Exits: Way out there
You ever notice no one says “Salt Lake City” when they talk about the Jazz? It's Utah, the whole lonely, sprawling space of it.
What I remember about Salt Lake City is seeing it as a fixed and trembling point of light as night came down from the canyons with us.
After spending the better part of two days driving diagonal down Wyoming, the wide-open huge and unhurried land of it gradually climbing from rolling grass wash and turning tonally more urgent until it’s all fire red rocks heaving in contorted, impossible shapes up against pale blue sky, the city seemed so small. Like a lost thing, way out there.
The other thing I remember, after we slept at the edge of the city like having the I-80 in sight was a comfort, is the smell.
The next morning as the car drifted etherial out into the baked, gleaming crystalline white of the salt flats, the rank of it was as strong and visible as the warped waves of heat lifting off the miles of that otherworldly surface. The stench, I’d learn later, drifted mostly over from the big lake the city sidled its name from, the last part left over from what hadn’t eroded the mountains to the west and eventually dried up 18,000 years ago. But darting my eyes across all the black and red rocks people drag down to the salt flats to shape out their initials with, or to put hearts around somebody else’s, it wasn’t hard to think of the smell as the ghost of the low, primordial water that once spread out there, sulphurous and teaming with all the life it would swallow down into itself, bones and living flesh coming to settle on soft silt, packed down and down by other bodies, forming into sedimentary rock that someone in flip-flops would eventfully haul to the flats to slowly, carefully spell out: SUCK IT
Mike Conley has got to be the kindest man in Utah. Certainly one of the only people in that state I’d trust to talk about its strange history with without then finding out that through some Mormon law that states the transfer of any knowledge to a woman means she is now one of your wives.
Do you remember what a hard time Jazz fans gave Conley when he first got there? Left the only team he’d ever played for on the heels of his best and benevolent friend Marc Gasol traded north, left the bright, joyful neon of Beale Street to the quivering lights of a city in a salt basin. It was going to be a big adjustment. Can you imagine trying to acclimatize to such a place and then having your new teammate effectively shut the whole world down?
Conley good-naturedly put his name down for the NBA’s H-O-R-S-E competition — remember that? Remember how harangued it was? When really it will be one of those weird, sociologic things we remember of the pandemic’s improvisational height, a little slap-dash with wildly ranging logistics but ultimately incredibly earnest, which is usually what makes people so uncomfortable — and won. We saw Conley has a half-court in his house. Knew it was his house because it was early pandemic and because his kids kept rushing out onto it. Conley is all quiet rhythm so it was very soothing, right then, to picture him taking one shot after another, identical except for on what imaginary number from 9-3 or 12-6 he was lining up his feet on.
I bring up Mike Conley because he’s made the Jazz easier to like, just not to understand.
Is Donovan Mitchell going to leave? Is Quin Snyder forfeiting development by keeping his rotations ration-tiny? Is Danny Ainge coming? Do I like seeing Dwyane Wade there courtside, jarring as watching a flamingo lift from the salt flats? Is this all happening because Dennis Lindsey and Snyder didn’t like each other after awhile and refused to have what most people with jobs come to understand as a collegial working relationship? The Jazz are so strange, dude.
It seems impossible that a team so small, market-wise, could wind up feeling so disjointed. Everyone involved pulling hard in opposite directions, the team the thing in the centre being drawn and quartered. Do the Jazz know what the Jazz want? If it’s to keep Mitchell and keep him happy then fake-firing Lindsey, who still has a nebulous advisory role mostly to give the guy a long umbilical back to the league’s nepotism, I mean “opportunities”, and whatever’s left on his salary — what a way to lose your job, hardly at all — because it’s ostensibly going to let Snyder be “in charge”, seems a scenic route to do it. Also, can we please quit handling coaches so tenderly? The way this report reads is that Snyder can finally exist in peace, free from the occasional criticisms of Lindsey, who once went on TV and talked about turnovers. The vision I keep getting, unfortunately, is a smug Snyder free to treat the space he does his job in like one where he can walk around in his underwear. Coaches do, or should, understand they will bear the brunt of inquiry. I say inquiry and not criticism because some coaches treat any line of questioning like personal sleight. And I like Quin Snyder. But it does seem like the kind of job where you can’t expect an air lock, a hotel room on a high floor at the very end of the hallway, an immaculate kitchen, or whatever austere analogy you prefer.
On the Mitchell front, Wade has said he sympathizes with him, remembering what it was like to be the lone guy before Shaq, then eventually LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined him on the Heat. But that was Miami, and this is literally Utah. You ever notice no one says “Salt Lake City” when they talk about the Jazz, about players staying, coming or going? We say Utah because that might as well be it, the whole lonely, sprawling, relegated space of it. It’s a place that was meant for people to disappear into.
The best news for the Jazz, and I hope their front office notices it, is that this Jazz, the roster as it currently stands, is probably the least vanishing it has been in years.
Conley, yes, but Jordan Clarkson, Mitchell. Gobert no matter how you feel about him. Udoka Azubuike no matter how Snyder feels about him. Even Bojan Bogdanovic for all the things he says on court, stolidly, just with his upper body. Joe Ingles too, who I was never totally sure about until I heard his booming, teasing voice down an arena hallway, laughing and joking, totally loose. Right, I thought, there’s nothing but room for that in Utah.
And that should be the hope for the team, to grow into all the space it is so unnecessarily limiting itself from. Make more than two diverse hires in four decades, don’t be afraid to say a technical game term in front of Snyder, maybe don’t be afraid of Quin Snyder, period. Play the bench where it will be meaningful but recognize that development, most of it, hardly ever happens in-game. Tell your fans not to be assholes all the time, treat everybody with some accountability, including the front office, and maybe the hopes of this team and its players won’t be pressed down and down into the basin of something that dried all the way up, went rank, became remnants to squint against on the way to someplace else.