4) 1987 West Quarterfinals vs. Golden State Warriors
This should’ve been the Jazz’s first, real coming-out party. Malone was emerging as one of the NBA’s best frontcourt players, Stockton was somehow in the top eight league-wide in assists as a bench player — the team’s bright future had come. All the while, Jazz mainstays Mark Eaton, Thurl Bailey, Darrell Griffith and Rickey Green continued to plug away.
The team was so good that Kelly Tripucka, a 20-point scorer the year before in Detroit, had become a supplementary piece (much to his chagrin).
As a result, the Jazz had home-court in the 4/5 match-up with the Golden State Warriors in the West Quarterfinals. In short order, they went up 2-0 and appeared to be on the verge of making some real noise.
However, Green suffered an injury just before halftime of Game 2 and would go on to miss the final two games after playing just 15 minutes in Game 3. Moreover, Malone instigated an epic brawl by throwing the ball at Golden State’s Greg Ballard, which ignited a fire within the Warriors. Eaton later said “It was pretty much a done deal. That incident really got them going.”
The Warriors went on to win the next three games behind the efforts of Sleepy Floyd, Joe Barry Carroll and a young Chris Mullin. The Jazz squandered a 15-point lead in Game 4 and couldn’t recover from a 22-point deficit in Game 5, despite cutting the lead to just three late.
After the series, Malone said, “This’ll haunt me the rest of my career.”