Quin Snyder has done his best to restore relevance to the Atlanta Hawks since they hired him in 2023. They've made the playoffs a grand total of two times and haven't advanced once. For the record, he had a better track record with the Utah Jazz. In fact, even when his teams came up short, he still reached the second round three times as head coach.
Even though the Jazz never quite got to where they wanted, they never stooped to the lows the Hawks just did. On the one hand, Atlanta gave New York a good fight for the first three games, but oh boy, the Knicks definitely figured them out. And that showed in their elimination game, as the Snyder-led Hawks lost by a whopping 51 points
Now to be fair, the game was over after the first quarter, as the Knicks went up 40-15. Even more painful is that they didn't take their foot off the gas pedal by the half, going up 83-36. Times like those can only make one wish there would be a mercy rule...
It's one thing for a team to be eliminated on their home floor, but to get flat-out annihilated? That's another. It's incredibly shocking because for a second there, it truly looked like this could have been an epic series, but the Hawks fell apart.
So much so that it makes the Jazz failures with Snyder look better by comparison, and that's kind of saying something.
There were definitely come low points in the Snyder-Jazz era
Utah definitely wasn't innocent of some embarrassing playoff outings. What everyone will probably remember most is when the Jazz were up on the Nuggets 3-1 in the bubble only to fall in the closing seconds of Game 7. 2021 was pretty disheartening as well, as they went up 2-0 against the Clippers before LA stormed back and finished them off with Terance Mann's spontaneous explosion.
It's hard to bring the past up, but it's important because as painful as it is, the Jazz never got humiliated to the degree the Hawks did. In fact, they never laid the same egg the Hawks just did tonight.
Really, the main difference is that the Jazz fought until the end through thick and thin. They even fought when everyone collectively knew the Rudy Gobert-Donovan Mitchell era had run its course before their final elimination, and their blowup was inevitable.
Losing by a historical margin in an elimination game is all sorts of embarrassing. You can call the Snyder-Jazz era plenty of adjectives. Disappointing, sure, but they never got straight-up mortified.
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