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I always liked Dennis Lindsey, and still do.
He made a weekly appearance on our radio show for a number of years, and four things became obvious as we battered him with questions about the Jazz: 1) He was intelligent; 2) He was most passionate about his job running the team; 3) He firmly controlled the endeavor, ran it his way; and 4) He was painfully careful about and aware of what he — or any other ranking Jazz staffer — said publicly.
There were times when he allowed fired emotion to bubble to the surface, such as when Rudy Gobert was left off the All-Star team one season, a season during which he should have been on it. And Lindsey had five pages and 15 minutes of the necessary data to back up his assertion.
If there’s a single thing — although it’s not the only thing — Lindsey believed in, it’s analytics.
Oops, we’re talking in past tense here. It’s not quite that dramatic, but … well, kind of.
That was the rudder by which Lindsey guided the Jazz ship through his near-decade in consecutive roles as general manager and vice president of basketball ops. All that — the specific leadership, not the analytics — has been done away with now, as Lindsey takes an advisory role to Jazz owner Ryan Smith. What that role is exactly, nobody’s quite sure. Justin Zanik, the team’s current GM and a smart basketball mind, will continue in that job, reportedly handling, steering the team’s day-to-day matters.
Here’s the thing: There will be other moves ahead.
Think about what Smith said when he announced that Dwyane Wade was taking partial ownership of the team a couple of months ago. He said: “This is just the beginning.”
It sounded a little like the days of creation famously recorded with the opening line of Genesis in the Good Book, “In the beginning …”
There would be more in store, more to come.
Like … a lot more. The light would be called day, the darkness called night.
And that could be a real good thing. And it could sheer an otherwise rocksteady operation off its bearings, an operation that has been happily grinding away since Larry Miller bought the team a few decades back.
There are two ways of looking at it.
The first is that the Jazz had established a solid reputation around the NBA as a well-run outfit in a smaller market that embarked on a responsible ascent in a ridiculously competitive league where the balance of power wasn’t always all that balanced.
In that mix, the Jazz climbed from an uncertain start after the move from New Orleans to Salt Lake City — remember Frank Layden’s line, about being asked what time the game started and he answered: What time can you be there? — to a quality position as a dependable franchise, one that was cautious and calculated and conscious of its financials in all its decisions, one that could be counted on to provide a strong product, to put a good team on the floor. Good. Good. Always good, and almost great, but mostly … good.
And now that there’s a new owner of the boat, an owner who had built a business out of his family’s basement into a multiple-billion-dollar enterprise and sold it for a record amount, all while still running the thing, that safe, reliable climb of the past would no longer be enough.
Ryan Smith had rocked the tech world, he would now rock the NBA — by making bold moves. Moves that would make the Jazz mirror the community in which it resides, which, the way Smith looks at it, is one of the best places on the planet to live, work and play.
Utah? You go live in Utah?
Pah. Derek Harper’s infamous statement no longer applies. That’s backward, erroneous thinking, as far as Smith’s concerned.
He views Utah as a garden spot, not as some my little village out yonder somewhere, out on the edge of the Wasatch. He sees it as an up-and-coming world business center.
Utah is great, he figures, the Jazz can be great. All this happy-to-just-be-a-part-of-it nonsense was and is exactly that. Going big and going bold is the future. No use being meek and mild about the venture.
The second is that Smith is going too far, too fast. And that his drive to make things different, to make a difference, is dangerous, impatient, unsettling, unwise. There are NBA franchises, and clubs in other leagues, that have accelerated too quickly and gone into a competitive speed weave, eventually either crashing or falling perpetually behind in the pursuit.
The hurrier they go, the behinder they get.
Guaranteed Smith doesn’t believe that’s what he’s doing. He was told he was going too far, too fast a thousand times as he built Qualtrics into what it is today. He ignored the noise, and he was right. He was told by a lot of people that he should sell his company in 2011 for $500 million. Why wouldn’t he? It was more money than he had ever dreamed of having. And … well, he did not. Instead, he continued to build it, and seven years later, sold it for $8 billion.
(Not that he wants to sell the Jazz. He wants to hold it like a baby.)
And all along, he expected no direct rocket ride to the top.
“We’ve had a lot of ups and downs over [the] years,” he told me a few months ago. “I mean, there have been no straight lines.”
Just a line that zig-zagged up and up and up to the top.
And perhaps that’s what he’ll do with the Jazz, too.
The switch of Lindsey to a new adviser role is one Lindsey said he’d been contemplating for a while now, looking forward to spending more time with his family. Nobody on the outside knows with exactness if that’s the whole story. There’s a lot of dust blowing in the wind about Dennis’ management style and the aggressive methodology he used in running the Jazz, talk of moments of inner strife.
Believe what you will on that front.
Inner strife there was.
There were times when Lindsey came across as a traditional politician, a man running for office, a statesman, so careful and calculated and diplomatic in what he said. There were times when his demeanor was nigh unto being soft and timid, sweet even. And then, there were times when his snarl and growl came out, his doggish bite was evident.
But the facts speak for themselves — that Lindsey helped lift the Jazz from a temporary nadir when he came aboard to where they are now, which is a secure station, if there is such a thing, as one of the best teams in the West, a team that if things had broken just a bit differently in the playoffs, minus a tricky hamstring here and a badly sprained ankle there, if a couple of All-Stars had stayed healthy, the Jazz might have made the NBA Finals.
A championship is indeed the intention, an idea Smith reiterated in a statement issued Sunday night about Lindsey’s new status.
Zanik will continue the charge now, in the purview of Wade, alongside Quin Snyder, with advice from Lindsey, and with more assistance and wisdom from yet-to-be-named additions en route. Smith’s good friend Danny Ainge? Who knows. Shane Battier? Not sure. Golfing buddies Charles Schwab and Brooks Koepka? Beats me. It could be Morgan Freeman or the Dalai Lama for all I know. What’s Jerry West up to these days? Elon Musk? The ghost of James Naismith?
This is what I do know:
It is the beginning, a big beginning, maybe not of the heaven and the earth, the land and the sea, but of the Utah Jazz as we recognize them, or don’t recognize them. Let there be light, and there was light …
GORDON MONSON hosts “The Big Show” with Jake Scott weekdays from 2-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone, which is owned by the parent company that owns the Utah Jazz.
