It’s mid-October and Will Hardy is peering through a Zoom camera inside the Utah Jazz practice facility. Behind him, several players are getting shots up after practice. “It's been a long summer,” says Hardy, the Jazz coach. “The guys have been working really hard. We've seen a ton of improvement from our young players over the last couple of seasons, and this summer was no different. The guys really just put their heads down and did the work.”
After several years of futility, including back-to-back 20-ish win seasons, the Jazz enter this year with expectations. With an All-Star-ish front line (Lauri Markkanen, Jaren Jackson Jr.) and a collection of uber-talented wings (Keyonte George, Ace Bailey, Darryn Peterson), Utah is a trendy pick to earn a play-in spot. Or at the very least compete for one. Says Hardy, “There is definitely a ton of excitement.”
Earlier this week, Hardy sat down with Sports Illustrated’s Open Floor podcast to talk about Utah's offseason, fitting all the Jazz’s new pieces together, expectations for the season and more.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sports Illustrated: You said it was a long summer. Why?
Will Hardy: Every offseason is spent sort of in two pathways. You're looking back and trying to self-assess everything. It's the individual players, it's the team, it's programmatic things. It's myself, my staff, things we can do better based on what has already happened. And then there's obviously the pivot point in the summer, which is the draft where somebody new is joining your program and now things start to shake out from a roster standpoint through free agency and you have a little bit of a clearer picture of what may lie ahead.
And so then all of your thinking goes into, ‘O.K., how can we help this team and how can we help these individual players? What are the priorities for everybody?’ I think prioritizing is probably my biggest responsibility. There's always a laundry list of things that need to be done both as a team and individually.
SI: Rebuilds are always difficult. Was there a point the last couple of years where you wondered if you were ever going to see the other side of it?
WH: Sure. I think the intrusive thoughts of people's brains can be pretty wild. And there are certainly moments where doubt creeps in. I'm inherently hard on myself already and there are certainly moments where you feel the thoughts rushing in of like, ‘Oh my gosh, I'm failing and we're not getting there as quick as we want.’ And it doesn't feel how maybe I imagined it would feel in that moment. But my belief has never wavered in terms of our group here in Utah and our willingness from the top down to go through a lot of hard work to ultimately try to get to where we want to go.
But certainly there are moments where every individual can have a down day. The thought can be, ‘Oh man, is this going to happen?’ But I believe that my biggest responsibility to our organization and to our fan base is to instill that belief and to live it out every day that I'm willing to do the hard things just like our players are, and our fans have been there with us through this entire process. I don't want that to go unsaid. And the process is ongoing. This is not over. We are still very much becoming. And that's been my message to our team all training camp that we are becoming and every day we have to be willing to do the hard work to get the result that ultimately we want. Not every day is going to be pretty, not every game's going to go our way.
SI: You guys have worked hard to develop Keyonte into the player he is today. When you draft a Peterson, do you worry bringing in another lead guard will have a negative effect?
WH: I think it was the opposite for me. I think there's a ton of belief and excitement in them. I think watching the playoffs, there's so much to learn, and I think one of the biggest takeaways was you need multiple ball handlers to get to the finish line. Even the best lead guards in our league need secondary ball handlers. It's a long road to the finish line. And so my approach with them has been messaging just that you guys need each other and there's going to be a lot made of who's the point guard and the answer is neither of you. It doesn't matter. Both of you, neither of you.
You're both really good basketball players and you both have the ability to play on the ball and off the ball. So the flexibility there is going to help both of them. Every opponent is going to be different. Each matchup they draw could lead us to do different things offensively, and I think it's going to serve both of them well. My communication with them is to try to continue to have them not focus on what it all means. I think there's always this question of like, well, what does it mean? We draft Peterson and we already have Keyonte. What does that mean? It means that Darryn’s a good player and we want him on our team and Keyonte, you're a good player and we need you both. It's not one or the other.
I don't want to pit them against each other because I think they have an opportunity moving forward to be a really dynamic back court. That term backcourt, I feel like it went out of style like 15 years ago and now it's point guard shooting guard. Here, I have Danny Ainge remind me all the time that they were just called a backcourt when he was playing. That’s how I see them.
SI: We are seeing the return of some big lineups. But you guys can play really big with Markkanen, Jackson and Jusuf Nurkić. How do you see that lineup working?
WH: My job as a coach is to come home, open the fridge, see what's in there and make dinner. And this is who's on our team. We've got some good players, and I think sometimes the combinations can lead people to say, ‘Oh, well, that will hurt them in this area, but there's also areas that it can help us.’ People make a lot of who starts. I'm more interested in 48 minutes functioning well. I think that Lauri is really the X-factor in the ability to play that way, because when you say three 7-footers, yes, that is true if we're just measuring them against the wall, but I don't think Lauri plays like a lot of 7-footers.
SI: How does he play?
WH: He is a great mover without the ball. He's an elite shooter. He's not a back-to-the-basket big. So he sort of provides some things that people would say like, ‘Oh, this is what some small forwards do, but he's just doing it in a little bit bigger frame.’ He gives us great flexibility to try some of these things. I don't think that we would be doing it if it weren't for him, but we're trying to play our best guys, and there are moments where you'd like the other team to try to adjust to you in certain moments.
But like I said in the beginning, I try to look at our team and I really try to take them for what they do. I think we can all pick players apart and say, ‘This guy can't do that and that guy can't do that,’ but that doesn't help me very much. I'm trying to focus on what each guy brings to the table and then trying to put those things together in some different combinations to hopefully produce winning basketball.
SI: How do you see Ace Bailey fitting into this mix?
WH: I think Ace is a massive, massive part of our program right now. I have so much belief in him. His summer has been outstanding. I'm excited for the league to really get to watch him this year because I think you're going to see a young man who's really improved on both sides of the ball. The most exciting part for me is his defense. I mean, he's turning himself into a good perimeter defender and what that can do for us going forward is very impactful. Ace is incredibly young and he's got a lot of runway ahead of him to improve, but what I've seen in 365 days gives me a ton of belief in him. He's a huge part of what we're doing.
SI: What was your message to him going into the summer?
WH: We needed him to focus on his body. Bridging the gap physically is usually one of the biggest things that a young player needs to do. Before we talk about skills—skills are very important—but when you're 19 years old playing against 28-year-olds, a lot of times the biggest gap is physical strength. And so it was about his body and really it was about his conditioning. We said, ‘Hey, while you're still trying to bridge the gap from a strength standpoint, we should be trying to make conditioning a superpower.’
But my biggest message to Ace was, ‘You've now seen an NBA season. You've seen how long it is. You've seen the toll it takes on your body, on your mind, your emotions, all those things. I want you to really be honest with yourself and think about, as you go into the summer, what type of work is needed to prepare for that.’ And to Ace's credit, he put his head down and worked all summer.
SI: A lot of people are projecting this team to fight for a playoff spot. What are your expectations?
WH: I mean, I'm never going to put a cap on our group at all, and I believe we should be competing every day. What that turns into, we're going to find out. But I believe in our team's work ethic, I believe in their ability to learn, and there's a group of us that have been through some hard moments together, and so I think being able to navigate whatever comes our way in terms of you lose a game, you lose a couple in a row, the injuries, whatever happens in an NBA season, the adversity that shows itself, this group has shown the ability to navigate those things together.
But I'm excited because I think we have a really hungry team and I have really high expectations for them every day. It's hard for me to look off in the distance and say, ‘I expect this at the end of the year,’ but I do expect and demand a really high standard of our players each and every day. The hope is that those standards every day and that work every day will ultimately lead to some good results, but training camp is short in the NBA.
Everybody feels really good right now. We're going to have to learn about our own team. I think that's probably a huge part of my job this year is really to be paying such really close attention and try to understand what's true, not what I want to be true about our team so we can solve those problems.
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