Rebuilding in the NBA and an Unexpected Renaissance in Utah

The NBA must be in line for some sort of public relations award because it is somehow composed only of contenders and future contenders. No franchise is just plain bad. "Shitty" is the new "eventually good," and half the league's general managers are talking a big game about how all the double-digits losses their teams are suffering through will pay off in three-to-five years. This is a scam insofar as most rebuilds don't take. Draft picks and assets are accumulated, the papers say the franchise is on the right track, and the end product is the contents of Al Capone's vault. You can keep a job for a while selling hope and nothing else.

This is why the Utah Jazz are refreshing. Here's a young, struggling squad with some substance and character. Rudy Gobert and his hilarious limbs have landed in enough Vines that he now has his own iconic, terrible nickname. Derrick Favors, who is somehow still just 23, is finally making good on the promise he showed circa 1994 at Georgia Tech. Gordon Hayward is bouncing back from a horrendous contract year by rounding into competence. Dante Exum is a cool idea who one day might become an actual basketball player. Trey Burke remains awful, but maybe he's just keeping the rest of the team grounded. The Jazz are not good, but they are alive, and that is something.

The beginning of a story is usually more interesting than the end, which is why so many NBA teams are in the tank these days. If you can convince a fanbase that what they're seeing is not dreadful basketball, but the initial steps of an ambitious project, they are less likely to reject the putridity in front of them. But that doesn't lend the losing any sort of flavor that overwhelms its rancidness. While the Knicks might be doing the right thing this season by putting Carmelo Anthony on the shelf and jettisoning all their halfway-decent players, that sound strategy hasn't rendered them any more watchable. Their unwatchability has simply been recontextualized. It is part of a plan.

The Jazz were set up to fail. They installed a new coach this past summer and didn't try to bring in much outside talent. Be patient for one more year, they seemed to be saying. Through the first half of the season, they performed up to expectations, which is to say they were crushed regularly. And then, about a month ago, something wonderful happened: they found their stride. Wins came, but more importantly, the cast of misfits and not-quites began to harmonize, forming a whole that all of a sudden makes sense, built around Gobert's defense, a motion-heavy offense, and Hayward's ability to get an acceptable shot up with the shot clock winding down. The doldrums of the youth movement have passed sooner than anyone would have guessed. The team the bosses have been searching for all this time might be the one they already have.

Rebuilds are nervous periods not because they so rarely end in rousing success, but because they often never even get off the ground. It's not uncommon for a franchise to telegraph that they're ready to enter phase two and discover that, well shoot, the car they've spent three years constructing doesn't have an engine. The anticlimax sets in, everyone gets fired, and the cycle starts again.

It's far too early to tell if a matured and souped-up version of this Jazz squad can win a title somewhere down the line, but the ignition has at least kicked in. The lean years did not pass in vain, and now, Utah fans are permitted to dream. The appeal of a team on the rise is not so much what they are as what they could be, and the Jazz are currently the imagination-indulging-est entity in the NBA. They are not so amorphous as to be a blank slate, but also full of possibility—they could go in a lot of directions from here. And the "here" itself is something to treasure. Accomplishing what you set out to do is satisfying, but the moment in which you realize the task might not be impossible is pretty swell, too.