So...if the season resumed, like the Jazz chances?

[MTJazzv3]

I'm voting kind of "no" as to the Jazz being a playoff force in some speculative post-season. While the shut-down and the presumed Rudy v Mitchell riff is a thing, other things just weren't clicking despite the on paper player talent and stellar coaching staff. To be generous it did seem like Conley was working his way into half his salary, but the whole Jazz team was playing so bi-polar, (so not on Mike), what the hell was going wrong pre-pandemic? Rudy was pouting game-to-game, Mitchell wasn't sure what his role was and executed poorly on that decision a lot of nights, Joe showed up or vanished for no known reason. Bogey was so up and down I didn't know what to think. At season's end the only guy I wanted to watch was Clarkson. The vaunted Jazz chemistry theory overcoming challenges thing was tenuous. If the league fired up tomorrow, why do I feel the Jazz would fail the "on paper" hopes we all held at the beginning?

[Catchall]

The pre-season expectations were for the Jazz to be a top-4 seed, likely top 3, win a round in the playoffs, and possibly make the WCF. This is still possible depending on the playoff seeding, but as you've mentioned, the team as a whole hasn't meshed as well as people expected. Conley has limitations and so does Rudy, making it difficult for those two to consistently work well together.

As it stands, who knows what the Jazz and other teams will look like after this layoff and under whatever bizarre conditions the league would restart with. The whole season is jacked as far as I'm concerned.

[Inigo Montoya]

I don't think anything has changed. The balance of power is the same as far as I can see. We still look like a first or second round exit team, depending on the final seeding matchups.

[stitches]

I don't have high hopes for this team anymore. I am shocked how little this is being discussed but Mitchell REALLY doesn't seem like he's past Rudy's antics. We were struggling establishing any sort of rhythm and consistency before when our two stars supposedly liked each other, and now at least one of them doesn't seem like he wants anything to do with the other. I don't know what happens but this is not a recipe for the team gelling up together after they get back to playing. If they do at all this year...

[babyjax13]

I don't have high hopes for this team anymore. I am shocked how little this is being discussed but Mitchell REALLY doesn't seem like he's past Rudy's antics. We were struggling establishing any sort of rhythm and consistency before when our two stars supposedly liked each other, and now at least one of them doesn't seem like he wants anything to do with the other. I don't know what happens but this is not a recipe for the team gelling up together after they get back to playing. If they do at all this year...

Is there something that makes you say that?

[stitches]

I don't have high hopes for this team anymore. I am shocked how little this is being discussed but Mitchell REALLY doesn't seem like he's past Rudy's antics. We were struggling establishing any sort of rhythm and consistency before when our two stars supposedly liked each other, and now at least one of them doesn't seem like he wants anything to do with the other. I don't know what happens but this is not a recipe for the team gelling up together after they get back to playing. If they do at all this year...

Is there something that makes you say that?

The whole way he's been responding to questions about it. The only thing he's said about Rudy is that he was pissed at him and he's refused to talk about Rudy on his various social media platforms. People flood him with questions on his streams and he still hasn't said anything about it. It's so easy to disarm the tension and he's refused to do it. That plus you know the whole Woj reporting on it. Where do you think that is coming from? It's obviously from Mitchell or his agent and other players.

edit: just listening to Tony Jones' podcast and he confirmed Mitchell is still upset with Gobert. Tony said the Jazz are nowhere close to thinking about trading one of them. They will try to make it work. But yeah... that doesn't sound good.

[Inigo Montoya]

Is Mitchell upset at Gobert for the Corona virus thing, or is he upset about other, unrelated things? To put it another way--was DM upset at Gobert for something before the Corona virus thing?

[stitches]

Is Mitchell upset at Gobert for the Corona virus thing, or is he upset about other, unrelated things? To put it another way--was DM upset at Gobert for something before the Corona virus thing?

Whatever issues there were prior to the corona virus thing, it seems have been exacerbated after it. Or if there was nothing before the corona virus, then the way Rudy acted has ticked many people off in the locker room, not just Donovan.

[Inigo Montoya]

In any case, it doesn't really matter to my outlook of this team. We weren't good enough to be legit contenders to begin with, DM-Gobert relationship aside. The Conley trade screwed us enough for this supposed feud to not matter in the grand scheme of things in terms of going deep in the playoffs.

[sipclip]

Mitchell is acting like such a baby in this situation. The funny part is that Rudy could have gotten it from Mitchell instead of the other way around since Mitchell was asymptomatic.

[KqWIN]

Pretty clear that Mitchell is pissed at Gobert. He's had every opportunity to say otherwise, he hasn't done so. Mitchell knows what he's doing in front of media. If he wanted to squash this narrative, he would have. He wants people to know he pissed at Rudy. Whether or not you think Mitchell's gripes are warranted, there is clear disdain.

There were clearly issues with this team before this all started. They were soft. The players and coaches were openly admitting that they weren't playing hard enough. There was the Mike Conley benching fiasco...Quin had lost the team. If there was no corona, this would have very likely panned out like the 16-17 Jazz. It didn't come out until afterwards, but that team hated each other.

I still think I'm relatively high on how good we could have been, but this team was not going to come close to it's potential...whatever that was. The Jazz took a big swing in a miss on Conley. It was the worst trade of the summer, and it will go down as one of the worst trades in recent history. It only gets worse from here, and the beef between Gobert and Mitchell makes me skeptical that there is another rally coming.

I seriously don't know what the plan is going forward. Mitchell is the face of the franchise, he's team controlled, and he also hates the player who is by far the best player on the team. Strange situation in very strange times.

[Catchall]

These rifts happen with most teams. The bottom line is that guys have their own personal goals. Once they establish themselves as star players, they tend to tune out a bit. Sibling rivalries start to happen.

Rudy had personal goals. He wanted to be an All Star this year. He wanted a certain number of touches and wanted to be a focal point of the offense. He wanted to be seen as a clutch performer. So when Mitchell went into takeover mode in 4th quarters (which the coaching staff wanted him to do), I got the sense that Rudy wasn't always happy about it. Rudy was a bit mercurial this year. He may also be looking ahead to his free agency a year from now.

The same thing happened with Andrei Kirilenko, who was at one point the focal point of the Jazz's offense and the primary ball handler. Then Deron Williams showed up and Andrei was told to stand in the corner and work on his 3pt shooting, while DWill and Carlos Boozer ran pick-and-rolls. AK started pouting and was less bought in to the team.

All these guys are competitive. They all want touches. They all want limelight. If the team is playing well and winning games, then they can put their differences aside. If the team is losing games though, guys tend to get more selfish.

Even the Warriors last year had big issues. When KD left, he openly complained that the Warriors were seen as Steph's team. Here's a team that nearly pulled off a 3-peat, KD was the back-to-back Finals MVP, and he still wasn't happy about it.

[MTJazzv3]

All the above posts are really relevant to me and my view of things. I know it isn't that simple, but I think Conley crapping the bed for half the season but a huge amount of tension on the team. Players know what their teammates are making in salary and what that means in terms of expected performance and team options getting better moving forward. Conley is a good guy and realistically this is not his fault. On the Rudy and Mitchell thing, both are in their bunkers - as Mr. Montoya speculated, this was going on before the virus. In my opinion, the two faces of the Jazz, Rudy and Mitchell, hit a wall dealing with each other. Rudy did need more touches, (and sadly we only saw like 5 games where Conley figured him out), and Mitchell is also a legit star needing touches, and I'm guessing that it wasn't worked out. I hope the season is cancelled - the Jazz need a mental re-boot because on paper they are better than this.

But if in this weird new universe a player has to be moved I vote Rudy. I lost a lot of respect for him in the "pouting games." Addition by subtraction and in Rudy's case the new haul should be bountiful in terms of incoming on a trade.

[stitches]

I think it's ridiculous for anyone to put the blame on Rudy wanting more touches. Here are his FGAs in the last month of play:

9, 6, 7, 12, 8, 7, 5, 4, 4, 9, 8, 4, 3, 4.... How the hell does that make sense? ABSOLUTELY HE SHOULD BE GETTING MORE SHOTS. And all the ballhogs on this team need to stop blaming Rudy for the problems of this team. He's literally the LAST problem of this team on the floor when it comes to selfishness and taking shots he shouldn't be taking. How about try to find the guy that finishes everything inside? How is it possible that for the last month one of the best finishers in the game has ONE game with over 10 field goal attempts and and 6 games with 5 or under? HOW?

On the other hand, I kind of understand them if they are pissed off at him about the coronavirus thing. The reports are that he's repeatedly made those types of jokes in the locker room and it doesn't matter if it was him catching it from Mitchell or the other way around. They are not mad about him giving them the virus, they are mad about him being irresponsible and putting other people in danger that didn't need to be put in danger. I'm not here to tell Mitchell or anybody else for how long they should be upset with Gobert, but of course at some point there has to be forgiveness and lets hope things get better when they get together after this and get the chance to talk about it and clean things up.

The NBA has a special place in hell for waiting until one of their players tested positive too, did they think they will just skate by and remain unaffected by it? What was the point of prolonging this and putting people in danger? They knew this was community spread. They knew big gatherings are among the biggest culprits of the spread but they had no problem continuing milking the market for as long as possible until one of their players tested positive.

[KqWIN]

It really was a bad, compounding situation. I do not blame Rudy for wanting more touches. His teammates outright ignored him. It was exasperated against switching team where there is a huge difference between the times he thinks he should get the ball and times his teammates think he should get the ball.

I do think it was selfish, however, for Rudy to stop competing like he did. It sucks that you're not getting touches...you can't quit on your team and stop playing defense. When Rudy is not playing well, we see how bad we are. We're basically a tanking team unless he's at DPOY level. This btw is the reason I'm scared about potentially trading Rudy. You will not get good ROI on a trade for Rudy. We will be a trash team without him. We can work around any player missing besides him.

At the same time, nobody on this team played the right way...even the guys that played "well". With all this offensive talent, I expected that we'd see a shift in how players got their shots. There shouldn't be any more open for a reason, and there should be way less hero ball because we should be able to always get a system basket.

I was dead wrong. The system baskets went down because it was priority for players to get the hero ball off first. The flipside of having so many guys who can create their own shot is that they feel comfortable taking poor shots. Our shot selection standard dropped significantly. The open for a reason team worked harder for better shots.

With our players....that's just what they do and that's how they play. Almost every guy in our rotation believes that their way to help the team is to score or make plays. Obviously we have the big time ball hogs, but it even goes down to Ingles/Niang. Royce and Rudy are the only guys whose role is to not score or handle the ball.

[Crunch 99]

The Jazz were making progress in fits and starts, especially Conley. Conley was starting out games looking to get others involved and was generally shooting the ball better. Ingles was was starting to have a few good games off the bench and the bench was frequently outplaying the other teams' benches.

But if the season were to resume, I suspect the layoff would hurt the Jazz more than it would hurt some other leading teams like the Lakers, Clippers, Bucks and Celtics. The roles on the Jazz team were a work in progress. Restarting the Jazz is more complicated than giving the ball to Lebron and Kawhi Leonard and telling them to lead.

9, 6, 7, 12, 8, 7, 5, 4, 4, 9, 8, 4, 3, 4.... How the hell does that make sense? ABSOLUTELY HE SHOULD BE GETTING MORE SHOTS.

Yes Gobert should get more shot attempts. Seems like Conley was starting to find him a little bit though.

I am especially concerned about the impact of the layoff on Conley. It took him months to find a rhythm and start shooting the ball at a respectable percentage. Hopefully the layoff doesn't set him back to square one.

[zero24gravity]

Honestly, I think Bogy is more of an issue than anyone, including Conley. At least Conley is understanding that his play doesn't warrant more shots/time, he still plays D & tries to make the right passes. Bogy, while awesome shooter, doesn't defend, doesn't rebound, turns the ball over (unforced) way too much, and is the only primary player on the team I would call a ball hog. If anyone is a direct cause of poor team D, and poor court-chemistry, it's him. He's the anti-Favors, which is what a lot of people seemed to want. Well, you got it, and it isn't as great as you hoped. No way he's the only issue, but if we are going to single people out, he's on my short list.

[MTJazzv3]

Honestly, I think Bogy is more of an issue than anyone, including Conley. At least Conley is understanding that his play doesn't warrant more shots/time, he still plays D & tries to make the right passes. Bogy, while awesome shooter, doesn't defend, doesn't rebound, turns the ball over (unforced) way too much, and is the only primary player on the team I would call a ball hog. If anyone is a direct cause of poor team D, and poor court-chemistry, it's him. He's the anti-Favors, which is what a lot of people seemed to want. Well, you got it, and it isn't as great as you hoped. No way he's the only issue, but if we are going to single people out, he's on my short list.

Upon reflection, I see your point about Bogey - but also a little same about Mitchell. Both guys can light up and win games but I cringe when Bogey puts it on the floor and drives, and per above comments, not always trying to get a bucket in the "system". We'll never know, but there was a chance that Conley had the team on a precipice of vintage Spurs ball sharing for system buckets. The only reason I offered up Rudy was he really wasn't trying very hard and pouting. Really thought he was above that and not a good look for the team.