To put it plainly, this team needs to be broken up. Only last year’s Sixth Man of the Year Jordan Clarkson and center Bojan Bogdanović played with any joie de vivre. Rudy Gay, Royce O’Neal, Hassan Whiteside, Daniel House. Elsewhere, the Jazz roster is littered with broken players who, judging by their relationship and play on the court, he seems genuinely unhappy to be playing in Utah i.me. The 34-year-old shooting guard is a shell of the player he was in Memphis and never regained the defensive form that made him such a deadly two-way player with the Grizzlies. The 2019 trade that brought Mike Conley to Utah has been an absolute success. Danny Ainge and the Utah front office have surrounded Gobert with a group of aging perimeter players who can’t defend. The tension between the two goes back to pre-pandemic times. It was no secret that its two superstars, Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, do not like each other. Before the Utah Jazz began their first-round playoff series against the Dallas Mavericks, there were big questions about their chemistry, viability as a winner and ceiling.
