How do the Utah Jazz compare to their purple predecessors?

The Core

NBA teams are always built around a core of a star player or two, and sometimes the head coach. The Utah Jazz are no different, having built around center Rudy Gobert ever since he broke out during his sophomore campaign.

Gobert came into the league as a raw athlete with a lot of length, and not a whole lot of anything else. Since then he has put on some muscle, and tirelessly worked in the gym and on the court to improve his game, developing into a franchise player in the process.

Does this sound familiar?

Karl Malone was also drafted by the Utah Jazz, and honed his craft diligently for the entirety of his 19-year career. In his rookie year he only shot 48 percent from the charity stripe, but improved that to 59 percent the next year, and ended his career a 74 percent free throw shooter. To this day, he is the NBA’s all-time leader in free throws made.

When both Malone and Gobert started to develop into stars, their respective teams started winning more games as a result. Malone’s impeccable timing in the pick and roll with teammate John Stockton earned him the nickname “The Mailman” because he could always be counted on to deliver for his team. Gobert has consistently been among the league leaders in defending the paint since his emergence in 2015, and the Utah Jazz have been a top five defense ever since.

Stockton and Donovan Mitchell are and were both integral parts of their team’s core, being responsible for much of the Utah Jazz’s success. But beyond that and the fact that both are 6-foot-1 guards, that is the extent of their similarities as players.

What is unique about the Jazz is the stability in ownership, front office and head coaching roles of the team. Since the Millers completed the purchase of the Jazz in 1985, they have only had four different head coaches something rare in today’s NBA, and something the Spurs copied from the Jazz as longtime coach Gregg Popovich is in his 23rd year on the sidelines for the same team.

The Wasatch Front was blessed to have Sloan as head coach for 23 seasons, and it was his replacing of Frank Layden that took the Jazz from a good team to a great team. That’s not a knock on Layden, as he helped put the Jazz on the map and stay in Utah; but Sloan was able to lead the Jazz past 50 wins and eventually to the NBA Finals, whereas the Jazz never cracked 50 wins under Layden’s watch.

In Quin Snyder’s case, he didn’t inherit a perennial playoff team like Sloan did. Coach Q received the reins to a 25-win team built around a young player forced into a star role he wasn’t cut out for, that of course being Gordon Hayward.

Snyder was not only able to maximize Hayward’s development and help him become an All-Star, but he swapped out Enes Kanter and Trey Burke in favor of Gobert and Dante Exum to turn the Jazz into a defensive powerhouse.

In Coach Quin’s first six years of running the helm, he’s helped the Jazz improve from a rebuilding, to competitive, to playoff team, and hopefully a title-contending team this year. Pairing a great coach with great players is how sustained success is achieved in this day and age, otherwise star players will run their coach out of town and eventually leave the city the play for (ahem LeBron James).

So far the ’19-20 Jazz appear to be on pace to match the ’90s Jazz, as long as Gobert, Mitchell, and Snyder keep on performing at the top of their games.