This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Deron Williams reappeared this week in the Jazz's lives, ruining their season and reminding everyone how long the franchise has gone without winning a playoff game.
The clock expired Wednesday for the 2015-16 Jazz, whose playoff hopes ended before they took the court in Los Angeles for their last regular-season game. The calendar keeps moving, six years after Williams and Carlos Boozer led the Jazz past Denver in the clinching Game 6 of a first-round playoff series.
Houston's predictable rout of Sacramento officially knocked the Jazz out of the playoffs. Dallas pretty much had done so Monday, when D-Will's presence illustrated how the franchise faces a continuing struggle to reach the level of the Williams-Boozer era — which nobody thought was good enough, remember? Boozer left as a free agent in the summer of 2010 and Williams was traded in February 2011.
If Detroit and Charlotte win playoff games this month, only the Jazz, Sacramento and Minnesota will remain winless in the past six years. The Jazz's four-year run of missing the playoffs matches the franchise's longest period in Utah without a postseason appearance, going back to the first four seasons (1979-83).
The Jazz's operation was a joke in those early years, in contrast to the current strategy. Six years without a playoff victory, though? That's unacceptable, and that's why nobody should declare this season a success.
Coach Quin Snyder salvaged a potentially horrible year, overcoming injuries and staying in the race until the final day of the season. Yet the way everything played out in the Western Conference, the No. 6 seed remained available to the Jazz this week and only 42 wins were required to make the playoffs. The lowered standard makes this a missed opportunity, especially when all it may have taken was Derrick Favors' grabbing a rebound in the final three seconds of regulation against the Los Angeles Clippers last week.
The Jazz were 26-26 at the All-Star break, when they were getting healthy and adding point guard Shelvin Mack, but they couldn't even go 16-14 after that. The injuries are not a fully satisfying explanation for a finish that fueled fans' impatience and frustration.
One disclaimer in this discussion: D-Will's history defeats my argument that playoff experience would have been valuable for the current team, because he won Game 7 of a first-round series in Houston in his first postseason appearance in 2007 after barely missing the playoffs in his rookie year.
So what's lost? Just a taste of the playoff atmosphere that we all miss around here. There's no guarantee the losing streak would have ended, but the games would have been fun — even against Golden State or San Antonio, and the Jazz would have been competitive with Oklahoma City. Nothing unites the Salt Lake Valley or even the entire state like the Jazz's being in the playoffs, and something's amiss when they stop playing in mid-April.
When the Jazz make the playoffs next year, I don't want to hear about their lack of postseason experience. They obviously could have given themselves that opportunity this year. And I wanted to find out right now how Snyder would have responded in his first playoff setting, and how Gordon Hayward would have played in his return to the postseason.
The Jazz made 9 of 33 shots from 3-point range Monday, and those numbers resonated with me. That was Hayward's exact shooting performance during San Antonio's four-game sweep in 2012. And he's not the only player I would have been curious about in the playoffs. Rodney Hood is another, after he struggled in losses to the Spurs, Clippers and Mavericks down the stretch. Favors, Mack, Rudy Gobert and Alec Burks also would have made the Jazz's playoff appearance interesting, regardless of how long it lasted.
Instead, all that's ahead is another summer of promises about the future, amid the unfulfilled possibilities of the present.
Twitter: @tribkurt