To put it plainly, this team needs to be broken up. Only last year’s Sixth Man of the Year, Jordan Clarkson, and sharpshooting big man Bojan Bogdanović played with any joie de vivre. Rudy Gay, Royce O’Neal, Hassan Whiteside, Danuel House. Elsewhere, the Jazz roster is filled out with broken players who, judging by their on-court rapport and play, seem genuinely unhappy to be playing in Utah i.e. The 34-year-old guard is a shell of the player he was in Memphis and never regained the defensive form that made him such a lethal two-way player with the Grizzlies. The 2019 trade that brought Mike Conley to Utah has been an unmitigated disaster. Danny Ainge and the Utah front office have surrounded Gobert with a bunch of aging perimeter players who can’t defend. The tension between the two goes all the way to pre-pandemic times. It was no secret that their two superstars, Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, don’t care for one another. Before the Utah Jazz even began their first-round playoff series against the Dallas Mavericks, there were significant questions about their chemistry, viability as a winner, and ceiling.
