SALT LAKE CITY — On a few occasions during Quin Snyder’s six seasons as head coach of the Utah Jazz, either he or executive vice president of basketball operations Dennis Lindsey has been asked if it’s harder to go from being a bad team to a good one or a good one to a great one.
The queries have come as the Jazz have made the leap from bad to good under Snyder and Lindsey, improving from a 38-44 record in the 2014-15 season — Snyder’s first — to 51-31 two seasons later. In addition to more wins, Utah made the second round of the playoffs in 2017 and 2018.
Each time Snyder or Lindsey has been asked the question, the answer has always essentially been the same: It’s harder to go from good to great than it is from bad to good.
That notion is evidenced by the Jazz’s last two seasons, as they made the playoffs but bowed out in the first round. The 2019-20 campaign in particular was supposed to be a year the Utah would advance farther than it had in a decade, as many predicted the Jazz would be in contention to reach the Western Conference finals after adding a bunch of new pieces last summer.
The Jazz, however, were eliminated in the first round, and now they are left to figure out how to take the next step.
“Going from good to great is really hard,” Utah general manager Justin Zanik said last week as he and Lindsey met with media via Zoom. “There are a lot of other teams that are trying to do the same thing. We can just commit to our fans and groups that support us that we will stop at nothing to try to reach that goal and do that in the best interest of the Jazz, the organization, the fans and the Millers.”
So what does going from good to great look like? For as much as basketball is a team game, the best squads generally have the best players. Utah made the NBA Finals in the 1990s because it had two Hall of Famers in John Stockton and Karl Malone, but it was still beaten twice by a Chicago Bulls team that had Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.
More recently, the Golden State Warriors were so good because Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green were All-Stars. This year, the Los Angeles Lakers and LA Clippers took steps forward into the NBA’s elite because the Lakers added Anthony Davis to pair with LeBron James, and the Clippers brought in Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.
That group has combined for 33 All-Star appearances.
So, first and foremost, the Jazz’s most likely path to greatness is that Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert take more steps forward after being named All-Stars this season. Mitchell needs to be among the NBA’s elite scorers and Gobert needs to remain among the top defenders in the league.
On Sunday night, Mitchell posted a video on social media, the start of which was a snippet from his postgame press conference after Utah was eliminated from this year’s playoffs by the Denver Nuggets.
“I know what I can do,” Mitchell said. “I know what I worked for. I know how hard I work, and I know how hard this team has worked. This is just the beginning, man. This is just the beginning.”
While Mitchell and Gobert are the most important players for success, how good can the supporting cast be, especially Mike Conley and Bojan Bogdanovic in their second years with the team? Conley came on strong at the end of the season after struggling the first few months, but the Jazz missed Bogdanovic in the playoffs after he had surgery in May.
“The one thing we were missing was Bojan’s ability to score over the top of the defense in a simple and very efficient way,” Lindsey said.
Some questions will have to be answered during the offseason about the back half of the rotation, but those aren’t generally factors that vault a team from good to great. A big X-factor that can, though, is luck. Whether fortunate or unfortunate, a lot of things have to break right for a team to be great once it has good enough players in place to be successful.
“Such a unique and unprecedented year, but you have to have some good fortune on your side as well, whether it be injuries or schedule or how things work,” Zanik said about the season. “We learned a lot about the team, and I think that will help us and inform us going forward in what we need to do and look everywhere to keep trying to improve.”