Will Hardy gets brutally honest about what Jordan Clarkson means to him

Old friend Jordan Clarkson and the New York Knicks gave the Utah Jazz a good old-fashioned beatdown last night. Clarkson got to show his old team the kind of impact he has when he's playing for a playoff contender, the first timer he's done that since his earlier days with the Jazz. However, before the game, Will Hardy gushed about the impact Clarkson had on him when he first joined the team.

Hardy could not hold back when he gushed about what it was like to coach Clarkson for the past three seasons.

"He taught me a lot about, not only tactics," Hardy said. "JC's incredibly smart. We spent a bunch of time together watching film, trying to understand how he sees it, and he taught me a lot."

Hardy also reminisced on what life was like back when Hardy first started coaching the team and how Clarkson helped him acclimate to being a head coach.

"I think my fondest memories are just how JC approached me as a first-time head coach," Hardy said. "At the time when I got hired, I was very young, first-time head coach. Didn't really have that many strong relationships with the guys on the team, and JC was one of the guys who accepted me from the first day, and helped me establish credibility in the locker room."

Many questioned for years why the Jazz didn't trade Clarkson when it was becoming evident that the team planned to get younger. From what Hardy says here, it sounds like Clarkson really was a golden exmaple for eveyrone in Utah's locker room, which included him when he first got there.

Could their rapport explain why it took a while to part ways with Clarkson?

The common Jazz fan will tell you that Utah held onto Clarkson too long before they parted ways with him, and they'd be right. In hindsight, he should have been traded immediately after they traded Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell.

However, Hardy's stories show that even if that may have been the right call, Clarkson clearly wanting to lead a good environment was instrumental to helping Hardy adjust to life as a head coach, which may have been hard for Utah to throw away because that's never a given with veterans, especially given the unfair reputation the Jazz have as a team that players don't willingly come play for.

It's also times like those that should make guys like Clarkson be remembered fondly by the fans. Things didn't end the way anyone in Utah would have preferred, but it was clear how positive of an influence he was during his time as a Jazzman. For that same reason, if he manages to win a title sometime before he hangs it up, not one Jazz fan should be mad about it.