SALT LAKE CITY — Joe Ingles and his wife Renae wrapped up the first season of the Ingles Insight podcast Wednesday with a finale episode featuring Utah Jazz coach Quin Snyder.
The six-year Jazz coach talked about how things unfolded from a coaching perspective after the team came back from Oklahoma City on March 12, the day after Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus and the NBA suspended its season.
Rather than go ahead with things like it was business as usual, Snyder felt the gravity of the situation and wanted to take a break from basketball and let the team process what was happening, not only in the NBA, but in the world.
“When we got back from Oklahoma, it was a time where there was so much uncertainty and anxiety and everything,” Snyder said. “I didn’t want to think about basketball and I didn’t want anybody else to think about it either.”
“When we got back from Oklahoma, it was a time where there was so much uncertainty and anxiety and everything. I didn’t want to think about basketball and I didn’t want anybody else to think about it either.” — Jazz coach Quin Snyder
Gradually the team began to get back into a rhythm, albeit a different rhythm. Virtual workouts and unconventional methods were being applied across the board, including the way the team watches film.
Snyder said that he’s split the team into groups that work with assistant coaches individually, as a group, and interactively with film. It’s something that he said has given him a different perspective to how things can be done and that he will likely continue the practice when things return to normal for the team.
“It’s hard for the players to offer anything in a larger group,” Snyder said of prior team film sessions. “And my voice can be too dominant.”
The Ingleses dove into Snyder’s playing career, talked about Snyder’s passionate and competitive personality (listen to the episode for a funny story about an 11-year-old Snyder tearing up a third-place 50-meter dash ribbon because he claims to have been cheated out of first place), and the influence of coaches R.C. Buford and Gregg Popovich, who are now the CEO and head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, respectively.
Basketball without Bogdanovic
On Ingles’ Thursday appearance on 1280 The Zone, the Jazz swingman touched on how the team looks toward a possible return of the NBA season knowing they won’t have Bojan Bogdanovic, who underwent surgery on his right wrist on Tuesday and will be out for the remainder of the 2019-20 season.
With the possibility of basketball and the NBA playoffs on the horizon, losing the sharp-shooting and 20.2 points per game of Bogdanovic is a huge blow to the Jazz, but Ingles said he’s confident that everyone will step up and joked that maybe he’d get a couple extra shots with Bogdanovic on the sidelines.
“We’ve obviously got a very deep team,” Ingles said. “It’s not all on one person. Maybe bits and pieces of our minutes go up a little bit, but overall I think it’ll be a team effort.”
Ingles noted that the idea of coming back and getting ready for the playoffs after more than two months away from the game is likely to be a bigger struggle for the Jazz than it will be to adapt to having one of their teammates injured.
“We’ve never been in this situation before,” he said.