SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Jazz began this season with high expectations.
The offseason acquisitions of Bojan Bogdanovic, Mike Conley and Ed Davis looked to give the Jazz sharp edges in areas where before they had been soft. It is the job of front office brass to analyze and critique every success and failure of a team in order to best calculate future moves.
But, how do you evaluate the successes and failures of a team that is navigating an unprecedented situation with so many variables and curveballs?
The coronavirus pandemic turned the NBA upside down. It brought league play to a screeching halt, throwing players into isolation, leaving uncertainty and fear as the only mainstays. After four months of no team activities, no practices and no games, the league is convening in Florida to restart the 2019-20 season with an NBA playoff schedule that begins in just under six weeks.
It would be understandable for any NBA team to consider this season a mulligan, and hold off on any harsh or lasting critiques. That is not how the NBA works, though. Even if this year has been strange, the offseason will still come and the Jazz brass will have to make decisions.
On Wednesday, Jazz executive vice president of basketball operations Dennis Lindsey said that this roller coaster of a season contextualizes how he will evaluate the 2019-20 Utah Jazz, rather than changing the way he analyzes where the team is.
“With that said, sometimes my critiques can be pretty strong of us internally — coaches, players, management, scouts, you name it,” Lindsey said.
In the context of this season, part of what a person like Lindsey, or Jazz general manager Justin Zanik, will look at is how the team responded to the cards that were dealt.
“I’ve stated before, an NBA season is a series of short stories with hopefully a lot of success, but defeats and trying periods. Obviously this season, we could write a book relative to the COVID-19 hiatus.” — Utah Jazz executive vice president of basketball operations Dennis Lindsey
While admittedly a harsh critic, Lindsey pointed to what he sees as major successes during the NBA’s season suspension, particularly in the realm of physical discipline and the maturation of the young players on the Jazz roster.
“A big piece of improvement when a college freshman becomes a sophomore and a rookie becomes a second-year player is they get a chance to get away, reflect, take in information the organization has for them, the coaches have for them and I’ve seen a lot of growth,” Lindsey said pointing to Georges Niang, Tony Bradley and two-way player Jarrell Brantley as examples. “I am in awe of how much work we put in. Our players are in terrific shape, they’re very excited to compete so I think we’ll be formidable.”
Although the most recent NBA memories are of the league hiatus and everything leading up to the Orlando restart, there’s no way for the team to escape the expectations it had in the fall of 2019.
“I’ve stated before, an NBA season is a series of short stories with hopefully a lot of success, but defeats and trying periods,” Lindsey said. “Obviously this season, we could write a book relative to the COVID-19 hiatus.”
Before the virus hit there were quite a few things that were clear.
Davis was a good idea in theory for a backup to Rudy Gobert, but it just didn’t work out. That was a swing and a miss, but it wasn’t a costly one.
Conley has been good but not great. His most important moments with the Jazz are likely ahead of him as he’ll be asked to do more and more closely resemble the player he was in Memphis as the Jazz embark on the remainder of the season.
Landing Bogdanovic was a huge win for the Jazz. Very quickly he found his footing with the team and his shooting was a huge boon for the team. Unfortunately his injury will take a toll on what the Jazz are able to do in the postseason, but that doesn’t mean that front office expects the level of competition to deteriorate.
“We’re paid to do our jobs and do them well,” Lindsey said. “It’s important for us to go and compete and compete great. If we do that then we can certainly live with the results.”
There’s no win total that Lindsey or Zanik have in mind for the games that will be played in Florida. They realize that matchups, circumstances and rhythm will dictate much of what the team is able to do, and they’re aware of the fact that basketball may not look great after such a long layoff.
“The good thing is that it’s not a completely new team,” Zanik said. “It’s more re-familiarizing rather than learning something new.”
With that in mind, measuring this Jazz season is less likely to be based on how deep of a playoff run they make, and instead on how well they responded to the strange circumstances, how well they are able to regain the season’s chemistry and how committed they are to continued growth.