Jimbo’s Mailbag – What Enes Kanter Will Miss About Utah

(AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

Welcome to the next edition of Jimbo’s Mailbag! At Salt City Hoops, we know that covering a losing team without any humor can be dreary. As such, we decided to add a little bit more levity to our site via Jimbo’s unique outlook on the world of Jazz basketball. Jimbo, by virtue of being recently featured in the Deseret News, is now the world’s most famous Utah-based basketball mailbag artist. Interested in submitting a question to Jimbo’s mailbag? Email it to Jimbo at mailbag@saltcityhoops.com or tweet @JimboRudding to appear.

Q: If you had 15 minutes to visit with Kanter, what life advice would you give him? Besides the mountains, what else will he miss about Utah?

@davidjsmith1232

What a mess this guy got himself into last week. I started the week worried that Jazz fans would boo him and then Ric Bucher would call us all “Mormons” and the rest of the NBA would hate us. However, once Kanter called the Jazz organization “unprofessional,” I was ready to throw Molotov cocktails into a turkey farm, but thankfully my mother explained to me just in time that Turkey is actually a country and that’s where Kanter was born. Can you believe that?! How could I make it into my 30’s without ever knowing that?

If I had 15 minutes with Enes Kanter, I’d spend most of it trying to convince him to get a new agent. Then I would ask him how “unprofessional” he thought it was that Coach Alex Jensen spend hours and hours with him trying to help him be better at playing a &$*# $#*! kid’s game. Then I would probably spend the rest of the time discussing the game of basketball while slowly morphing into my version of a Turkish accent. You know, just to mess with him.

Here is a list of things that Kanter forgot to mention he will miss about Utah:

• Salt water taffy
• Our crowded Old Navy’s
• Lagoon coke can discounts
• The Comic Con smell
• Crown Burgers
• Taking quiet naps underneath a tree in Pioneer Park
• Road trips to see the dinosaurs in Vernal
• Dirty Dr. Peppers

Q: Given one wish, what currently active, former Jazz player do you want back in the fold? Also, have you seen Andris Biedrins lately?

@the6bees

Funny you should ask this, because I just saw Biedrins the other day at the rec center indoor pool wrapped up in a WALL-E towel and eating a soft pretzel. He seemed pretty happy, so I didn’t ask for an autograph.

As far as which former Jazz player I would want back on the team, that’s easy—Brandon Rush!

Seriously though, I loved Wesley Matthews. He played so hard and it was so fun to see him surprise Carmelo in the playoffs with his tenacious defense. It will be interesting to see how he does coming off of the dreaded Achilles injury.

Kyle Korver was just a sweetheart of a guy, not to mention a beautiful man with a chiseled frame and gorgeous eyes and…I mean, he’s a great shooter and I wouldn’t mind going dirt biking or skeet shooting with him someday.

If Wesley Matthews can’t get back to being the Wesley of old, then I would LOVE to see DeMarre Carroll back in a Jazz uniform. I am a huge supporter of anyone who plays defense, and Carroll wasn’t afraid of anybody.

Q: If a tree falls in a forest, is it because Quin Snyder didn’t want it there and simply glared at it?

@k_r_baum

That’s a good one. Seriously though, whenever I’m watching the game and Quin goes all fire and brimstone, all 13 of my pets run underneath furniture. In fact, it’s happened so often that now they can sense when it’s coming, much like an earthquake. All the scattering scares the crap out of my cockatiels.

Quin’s demon face is one of the reasons I have enjoyed this season so much. He doesn’t care one bit about showing emotion to his players. I LOVE it when he spends the first half of a time out yelling at a player and then putting his arm around him or smacking him on the butt.

Not to dump on Ty Corbin, but… Ty wasn’t a good coach. By the look on Corbin’s face you could never tell if the Jazz were down by 20 or down by 30. Instead of a demonic look on his face when players weren’t doing what he asked, he had an “Easter Island statue” look when players weren’t doing what he asked. The only difference between Ty and the Easter Island statue is Ty has the world’s tiniest mustache, which he still to this day hasn’t received any recognition or praise from Guinness.

Q: One referee in last night’s Golden State vs. Clippers game looked tired and sweaty. Should the refs get one timeout per half so they can get a breather?

@BacherRandy

Usually, if neither team takes a timeout before 5:59 left in a quarter, the officials will call a time out and I believe it is charged to the home team. I don’t know why that is. Maybe to slow the game down? But maybe you’re right; maybe it’s so the referees can rest for a while, set the ball on the floor and stand still staring off into space.

It seems like almost all the refs are in pretty good shape. They have to be in shape to spend an entire game running back and forth on the court. But even someone who is in great shape will get sweaty and tired during a two and a half hour game. I had an uncle who would get tired and sweaty while getting the mail. He had permanent pit stains and smelled like a mixture between Pledge dust spray and Cool Ranch Doritos.

Q: With the season winding down, what will our players be up to for the summer?

@joel_hiller

I have a love/hate relationship with this time of year. Pretty soon we will all have to come to grips with the idea that there won’t be any more Jazz games to watch. Local sports talk radio will abandon segments on the Jazz for ridiculously early football nonsense.

What makes it even more difficult is the Jazz are heading for the lottery again, which means we can’t start getting excited about anything until June when the Jazz bring in Wolfgang Flucheinz from Germany for a workout before the draft.

Nevertheless, just as I need the off-season to get to know my family again, so too do the Jazz players need to take time to work on getting better. Here is a list of things that certain Jazz players need to do this off-season:

• Exum – Visit with a sports psychologist.
• Favors – Get just a little bit meaner.
• Hayward – Finally attain the golden orb of Mauront in League of Legends.
• Millsap – Convince Paul to come back and also come off the bench.
• Gobert – Get stronger and maybe also get stronger.
• Hood – Eat Activia.

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Thanks for the questions everybody!