Five Reasons to Enjoy the Surprising Jazz Start

Markkanen and Clarkson are having fun with the Jazz’s 6-2 start. (Trent Nelson, The Salt Lake Tribune)

Are you a bandwagon Jazz enthusiast, only tuning in when the team is good and in the playoffs? Great! Bad and losing basketball can be quite shitty to watch frequently. Are you a Jazz diehard, enjoying the team in whatever form they are and catching every minute? Also great—you are no less or more of a fan because of it.

We have limited free time. We should all find the right balance in our lives to maximize the things we enjoy and extricate the optional entertainment sources that don’t exude The Good Emotions in ourselves.

Ever since the NBA bubble in the fall of 2020, the tumult surrounding the Utah Jazz keeps pulling me dangerously close to my personal charge to not lecture anyone on “how to fan.” And I still won’t, because nobody needs my annoying maw touching anything regarding morality. However, I see an increasing number of ostensible fans of the Utah Jazz really, really not enjoying the Utah Jazz. Being perpetually upset seems extremely not fun! So I find myself poking and prodding around the edges of fandom existentialism to see if there are ways that these malcontents could actually, truly enjoy the team, rather than be pissed off and disappointed.

The rebuilding 2022-23 Utah Jazz presents a new challenge.

There exists a player in Victor Wembanyama who represents the greatest basketball talent to enter the league since LeBron James. And while that statement probably deserves a “[citation needed]” footnote for my lawyer brain, consider that the NBA itself, in an unprecedented move, is going to freely broadcast every single damn game of Wembanyama’s team from a completely separate professional league:

The NBA will stream every game Victor Wembanyama — the projected No. 1 pick in 2023 — plays in during the 2022-23 season on the new NBA App. It will debut on Oct. 29 when his team, the Metropolitans 92, play JL Bourg Basket at 2 p.m. ET.

— Chris Haynes (@ChrisBHaynes) October 27, 2022

When Utah traded the two tentpoles of its playoff mainstay squad, it was overwhelmingly expected that the Jazz will do what they could to be objectively bad and lose a shitload of games to procure a high draft pick — ideally, Wembanyama. And so we all steeled ourselves for the long, losing season without Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell.

But then Utah started the season by winning.

The Jazz stunned the NBA by completely working over the contending Denver Nuggets on opening night, and then traveled to Minnesota and New Orleans to win tough, overtime contests against the playoff-certain teams. After splitting a home-and-home with the Houston Rockets, dropping on the road to Denver, and beating Memphis twice in a row, Utah sits 6-2 near the very top of the Western Conference¹.

We’ve quickly realized that the team still doesn’t feature any real zeroes, and new coach Will Hardy is getting this new group to play their asses off. Veterans Mike Conley, Jordan Clarkson, and Rudy Gay are still around, and in exchange for Mitchell and Gobert (and Bojan Bogdanovic) they added competent, actual NBA talent to play every minute: Collin Sexton, Lauri Markkanen, Jarred Vanderbilt, Kelly Olynyk, Walker Kessler, Malik Beasley, and Talen Horton-Tucker. Just outside the rotation, they have real NBA experience (Nickeil Alexander-Walker) and prime first-round talent (Ochai Agbaji) on deck if needed. Turns out the tent can still stand—even if flapping in the wind a little bit—without its tentpoles if the surrounding infrastructure remains bolted in the ground.

So, where are the Jazz actually going? The surprising success absolutely does not imply sudden championship equity, but Utah is clearly way better than bottom-feeding teams that regularly trot out never-have-beens and never-will-bes. And while they seem poised to make another trade or three to remove any multiple of Conley, Clarkson, Gay, or others from the rotation, the Jazz are still left with a group of young veterans and solid talent that can take down anyone on a single night. Utah feels spiritually ready to tank the season away but has no clear path to do so right now.

Compounding this team-building and tanking dilemma is the relatively new² ‘flattening’ of lottery odds. The worst three teams now share top-choice odds, and teams later in the pecking order all receive a few more bites at the top picks. That also results in the worst three teams having a scant 14% chance at the top pick³, and less than 50% to even be in the top three selections at all:

Lottery odds (if no ties)

Despite those narrower odds in the lottery, anything short of the literal worst record in the league is going to leave the ‘lose at all costs’ segment of fans exclaiming: “They should have been worse!” If the Jazz achieve the worst record but end up with, like, the fourth pick, those voices will say, “At least they tried.” There should be no joy had this season, the logic seems to go, so shut up and eat your vegetab-Ls.

These already loud, pissed-off fans get louder the further the Jazz get from that rock bottom floor. I’m not so dense to pretend not to understand why. I get the logic behind leaning into the emotional turd in the punch bowl and preferring a supertank, dump season. Again, you fan how you fan. (I would also like to cheer for Wembanyama as a member of the Utah Jazz, to be clear).

But I do hope to convince you that the Utah Jazz winning a bunch more games than expected isn’t the worst thing in the world, and in fact is cool and awesome. I have five reasons why these surprise wins are good—some logical, some spiritual—and I hope at least one of them resonates with any Utah Jazz enthusiast who is grumpy about their team being surprisingly fun and competent.

The championship-or-bust mindset is reductive and boring.

This current meta of the NBA is ironic in light of the general rejection of “RINGZZZ” as a legitimate basketball comparison point. This is also true in the inverse, in which only total washout seasons are acceptable forms of missing the playoffs. This binary approach just leaves so much meat on the bone as to what professional basketball is as entertainment for us.

We’ll skip the inherent positives of playoff basketball, since that still doesn’t seem in Utah’s cards. But seeking the very bottom of the barrel of losses incorrectly disregards the other draft-based outcomes as failures. I get that Wembanyama is a singular talent, but have you checked out the other recruits in the draft? Scoot Henderson looks as pure of a lead-guard talent since Kyrie Irving.

Check out the 6’7” Thompson brothers for Overtime Elite this year and tell me you don’t see All-NBA potential. Nick Smith out of Arkansas totally kicks ass as a 6’5” dynamo of a combo guard. Wembanyama’s French countrymate Rayan Rupert has a 7’3” wingspan for a swingman and will battle in the physical NBL this year. The broader athleticism levels and multi-positional flexibility from the rest of the lottery are way, way more advanced than prior years.

There are going to be several championship-impact dudes coming into the NBA next year. Utah doesn’t need the first pick to get one, nor is Wembanyama actually guaranteed to be such a player. Note that the last talent this special, LeBron James, didn’t win a title until he left the damn team that drafted him. There are other ways to build a contender, if that’s all you really care about. Laser focus on every possible loss is exhausting and tiresome, when there is so much other cool stuff to pay attention to.

General competency matters for small markets.

The Miller family and Ryan Smith have done the right thing (as far as billionaires go) and invested in the team’s facilities and player care to a level of genuine envy across the league, attempting in part to make up for their undesirable market. Joke about the send-off tweets for training camp invite Cody Zeller, but players have enjoyed the environment and facilities to be professional basketball players. I agree that ‘establishing a winning culture’ seems like a weird trope that is really unquantifiable, but whatever it constitutes—and players and coaches insist that it is a thing that exists—it definitely matters more for small markets like Utah than in Miami or Los Angeles, where they can play ass basketball for seemingly forever, and still be desirable for free agents or dudes requesting trades.

Let me put it a different way: imagine a twenty-something player who is a low-end starter or good bench piece. His contract is reasonable but his team is willing to trade him for a small asset, and he’s up for a reasonable extension in the offseason. Between a 35-win upstart Jazz team or a wet fart of a season from Sacramento where they manage to make the play-in tournament, who is that player more likely to extend with as part of a trade?

The lottery odds suck now anyways!

This one’s simple and I already touched upon it above. The amount of total shit we would have to wade through just to somehow end up picking fourth just doesn’t make much sense if the other choice is putting young, developing talent in winning situations. We don’t have a ton of results from the new lottery odds yet—nor should past results at all change what could happen next—but the lottery winners so far have finished 7th, 3rd, 2nd, and 2nd worst in the standings. There aren’t a lot of ways to rephrase what the percentages above already show: the dropoff to the 6th, 7th, and 8th worst records isn’t all that steep, and the worst three records all share equal failure points at the end of the day.

Being surprisingly good is better than intentionally mediocre.

What if the Jazz are better than the 8th worst record? What if they win, say, 38 games, and end up as the 11th worst record with just a scant 2% chance at the top pick (9.4% in the top-4 overall, by the way)? Doesn’t that just mean Utah has landed in the dreaded treadmill of mediocrity? Not in this case. It would require that some aspects of the 2022-2023 Utah Jazz went stunningly well. There is a huge difference between intentionally crafting a team to top out at 41 wins and accidentally fielding a decent roster.

That difference is predicated on future flexibility. The Charlottes, Detroits, and New Yorks of the league continue to spend loads of cash on decent-but-not-great, fading, or simply misidentified talent. They have scant extra draft capital (or operate at a draft pick deficit), and it is impossible for them to acquire significant picks by trading their best talent right now: what would newly made 104-million-dollar man Jalen Brunson fetch in a trade right now? Gordon Hayward and his $120 million? The Pacers managed to find a taker for Domantas Sabonis’ $75 million and got real stuff back, but how many times can you fleece the Sacramento Kings? It’s easy to think of Utah’s draft assets as stuff that can only be used later, but it could just as easily be used in the short term to turn around and trade for the next special player in a shitty situation. (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? LaMelo Ball? Cade Cunningham? Keegan Murray?)

The Jazz have every option still on the table, and surprising success can only occur if several high-end outcomes are reached by certain individuals. Markkanen would need to continue his play all year and establish himself as a top-40 NBA player (or higher). Clarkson’s newfound leap into smart passing and wily defense could be permanent, and the Jazz could pen him to a reasonable extension. Jarred Vanderbilt is diving and skying towards annual All-Defense consideration. Conley’s smart, reliable play would surely net the Jazz a future asset in a trade, opening the door for Sexton to apply his intense athleticism and scoring across more minutes for the first winning ballclub of his young career. Kessler and Agbaji can become starter-level quality sooner than later. And, to top it all off, Hardy would have Coach of the Year consideration for good reason.

We think of Mitchell’s rookie season so magically—a special, unique event that singlehandedly changed the team’s mediocre outlook to immediate contention. It’s easy to see why, with so much of the success baked into a single man’s performance. My question to you is: why couldn’t this Utah Jazz team do the same, but in the collective? It would be a team suddenly starting its ascent a year or three ahead of schedule, just like Mitchell’s rookie season, but this time with a couple great starters, a kickass coach, and a metric fuckton of draft assets to transition to the next level.

Seeing the Jazz win feels great, regardless of the disposition of the team’s championship odds.

I can’t explain the innate feeling of simply being happy when the team knocks off their competitor. It feels impossible to be…sad?… when Clarkson makes a three in the clutch to seal a victory. I understand that detractors are largely not cheering for bad energy and useless monotony, and rather for exciting basketball culminating in narrow losses. But I don’t think that’s really an outcome that can be reliably achieved.

The best part is, though, is that these wins haven’t been ugly. This team kicks ass in every fun way imaginable. I implore you to read Zarin Ficklin to bring us home, but the ways the Jazz are succeeding are thoroughly aesthetically pleasing: higher passing and steal rates, clutch execution, frenetic energy (3rd in turnovers forced after being 29th, 30th, and 28th the prior 3 seasons), and crowd pleasing antics. It is so hard to not have your heart rate rise a little during every Jazz game with how they play.

At the end of the day, if you think the only path of success in professional basketball is winning a title, if you think the only viable path for Utah to win said title is to draft Victor Wembanyama, if you think the only viable path to acquiring Wembanyama is to lose the most games in the NBA…

…then yeah, this Jazz team might not be for you, and you’re probably having a miserable time right now. To that I ask, what if you had fun with us instead? If not, maybe find some joy elsewhere—there are too many other ways to enjoy life to settle for a disappointing, winning basketball team.