Monson: Jazz did more than beat LeBron — they made basketball fun again

All you had to do was look at their faces.

And you knew, pro basketball in Salt Lake City is fun again.

At long last.

It's been awhile.

When Gordon Hayward hit his buzzer-beating game-winner, a shot that needed a proper name — Bomb On LeBron? — Wednesday night, giving the Jazz a 102-100 win against the Cleveland Cavs at EnergySolutions Arena, he stood for a second or two in isolated glory. He bent his knees, leaned backward, clenched his fists and stared heavenward.

If you looked close enough, you could almost make out a beam of light splashing down on his countenance and on the ground all around him. It was as though, in that one moment, all the frustration at so much losing left over from a year ago, all that heavy lifting he couldn't quite heft by himself in 50-whatever losses, was washed away and replaced by something else, by not just new hope, rather by the realization of new hope.

And that realization brought a deafening roar from the crowd.

Just as his teammates swarmed him, some sprinting from the team's bench, Hayward did what they were all doing. He did something he almost never does at the end of a game. He grinned. He might have even laughed. No, he exulted.

There hasn't been a whole lot of exulting around here lately.

There's been a lot of talk of growth, of patience and potential, of a promising future sometime off in the distance somewhere, talk of what that future might be, could be, would be. Well, for one night at least, that future was now. What it could be was what it actually was.

And the kids relished it.

Trey Burke joyously bumped into Hayward. So did Derrick Favors and Trevor Booker. Dante Exum and Enes Kanter and Alec Burks galloped over. Everybody jumped in the pool. It looked like one of those old Western cartoons where a moving cloud envelops a group of characters rumbling around, with stars and punctuation points and assorted body parts randomly emanating/sticking out as the cloud rolls back and forth across a parched, dusty road.

In that moment, not one of the Jazz players looked or acted like cool, modern multimillionaire athletes, like greedy mercenaries, like guys who cared more about themselves than their teammates. They looked more like kids on a playground, stacking themselves in a dog-pile, having more fun than any full-grown adult could imagine.

Except that everyone else in the building, from 9 to 90, was doing the verbal equivalent of a dog-pile, too. They were grinning and laughing right along with Hayward and the fellas. They were slamming their palms together, bumping fists, raising arms over their heads, jumping up and down and screaming like maniacs, like they had just been let out for recess from math class, after Mr. Fuddpucker had crammed two hours of times tables and long division into their weary brains.

Free at last, free at last.

So what if the Jazz are 2-3. They just toppled the King. They beat LeBron James and the team favored by Vegas to win the freaking NBA title. And they did it with style, with the kind of unselfish ball movement Quin Snyder has been preaching since he arrived in Utah last spring. They did it with execution and energy and with just enough defense. The Jazz totaled 26 assists. The Cavs got six. The Jazz shot 50 percent. The Cavs hit 41 percent. The Jazz got 41 boards. The Cavs got 30. The Jazz beat the Cavs, despite going to the line 18 fewer times.

It mattered not one bit to anyone on hand that Cleveland had been smoked the night before in Portland, or that afterward, ESPN devoted full segments to LeBron's and the Cavs' loss and only a few nanoseconds to Hayward's and the Jazz's victory.

This win ran much deeper than just the peripheral stuff.

It ran to heart and poise and confidence and clutch play. It reminded a young group what the payoff is. How rewarding the payoff is, even when the play itself is imperfect, which it most definitely was in this particular case. If losing feels worse than winning feels good, everybody sort of overlooked that little bromide on this occasion. Whether the victory was transformative … well, that will be determined, in part, starting Friday night against Dallas.

Either way, point of fact is, this Jazz team is a gas to watch. They are nobody's darlings, nobody's sleeper pick in the tough West. They won't make the playoffs. They'll lose more than they'll win. They'll get some games at home and suffer defeat a lot on the road. They're young and learning, a bunch of guys who are finding out for themselves how good they can be. But watching their evolution is fascinating and fun — for players and for partisans, even for pundits. They're an easy team — win or lose — for the basketball fans of Utah to root for.

It's been awhile since anybody said that.

The grins Wednesday night shouted it.

It's been far too long.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM/1280 and 960 AM The Zone.

Twitter: @GordonMonson.