Things are bad in Salt Lake City. The Utah Jazz just lost to the hapless Charlotte Hornets, getting outscored 30-17 in the final quarter. The Jazz fell to the 14-win Hornets 115-107, and are now 2-8 in their last 10, all while rocking a five-game losing streak. The tank is on, baby. And it's going to get hard to watch the Jazz from here on out.
Yes, it's very clear that Utah Jazz head coach Will Hardy is deliberately coaching to lose, why else would you start one of your worst players Taylor Hendricks over Walker Kessler? Upside or not, he's looked lost as a rookie. Clearly, he's getting players who need reps over players who can help him win. Is that the wrong move?
Well, this is why it's hard to watch anymore. Not because the product is bad or because we only care about winning, but because this is a team that's good enough to reach the playoffs and could've had they gone a different direction at the trade deadline. So now, watching this team fall apart on both ends of the court is maddening. They should be so much better than they are.
Yet, the tank is here. This team is going to be lucky to win 10 games the rest of the season because the Jazz are trying everything they can to avoid that. They want their draft pick back this offseason, even if they aren't going to come right out and say it. The moves they're making on the court reflect that desire.
So the goal from an organizational standpoint is to get that draft pick back, so winning is counter-intuitive to what the front office believes is best for the team. So if they're losing games, that means that they're actually winning in their goals.
Yet, as fans, we still want to see them win. It's a conundrum. This isn't a team that's actually tanking. There is no full tear-down and rebuild. They're more or less just treading water, waiting to see what happens before making a move, and that indecision and waiting is excruciating. So it's going to be hard to watch the games because, simply put, we don't know what we're supposed to want.
The Jazz looked awful on Thursday against the Hornets. Yet, that's the goal, right? So can we be mad at how bad they look, knowing full well it won't matter how mad we are, this is the direction the team is going this season?
As we said, it's going to be very hard to watch the rest of the season, and only because we're not sure what we're supposed to be feeling as this team pooches away one more great year from Lauri Markkanen.