Utah Jazz

Team information

• Inaugural season: 1974
• Home arena: Vivint Smart Home Arena, Salt Lake City, Utah
• Owner: Gail Miller
• Team colors: Navy blue, gold, and green

Overview

The Utah Jazz is a professional basketball team that plays in the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Western Conference. The Jazz originated in New Orleans in 1974 and built its identity around the city’s musical traditions and Mardi Gras celebration. After the franchise moved to Salt Lake City in 1979, the team kept its name, logo, and colors, despite the two cities having fundamentally different cultures. Nevertheless, the team was embraced in its new home. By the mid-1980s, Utah had developed into one of the Western Conference’s best teams, embarking on a two-decade run of consecutive playoffs appearances. The team’s success in this era was powered by perhaps the greatest teammate duo in NBA history. Karl Malone and John Stockton arrived within a season of each other, and led the Jazz to two NBA Finals appearances in the mid-1990s. By the time both players retired, they were recognized as two of the greatest players in NBA history. They not only held every major franchise record, but several NBA marks as well. Although the Jazz did not reach the same heights in the years following the Malone-Stockton era, the team remained competitive into the twenty-first century.

History

The Jazz were born as part of a wave of expansion that saw the NBA grow from nine teams in 1965 to twenty-three teams by 1980. New Orleans entered the league in 1974 when the NBA granted a new franchise to a group of California businessmen for $6.2 million. The name Jazz was selected from a fan contest that also included the names Blues, Cajuns, Crescents, Deltas, Dukes, Knights, and Pilots. Although only three out of the 6,500 entries suggested Jazz, team officials chose the name because of the city’s reputation as the jazz music capital of the world. The team colors of purple, green, and gold were chosen because they were the traditional colors of New Orleans’s famed Mardi Gras celebration. The franchise’s logo featured “New Orleans” in small type above the larger word “Jazz.” The “J” in the team name was a musical note with the note’s head designed as a basketball with the team colors. The logo was later updated to reflect the move to Utah. After a mountain-themed makeover in the 1990s, the Jazz readopted the J-note logo in 2016, substituting dark blue for the original purple.

The first roster move in franchise history was the acquisition of All-Star shooting guard “Pistol” Pete Maravich from the Atlanta Hawks. Maravich was a collegiate legend at Louisiana State University, where he set the all-time scoring mark in men’s Division I basketball. Despite the presence of the future Hall of Famer, the Jazz got off to a terrible start, losing their first eleven games and firing their head coach. New Orleans won only twenty-three games in its inaugural season and the next four seasons were little better. The Jazz never had a winning record in their time in New Orleans and finished last or next-to-last in their division each time.

The team did make history in 1977 when it selected college star Lucy Harris in the seventh round of the NBA Draft. Harris was the first and only woman ever drafted by an NBA team. Although her selection was done more for publicity, Harris was the best women’s collegiate player at the time. In 1992, she became one of the first women inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player. On another draft-related note, in the team’s push to acquire players, the Jazz traded away their first-round picks in the 1977, 1978, and 1979 NBA drafts to the Los Angeles Lakers. In 1979, the Lakers used what would have been Utah’s top overall pick to select future NBA legend Ervin “Magic” Johnson. Johnson would go on to win five NBA titles and three NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards with Los Angeles.

As New Orleans struggled on the court, team management was having financial difficulties off of it. The Jazz was weighed down by an unfavorable lease deal at the Louisiana Superdome and further hampered by the city’s high amusement tax. Principal owners Sam Battistone and Larry Hatfield began looking to move the team. They decided on Salt Lake City, mainly because the city had enthusiastically supported a franchise in the rival American Basketball Association (ABA). That franchise, the Utah Stars, played in Salt Lake City from 1970 to 1976 and won an ABA title before folding.

The franchise did not get the NBA’s approval to relocate until the summer of 1979, which was too late to rebrand the team for its new location. So, the team kept its New Orleans-inspired name and colors, despite Utah having no connection to jazz music or Mardi Gras celebrations. The franchise did later explore changing the name, but Battistone felt that fan suggestions, such as Crickets, Bees, and Briny Shrimp, did not sound as good as Jazz, so he decided to keep the name.

At first, the new location did little to change the team’s fortunes as the Jazz finished below .500 in its first four seasons in Utah. However, the turning point for the franchise occurred following the 1983–1984 season when Utah finished with forty-five wins and made its first playoff appearance. In the 1984 NBA Draft, the team selected point guard John Stockton out of Gonzaga University; a year later, Utah chose forward Karl Malone from Louisiana Tech. Stockton and Malone would go on to play eighteen seasons together and transform the Jazz into one of the NBA’s best teams. Counting the two seasons before Malone’s arrival, Utah made the playoffs each season from 1984 to 2003 and advanced to the Western Conference Finals five times from 1992 to 1998. The Jazz won the Western Conference in 1997 and 1998 to play in back-to-back NBA Finals. Both times, they faced a Michael-Jordan led Chicago Bulls team that was considered one of the best of all-time. Utah lost both series by identical 4–2 margins.

Stockton retired in 2003 and Malone left Utah to play one more season with the Los Angeles Lakers. Predictably, the Jazz’s twenty-season playoff streak was snapped, but the team remained competitive. After missing the playoffs for three seasons, Utah returned to the postseason from 2007 to 2010, making it to the Western Conference Finals in 2007. The team experienced another lean period from 2011 to 2016, advancing to the playoffs just once over that span. However, in 2016–2017, the Jazz bounced back to win its division and begin a three-year playoff run.

Despite playing in one of the NBA’s smallest markets, the Jazz have constantly finished among the top half of the league in attendance. The team’s current home arena opened in 1991 as the Delta Center and was renamed the Vivint Smart Home Arena in 2015.

Notable players

The franchise’s first star, Pete Maravich, played in New Orleans from 1974 to 1979 and moved with the team to Utah for the 1979–1980 season. Maravich won the NBA scoring title in 1977 and made three All-Star teams with the Jazz. Although his career was cut short by injuries, Maravich was elected into the Hall of Fame in 1987. In the Jazz’s first year in Utah, the team acquired high-powered scorer Adrian Dantley from the Lakers. Dantley made six All-Star appearances with the Jazz from 1979 to 1986 and won two scoring titles. He stood third on the franchise scoring list with 13,635 points, and was inducted to the Hall of Fame in 2008.

John Stockton arrived in Utah in 1984 and played his entire nineteen-year career with the Jazz. During that time, he made ten All-Star games and led the NBA in assists nine times. Stockton was a master of the pick and roll, a play in which one player screens an opponent, allowing a teammate to get open and move toward the basket. The player with the ball than feeds the open player, leading to an easier shot at the basket. In this manner, Stockton amassed 15,806 career assists, the most in NBA history. Stockton was also the all-time NBA leader in steals. His 19,711 career points remained second only to Malone in the franchise record book.

In college, Karl Malone had been nicknamed the “Mailman” because he was said to always deliver around the basket. Over the course of his nineteen-year career, Malone did just that, appearing in fourteen All-Star games and winning two NBA MVP awards. As of 2020, Malone’s 36,928 points were second-most in NBA history. Malone scored 36,374 of those points with Utah. His 14,601 rebounds with Utah were a franchise record, and his career total of 14,968 was seventh-most all-time. Stockton was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009, and Malone followed him a year later.

In the post-Stockton-and-Malone era, guard Deron Williams made two All-Star appearances with Utah from 2005 to 2011. His 4,003 assists with the Jazz were fourth on the franchise list. Center Rudy Gobert was drafted by the Jazz in 2013 and made the 2020 All-Star team. Gobert was third in team history with 5,125 rebounds. In 2017, Utah drafted shooting guard Donovan Mitchell, who led the team in scoring in each of his first three seasons. Mitchell was also a member of the 2020 All-Star team.

Bibliography

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