, which was never his strength (31% career 3-point shooter). So yeah, there’s something to be said for Jason’s theory here that Boozer in particular stunted AK’s game somewhat. That said, Boozer gave Williams a natural P&R partner, and that tandem took the Jazz to four straight playoff runs, including three trips to the conference semis or deeper.

So what could the Jazz have looked like if they signed Memo, kept AK at the four, and spent the Boozer money on a wing upgrade instead? Well…

Jazz should have offered the Boozer money to Manu Ginobili in 2004. Jazz win a title or two the following years with a core of Williams, Manu, AK, Memo.

@JasonForTheLove

I’m not sure how available Manu really was to suitors outside of Bexar County, Texas. He verbally committed to return just days into free agency, although there is a report that he had some dialogue with the Denver Nuggets before re-upping with the Spurs. And the $55 million he got from the Spurs was less than what Utah paid for Boozer, so it’s at least fair to wonder.

Although, back to the butterfly effect, would the Jazz have still been in a position to draft Williams that following summer? Does AK still get injured and miss half the season, or does he dodge those injuries by playing elsewhere on the court during that 2004-05 season? This one will probably keep me up at night for a while, because I love Ginobili.

If Kyle Korver wasn’t so worried about his shooting percentage in the last game of the 2009-10 season the Jazz would have won and then beat the Nuggets in 4 and would have been better rested and would have beat the Lakers in 7. Then beat the Suns in 6. Finals.

@mjflinders

Korver averaged 4.4 3-point attempts per 36 minutes over the Jazz’s first 76 games that year, and the team was at 50-26 with a half dozen games to do. Over the last six, he took 3.3 long bombs per 36 minutes, and the Jazz went 3-3, limping into a tie with Denver that forced them to open the postseason in the Nuggets’ gym.

That said, that final game (at home vs. the Suns) was a blowout. They trailed by 21 going into the fourth quarter, and only one Phoenix starter saw the court at all in those final 12 minutes. In other words, it would have taken a LOT of Korver threes to make that game even remotely competitive.

I also don’t know that they beat the Lakers in the second round, even with more rest. Those Laker squads were a really bad matchup for Utah, as evidenced by the 4-0 sweep in round two… not to mention the parade they threw in Los Angeles that June.

If the New Orleans Jazz hadn’t traded their pick and rights to Moses Malone for Gail Goodrich, Utah would never have an NBA team and the New Orleans Jazz would have dominated the NBA in the 80s. New Orleans drafted Malone when the ABA disbanded but placed him in the Dispersal Draft for the return of their 1977 first round draft pick which they traded for Goodrich. Such a dumb move.

@funky_flashman

Funky is partially right here. But the club’s hand was mostly forced by the NBA here at the intersection of two great what-if stories for the New Orleans Jazz, both of which involve Hall-of-Famers.

In order to participate in the 1976 ABA dispersal draft, teams had to surrender a pick from an upcoming college draft as a ticket to entry. The Jazz had ponied up their 1977 pick, but the league was about to step in and complicate things.

Three weeks before that, the Jazz had already signed Goodrich as a free agent. Back then, it was common for the NBA to require teams to pay compensation after the fact when signing another team’s free agent, but the league didn’t levy the cost for Goodrich until August 5, when the dispersal draft was taking place. The league required Utah to surrender their 1977, 1978 and 1979 picks (along with a 1980 second-rounder) to L.A. as compensation for signing the former All-Star Goodrich. That left the Jazz without a pick to sacrifice to stay in the dispersal draft. They had to release their rights to Malone so they could send the 1977 pick as part of the league-mandated pick swap.

In all honesty, signing Malone would have been difficult for the nearly insolvent Jazz at that stage anyway. Moses carried a signing price of $350,000, a prohibitively high figure for a 21-year-old who was still largely unproven. But the point here is that it wasn’t really the Jazz’s choice; they went into the dispersal draft thinking they had the 1977 pick to play with, and then it was taken out from under them on the same day they had selected Malone.

It gets worse: the 1978 pick the Jazz were forced to surrender became Freeman Williams, a double-digit scorer. The 1979 pick became Magic Freaking Johnson. If the Jazz hadn’t signed the aging Gail Goodrich that July, they could have conceivably had the 1977 pick that would have allowed them the right to nab Moses, and also still kept their 1979 pick and potentially been in a position to draft Magic — although it’s probably a safe bet that they would have been good enough with Moses that it’s unlikely the 1979 pick would have remained the #1 overall in this alternate reality. Still, the Goodrich signing ultimately cost them a shot at one or both Hall of Famers, even though they didn’t know the cost until well after they signed him.

Side note: Freeman Williams later made his way back to the Jazz — in exchange for another Hall of Famer. The (now Utah) Jazz drafted Dominique Wilkins in 1982 but the star-in-waiting refused to sign with the Jazz, who were also still struggling financially. So instead, they dealt ‘Nique to Atlanta for Williams and John Drew. Williams lasted only a couple of months in Utah; Drew was good until his cocaine addiction forced him out of the league.

That was fun. Many more hot takes to come in Part II, which will focus on the modern era, and Part III, where we’ll dive into more Jazz history.