But we’ll table the catastrophic scenario.
One Jazz era morphed into another in a mid-season flash. I remember sitting at the Chicago game where Jerry Sloan stormed off, and Deron Williams was gone shortly after. We’ve seen how quickly a situation can devolve. At the time of this writing, it feels like a coin flip. The Jazz would like to keep Rudy, but are entertaining trades. The Jazz want to compete for a championship - that means no blow-it-up scenarios. Let’s start with a few baselines we’ve been hearing: The final stages of grief include the upward turn, reconstruction, and hope. Because some sort of Jazz team will suit up next season, and the mystery of what that team will look like is more interesting than dissecting what went wrong - at least for now, while the wound is fresh. Let’s gloss over the woes, the issues, the bad feelings. Others have one foot in the pain and the other in the anger.
Some are still in the denial stage, some in the depression stage. Fans of the Jazz are wading through the seven stages of grief, but hey, it’s familiar territory. Zarin Ficklin looks at the Jazz’s options moving forward with, among others, 3-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert.
