The Utah Jazz need toughness.
OK, so you’ve heard that a thousand times before. But what does it mean? What is it exactly? What are their prospects for having it, for owning it, for breathing it, for being it — and why do they need it more now as they rocket to the altitude to which they’ve blasted?
Best answer to that last one: A championship requires it.
Donovan Mitchell knows this, and has said it over and over — for good reason. He’s felt the focus and force with which opponents currently approach the Jazz, whether it’s in the humdrum of the regular season or in the ratcheted atmosphere of the playoffs, and he’s fully aware he and his teammates must bounce back at it with superior focus and force.
As often as toughness is thrown about in basketball, it means different things to different people in different situations, everything from roughing up opposing players to rawboned mentality to basic rebounding.
To some, it is the ground when taken and held that leads to winning. Bill Russell said: “Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory.”
To some, it is illustrated and defined in a number of ways, as that great point guard of a different order Tom Brady said: “To me, [basketball] is so much about mental toughness. It’s digging deep, it’s doing whatever you need to do to help your team win, and that comes in a lot of shapes and forms.”
To some, it means banging on the boards hard, because that is an area of the game that requires sacrifice and dogged aggression. It’s not glamorous, it’s not pretty, there’s no flash and panache involved. It often happens at the defensive end, where some players, but not the best ones, are derelict in their duty, coasting between offensive possessions.
A memorable quote was spoken by the legendary hoops guru Pete Carril, who mixed together toughness with hitting the boards and the background, in his opinion, necessary to achieve and apply both. He said: “A player’s ability to rebound is inversely proportional to the distance between where he was born and the nearest railroad tracks. The greater distance you live from the poor side of those railroad tracks, the less likely that you will be a good rebounder.”
An exaggeration, but worthy of note.
To some, it means possessing authentic leadership qualities that can be depended on to win when that winning is difficult. Larry Bird said: “Leadership is getting players to believe in you. If you tell a teammate you’re ready to play as tough as you’re able to do, you’d better go out and do it. Players will see right through a phony. They can tell when you’re not giving it all you’ve got.”
It’s not a matter of playing hero-ball. As Brady said, it’s paying whatever price — preparedness, rock-steadiness, unselfishness, fearlessness, aggressiveness — victory calls for.
To some, it’s emotional centering, mixed with intensity. In the specific, it’s what Michael Jordan circled after the Jazz beat the Bulls at the United Center in Game 5 of the 1998 NBA Finals, a game everyone, including Jordan, expected Chicago to win. The visitors were down 3-1, having been smoked in the previous game, and now, with champagne on ice in the Bulls locker room and confetti loaded up in the rafters, celebration waiting to ignite, the Jazz beat the Bulls, impressing His Airness, at least for the moment. He said: “They played tough, with a lot of intensity and emotion. They got what they deserved.”
A win.
As everyone around here knows, the King of Competitiveness came back to do the same to the Jazz in Game 6.
Another king, the King of Leather-faced Toughness, Jerry Sloan himself, was a big proponent of standing up to the challenge and pushing forward against it, a combo-pack of fortitude and physicality. He said: “Every team needs toughness, to work hard to get the job done. Players have to discover who they are, what they are, what they’re made of, what they’re willing to do.”
So, the Jazz this season have talent, including three All-Stars, and depth and experience. They’re good on attack, especially from distance. They’re deep. They prioritize defense, although at times it lapses a bit. And, for the most part, they are healthy. They’ll need to be all of that, from sharpshooters to forearm shiver-givers.
“If the ball’s not going in, we just have to have more fight,” said Quin Snyder, “to be more locked in.”
Which is to say, they’ll need some nasty, the drive and willingness to be competitively angry and mean, to tear the hearts out of opponents and laugh at their pain.
To some, that means verbal torture, talking up the smack, giving utterance to the moment, whether its straight into the mug of an opponent, a referee, or anybody else. When it comes to speaking out loud what’s caroming around inside the noggin, it reminds of a funny quote from Jim Valvano, who said: “I asked a ref once if he could give me a technical for thinking bad things about him. He said, ‘Of course not.’ I said, ‘Well, I think you stink.’ And he gave me a technical.”
To others, it’s elbowing and shoving and fouling and, if need be, standing up for teammates in the fog of the battle.
The Jazz seemed to have steeled themselves in this regard, not just with the players already aboard, but adding guys like Hassan Whiteside and Eric Paschall, individuals who can whirl around on the floor, owning their space, taking what they can and giving nothing back.
This is a good thing.
A fistful of years ago, as part of a Schadenfreude Poll done by a writer at Sports Illustrated, the Jazz were named the NBA’s “most likable team,” an outfit “with no rough edges to irritate,” with “no dominant style about which to turn up your nose,” and “no offensive personalities at whom to seethe.”
That’s as much of a kick-you-in-the-onions compliment as can be spoken about a basketball team, certainly one with intentions of getting a trophy, bad intentions. A team like that must be feared, and not just for its enormous talent, but also for its … presence.
Hugging opponents after a hard-fought game is fine and all, as long as some bruises to arms and legs and egos were extended en route.
Even within a team itself, where brotherhood is important, a component the Jazz have worked hard to cultivate, if anyone slacks a bit, someone has to make sure that sort of effort, or lack thereof, is not acceptable, not with everything at stake for a team pounding on the door.
“If you have somebody to knock you in the head,” Paul Millsap once said, “it helps you win.”
Take it, then, from all these folks who know.
Being tough enough is the thing for this iteration of the Jazz.
As long as health accompanies it, the talent is there, as are the overall capabilities and the coaching. The Jazz should be adorable no more. The question is, is the toughness, in all its shapes and forms, there, too? What are the players willing to do, to be, in order to climb to the top? The basketball world, far beyond Salt Lake City, awaits their answer.
