On Small Markets, Status, and Snubs

With Anthony Davis maneuvering to join LeBron James in glamorous L.A., small market teams like the Jazz are left reflecting once again on whether they have a fair shot of competing in the NBA. (AP Photo/Jae C Hong)

The current NBA moment strongly invites angst from small-market teams and their fans, and Jazz fans excel at that.

The angst takes many forms: entrenched pessimism; bristling, chip-on-the-shoulder combativeness; a strange, self-flagellating sense of purity; sometimes even whininess.

Anthony Davis’s trade request to be shipped from New Orleans¹ to the Los Angeles Lakers², made in bald defiance of a certain $50,000 fine, has small market franchises and those who cheer them in the all-too-familiar doldrums. 

The fearful certainty is that the Lakers, the NBA’s glamour franchise, will steal away Davis as it once seduced Shaquille O’Neal away from a potentially revolutionary Orlando team — and then Dwight Howard from that same poor Magic franchise a decade later. This on top of star-studded California already stealing Kevin Durant away from Oklahoma City, LeBron James from his hometown of Cleveland, and Chris Paul via the Clippers even after its first attempt — via the Lakers — was nixed by the NBA’s powers that be³.

No mere name change can obscure the fact that sooner or later New Orleans will have lost the two greatest stars in the city’s modern basketball history⁴ to the L.A. jezebel.  

It’s a sour note for Jazz fans less than two years after their own homegrown All-Star, Gordon Hayward, spurned them for the NBA’s other legacy team bedecked in green in Boston, despite universal acknowledgement — including by Hayward’s own agent — that the Jazz had done everything right in their attempt to retain him.  

It certain doesn’t help that the Jazz’s current stars, Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, both missed out on All-Star acknowledgement, in Gobert’s case despite what his coach Quin Snyder called the objective fact of his being “one of the most impactful players in the league.” 

In the analytically driven NBA, how could the player leading the league in win shares along with James Harden — a.k.a. the only real challenger to Harden for league MVP — not make the All-Star team even as a reserve?

There’s an easy answer that many Jazz fans think, some complain about, and even more feel: the game’s rigged against their team. 

It’s the money, and the metropolitan hubris, and the weather, and the impossible-to-kill stereotypes, and it will never change.

“You go live in Utah.”

“The mountains… I guess, that’s it.”

“Gordon hasn’t made a decision.”

Whether it’s Gobert or Andre Kirilenko, Jazz players will end up in tears, their fans with them, and the rest of the league will mock. That’s the reality, the felt-sense so deep it cannot be doubted.

The problem is, that felt-sense is wrong. 

Small market syndrome isn’t a fatal illness so much as a delusion of self-confidence, and legacy of past disappointment more than present or future reality. It’s passed time more Jazz fans shed it, as — hopefully — Utah’s front office, coaching staff, and players have.

Never in history has market size mattered less than it does now in the NBA. Star power isn’t widely migrating toward big markets. Instead, talent is funneling toward franchises of excellence, with quality ownership, facilities, coaching, and more than anything, players. Players with blindingly brilliant talent.

Yes, James settled in L.A. because the market boasts more possibilities for moguls than any other, but remember: no one else — not Davis, or Durant, or anyone this side of Michael Jordan –is LeBron James. He is a case so singular that it’s folly to generalize just about anything from his decisions.

Cleveland was never a model NBA franchise, at least not recently⁵. They simply had the unique fortune to be James’s hometown. Had that not been the case, he never would have returned there to win them that cherished championship. Instead, they’d have turned the chance to draft arguably the greatest player in history into zero NBA championships.

Likewise, the Lakers are no NBA paragon. It’s been five years since they sniffed the playoffs, and they are off pace again this season. The Jazz have NEVER missed the playoffs five straight seasons since they moved to Utah. The NBA’s golden franchise has more recent headlines for tampering investigations, attempted ownership coups, and failed player development — remember when Brandon Ingram was the second coming of Durant? — than for luring elite talent.

Oh, they try. Paul George left the Pacers with supposed intent to join LeBron in L.A. then decided to stay in Oklahoma City instead. And the Pacers, a small-market but also historically solid franchise, were rolling along as an up-and-coming Eastern power despite George’s decision until the tragic injury to Victor Oladipo. 

Might L.A. land Davis because of James? Sure.

If so, then they’ll still have a top five NBA player in Davis once the 34-year-old King leaves the game for his business interests. And given their recent track record, the Lakers might slide right into the slot New Orleans once held as a fringe playoff team led by one of the league’s most glowing talents.

If you want to identify poorly run franchises star players are dodging, look at the biggest markets in the league.

The Knicks have won just one playoff series in 18 years, turned arguably the greatest coach in NBA history into a front office joke, last landed a star⁶ who can’t even stick on a team now, and just got dumped by Kristaps Porzingis for the Mavericks (and Luka Doncic). What advantages the league’s largest market has!⁷

The Chicago Bulls lost homegrown All-Star Jimmy Butler to ultra-glamorous Minnesota and shook the league with their huge free agent signing of Jabari Parker, who they may have to buy out if they can’t sweet talk a reluctant trade partner into eating his contract.

The Brooklyn Nets have one playoff series victory in twelve years and are rightly encouraged that Sean Marks has rejected the franchise’s traditional mantra of “err toward the stupid.”

Clearly, market size doesn’t guarantee star free agents, titles, or even a decent number of wins. What’s the formula for big-market NBA success then?

Turn a 7th, 11th, and 35th draft pick into Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green. Trade Kevin Martin, Jeremy Lamb, and two first-round picks for James Harden. Employ Danny Ainge as your general manager so he can build a championship team then swap its residue for the Brooklyn Nets’ entire draft future. 

Big market franchises thrive for the same reasons small markets do: good ownership, good management, good coaching, and more than anything, possessing more good players than their competition. According to that formula, Utah has more going for it than just about any other team in the league.

The Legacy Trust provides greater security and less intrusion than arguably any team ownership in the America’s pro sports landscape. Many in-the-know pundits consider Dennis Lindsey one of the finest general managers out there. Quin Snyder has already gotten as close to winning Coach of the Year as Jerry Sloan, a first-ballot Hall of Fame Coach, ever did. Plus, the Jazz leveraged a 27th pick⁸ for a now 26-year-old Defensive Player of the Year and All-NBA center and a 13th pick⁹ for a now 22-year-old Slam Dunk champion with franchise-altering character who is leading a playoff team in scoring for the second straight season. 

The Jazz are clearly in the Warriors/Celtics/Rockets club, as are fellow small market franchises in San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Portland. 

But what about Rudy’s atrocious snubbing, possibly “the worst in recent memory?” Doesn’t that prove the world’s against the Jazz?!

I don’t know that a vote for Karl-Anthony Towns’s 23 and 12 on a 55 percent effective field goal rate is all that crazy. If you could swap Gobert for Towns, would you? Be honest.

As for LaMarcus Aldridge making his seventh All-Star game, yeah, I think it was the wrong call. Gobert is simply a better and more impactful overall player than Aldridge. But Aldridge is the incumbent, which is always an advantage in such popularity contests, from sports to politics. And he plays on a team with a better record than the Jazz, which has often decided close decisions between candidates.

If anything, Gobert’s omission is disrespect for the value of defense and privileging San Antonio — the small-market standard bearer — for its ethos. And maybe its age.

Gobert will be in that game in the future¹⁰, and Mitchell likely will, too. There’s a good chance Aldridge never will be again.

And this is where Jazz fans should put their focus. 

Curry, Durant, Westbrook, and Aldridge are all on the wrong side of thirty, and Harden will soon cross that line. The games of George and Damian Lillard will dull when Gobert is still in his prime and Mitchell is just nearing his peak potential. 

Denver may be for real, and Towns and the Doncic/Porzingis pairing are the types of foundation any team in the NBA would love to build from.

But from a holistic standpoint, from ownership to management to coaching to player star power, does any team in the Western Conference have as many reasons to be envied for its future as the Jazz? There’s a good argument the answer is no.

So by all means, feel anger for Gobert and pity for New Orleans and disdain for the Lakers. All well and good. Just don’t feel fear or shame or especially despair; keep live-wire nerves, raw from history, deceive that the future is the past. 

The NBA is not an even playing field — and most advantages are in favor of small market Utah.