Exits: A soon to be ghost town
The limits of willful suffering, industry as proverb, and the Jazz's reliable basketball.
Willful suffering, the kind of misery that is measured and entered into by a conscious choice, is always temporary. Basketball seasons, in the grand scheme of things, are fleeting, and not a particularly noble thing to suffer for. While I waffle on any forced discomfort — there’s already so much out there ready and waiting if you’re hard up for some — for the sake of personal benevolence, when one is being paid in the millions for it, that’s not the kind of suffering you’re taking home with you.
There was only going to be so much pain Snyder would wane away his career for, especially when it seems these years of quiet toil have earned him rumoured entry into one of the most hallowed and/or overblown, depending on how you look at it, roles in the league — next head coach of the Spurs.
Utah’s state motto is “Industry”. Their bug is the bee. Their state rock is coal. Do you think this is a place that gets tired of attrition as atonement?
If we’re to believe this is the summer of the Jazz’s discontent, then we’d have to separate the needful suffering the team shored itself through six consecutive playoff appearances with and whatever this new, end of the rope finality is. Snyder suffering for a team he believed in doesn’t make him prone to suffering fools, or a front office shift in the arrival of Danny Ainge that came in the same season the rifts between Utah’s stars got too wide to repair. There’s a lot of coincidence in the NBA, it’s a human-driven enterprise after all, but it’s also a business where timing is everything.
To move on, indeed a mass exodus, could make this a summer of benediction for the Jazz. That is, of course, if they can clock out of martyrdom long enough to enjoy the relief of coming up clean.
This was just going to be about basketball. It was. How the Jazz setting themselves up to resemble a western ghost town next season — Snyder gone, Rudy Gobert about to go, Donovan Mitchell maybe going — wouldn’t be the worst thing. Nobody lives in a ghost town once it goes that way. Haunted houses are one thing, but at a town’s last gasp the people who were in it scatter to the wind, the fading sound of their flight its death rattle. New places spring up better suited to support a population and in the case of the Jazz, don’t use the plans of the past to build something new up around Mitchell if he stays, and if he goes, well, maybe work on team infrastructure before starting over.
The Utah Jazz could use a fresh start, and in the NBA, so long as its owners turn out their pockets, those are a perennial resource. But Salt Lake City, indeed the whole simmering basin the city sits comfortably cratered in, is edging toward collapse.
Since the late 1980s the Great Salt Lake itself has shrunk by two-thirds, from 3,300 square miles down to 1,000. It’s the largest salt lake in the western hemisphere, the eight-largest terminal lake in the world. Bodies of water like this allow no outflow and because of their isolated status are more susceptible to environmental pollutants, which accumulate and sit, without diluting through rivers, swamps or groundwater systems.
For a place marked more by what it lacks (population density, water, arable land) Utah is changeable. A capricious stretch of sage scrub and desert that rises into the Rockies at one end and impossible, burning red buttes and contorted spires of stone at the other. The first time I drove into the state was from Wyoming, a softer, gentler sort of sloping land, surprised to feel like I was going down instead of up, toward Salt Lake City and it’s surrounding peaks. The second time was across, in from Nevada and out the other side into Colorado, red dust from Arches National Park clinging to the white canvas of my Chucks, my legs, as we stopped to eat breakfast for dinner at a Denny’s and snow started to fall, doing its best to banish the memory of the desert’s blazing heat and mesas that glowed orange after dark.
I’ve written about the big, stinking lake before, how eerie and beautiful and like a void come to earth, but turns out to be a teeming ecosystem, vital to 10 million migratory birds that feed on the brine shrimp that live only in its waters. Plus, the 200,133 people that live in the city at it’s south-eastern shores, a population set to grow by 50% within the next 20 years.
Utah, remember, is for industry, and business has long been about what can be brought up out of its plains, hills, desert, ground. The readiest, reaching out forever resource. Mining has thrown arsenic, copper, zirconium, and antimony, a chemical agent rendered out of stibnite, up into the state’s air for decades, particles coming to settle gently down in the hard crust of the Salt Lake’s baking basin. But when the lake continues to shrink, because all the water from the mountains ice melt is diverted into expanding developments, or ski resorts that drive the state’s tourism, the soil erodes and the wind begins to waft the chemicals around.
Psychic, or competitive, ghost towns are one thing — the Jazz adrift for a season, maybe, after being cut loose by a coach with a .623 win percentage, third best in the league — but regularly occurring poison clouds will render the real thing.
And it’s going to be recurring, if it isn’t already (for Jazz fans in Salt Lake City, Pelicans fans in New Orleans), to grapple with a changing climate’s impact on what it was that made us comfortable for so long in ignoring it. This isn’t a screed, it’s just what’s happening in the city the team finds its home in, in the same offseason, both circumstances (offseason and impending catastrophe) anyone in the city would agree, entered into too quickly.
What’s rare, too heavy to call a silver lining, and the only way I know how to end this on a positive, is to see a ghost town coming. Whether Ainge, Justin Zanik, or the Jazz’s ownership group see it this way yet, they lost a team to coasting. Snyder stayed for eight seasons, Mitchell has been there for five and made it to the playoffs in each — an impressive but untenable, at least without the right support around him, trajectory — and Gobert pre-dated them both, and still this was a team most comfortable finishing 5th in its conference, acquiescing to a middle ground of growth and development so long as they could capitalize on their stars. Industry for the sake of the churn, the smoke.
The luxury of the experience of pro sports is willful suffering. The abiding feeling of a comforting clench in the chest, tension that sparks all over our skin, stress that has nothing to do with us. How will we talk about summer trades amidst blooming summer chemical clouds? Coaching fires as the real things rage through state lines and their rooting interests, smouldering from playoffs to preseason? The promise of the Draft’s generational stars as hundred year floods start to happen every spring?
The NBA is a 10 billion dollar industry, it isn’t going anywhere, but sooner than later the land under the cities that hold its little outposts are going to buckle, flood, go arid and acrid, go under. Soon to be ghost towns, all of them, with anguish it only seems sociopathic to wait for when we have ample heads up on the hauntings to come.
That’s pretty intense.