This was the worst Jazz season I ever witnessed. I have put off writing about if for so long because it still is very recent and painful for me. I'm not sure how much Kevin O'Connor is to blame for everything that happened, so I'll try to keep to the facts and not let my emotions carry me away.
Season 12: 2010-11
Heading into the 2010 Draft, the Jazz didn't own their own pick, having sent it to Philadelphia for Kyle Korver in 2007. Luckily, though, the Jazz did have New York's first-round pick, which had been forgotten about for half a decade. In 2004, the Knicks sent that pick to Phoenix in a blockbuster involving Antonio McDyess and Stephon Marbury. The Suns then sent the pick to the Jazz in the Keon Clark-Tom Gugliotta trade. Fortunately, the Knicks sucked in 2010, so that pick ended up being No. 9, which O'Connor used to find a replacement for Kyle Korver in Gordon Hayward. It's still too early to say if Hayward was the best pick, but he hasn't been a typical O'Connor bust, at least. You couldn't call him a sharpshooter, but Hayward is a good basketball player who can do a little bit of everything. His rookie season started slowly, but he worked his way into the starting lineup at the end and wound up averaging 5.4 points per game.
With Utah's own second-round pick, No. 55, O'Connor chose Jeremy Evans, the lanky forward who does little more than throw down the occasional alley-oop. His biggest highlight so far has been winning a very boring dunk contest. I don't know if he'll ever develop into anything more — we've only seen him dunk — but I guess anything the 55th pick can give you is a bonus, even if that one thing is just a dunk every now and then.
With the draft out of the way, O'Connor then turned his attention to replacing Carlos Boozer. Instead of letting the disgruntled failed Malone replacement leave, O'Connor arranged a sign-and-trade with Chicago and got a player exception in return. He did have to give up a protected second-round pick, but at least he got something back from Boozer. Now this next part is a bit more complicated. O'Connor packaged that player exception with Kosta Koufas and two protected first-round picks to Minnesota for Al Jefferson. Getting rid of Koufas was fine — he wasn't developing quickly enough into anything productive — but losing two first-round picks was too steep a price for me. In Big Al's first year with the Jazz, he averaged 18.6 points and 9.7 rebounds per game, but I'm not completely sold on him. Yes, Al Jefferson can score and rebound, but he's just as inconsistent as Boozer was, plays very little defense, rarely gets to the foul line and has only recently decided to try to pass the ball every now and then. But at least we got somebody to replace Boozer.
O'Connor's next project was to find a defensive 2-guard to replace Ronnie Brewer. Ex-Jazzman Raja Bell was available and was being heavily courted by the Lakers (Kobe even took him for a ride in his private helicopter), but he wanted to return to Utah and Jerry Sloan's system. O'Connor rewarded Bell with a three-year contract, which would have been fine if this was the All-Defense Raja Bell who could knock down 3s and score 14 points a game. But this was the injured and aged Bell who played in a total of six games in the 2009-10 season. He did manage to play in 68 games with the Jazz in 2010-11, and averaged 8 ppg, but as we'll see in the next season, his contract went about two years too long.
As the season approached, O'Connor filled up the roster with a couple of veteran journeymen — big man Francisco Elson and point guard Earl Watson. Elson didn't do too much, but never did anything bad. Watson, though, was a nice little surprise. While he never does anything extraordinary, he runs the offense well and seems to be able to rally his teammates a bit. It's those intangible qualities that have kept him on the Jazz roster through today.
And so the season started. Everything seemed fine enough — the Jazz were winning games — but something seemed a bit off as the season progressed. It seemed in every game the Jazz played, they had to miraculously come back from some huge deficit. Eventually, they stopped coming back. I remember it happening around Martin Luther King Day, when the Jazz were just getting crushed by terrible teams like the Wizards. Of course, we didn't really know exactly what was going on, and we never really will. All I know is that something happened between Jerry Sloan and Deron Williams, and it was so bad that the Hall of Fame coach decided to retire mid-season after 23 years. I'll never forget that day. I was crushed. I almost completely gave up on being a Jazz fan. It just didn't feel like the same team anymore. But I guess I realized I don't need to be so emotionally invested in a professional sports team and my love of basketball won out in the end. I am still and always will be a Jazz fan, but it won't ever be the same. Not since Greg Miller took over. And not since Jerry Sloan left.
Since Sloan's long-time right-hand man, Phil Johnson, left with him, Tyrone Corbin was inexplicably named the new head coach. Not interim or anything like that, the new head coach. And to create some sense of stability, I suppose, Corbin was immediately given a two-year extension, despite doing nothing but lose a bunch of games. I guess I could say the jury's still out on Corbin's coaching ability, but so far, it hasn't been pretty. Maybe after I finish examining Kevin O'Connor's career, I'll have to start asking if Tyrone Corbin is a good coach.
Once Sloan was gone, everybody assumed that the moody Deron Williams would mellow out and things would start to get better. Instead, O'Connor shocked the world by trading D-Will to New Jersey for Devin Harris, Derrick Favors, two first-round picks and cash. O'Connor's justification was that he didn't want to lose Williams to free agency and get nothing in return. In hindsight, this is exactly what he should have done with Carlos Boozer, who announced he'd leave Utah more than a year before he actually did. Anyway, this was actually a pretty good trade that I surprisingly supported. Yes, D-Will was leading the Jazz with 21.3 points and 9.7 assists per game, but he wasn't making his teammates better, which is a point guard's first responsibility. It seemed whenever something bad would happen, he'd start making excuses and sometimes even blame his teammates. And so ultimately, I guess O'Connor decided it was time for some addition by subtraction. Devin Harris was a one-time All-Star, so he seemed like an adequate replacement for Williams. However, he seemed to struggle in Utah. In the 17 games he played with the Jazz this season, he only averaged 15.8 ppg and 5.4 apg, despite having strong post players like Jefferson and Paul Millsap around him. He is an incredibly fast player, but he never could figure out how to use his speed to his advantage, and his tenure with the Jazz was always marked by his teammates and coaches calling him out for not being aggressive enough. So while Harris turned out to be a dud, the real prize from the New Jersey trade became Derrick Favors. He averaged 8.2 ppg and 5.2 rpg in his first half-season with the Jazz, and has done nothing but show tremendous upside and potential. Unfortunately, he's stuck behind Millsap on the depth chart, and Tyrone Corbin has had a hard time of figuring out how to get Favors on the floor.
In March, injuries forced O'Connor to pick up a couple of guys on 10-day contracts. Big man Marcus Cousin played in four games, did nothing, and hasn't been in the NBA since. Swingman Kyle Weaver averaged 5.6 ppg in five games, but he's also out of the league now.
The rest of the Jazz roster was filled with the usual suspects. Paul Millsap put up 17.3 ppg and 7.6 rpg in his first season as a starter, but it always felt a bit awkward having him on the court with Al Jefferson at the same time (it still feels awkward today). C.J. Miles became the team's inconsistent sixth man with 12.8 ppg off the bench. Andrei Kirilenko averaged 11.7 ppg and 5.1 rpg, while earning slightly less than $18 million that year. Tragically, Memo Okur was unable to recover from his injury from last year's playoffs, and only appeared in 13 games. The oft-injured Ronnie Price made it into 59 games, which was about average for him. Oh, and Kyrylo Fesenko was there, too. He even got to start one game.
As I said earlier, the season started off alright. When Sloan stepped down, the record was 31-23. But once Tyrone Corbin took over, the team went 8-20 to finish 39-43 and out of the playoffs for the first time in four years. So just like that, the team that made it to the Western Conference Finals was gone, O'Connor's Boozer-Williams plan had shattered and Jerry Sloan's unparalleled legacy had ended in the saddest, most-disappointing way. Although O'Connor stayed on for another year, I really believe he started to prepare for his retirement after this season. Everything that could have gone wrong did, and at least some of the blame has to rest with Kevin O'Connor. I'm sorry, but that comes with the territory of being the general manager.
Next time, I'll cover O'Connor's final season with the Jazz (plus the little bit extra he did) and I'll try to answer the most difficult question: Was Kevin O'Connor a good GM?
No comments:
Post a Comment