Two truths are on a collision course in the weeks ahead:
• Quin Snyder should be the NBA’s coach of the year.
• The veracity of that claim will not make it happen.
We’ve been down this winding county two-lane before.
You said it, I said it, we all said it in years gone by when Jerry Sloan should have won the league’s top coaching honor. It was as plain as the bent nose on Jerry’s face.
It did no good.
It never happened.
Not once.
Guys like Sam Mitchell instead won it, Avery Johnson won it, Byron Scott won it, Mike Dunleavy won it, Doc Rivers won it, Del Harris won it, Don Chaney won it, Scott Brooks won it.
Even in the Jazz’s best seasons ever, 1996-97 and 1997-98,Sloan missed out, sitting and not saying a word — maybe mumbling a few colorful, countrified complaints to himself — when Pat Riley won it and Larry Bird won it.
As it happened, Sloan would have to be content with landing in the Hall of Fame.
Now it’s Snyder’s turn to let a season’s worth of brilliance speak for itself while voters likely turn a deaf ear, rewarding somebody else.
Consider what the coach has achieved in this, his fourth year with the Jazz.
Before the season started, he lost his only All-Star (Gordon Hayward) and his top two scorers (Hayward and George Hill); by the February trade deadline, he’d lost three of his top four offensive weapons from a year ago and his top scorer this season (Rodney Hood).
Study the Jazz roster at the start of 2017-18 and compare it with the rosters of other Western Conference playoff contenders. Compare the names. In the Jazz’s case, it looks like somebody tilted the league’s junk drawer as a bunch of paper clips, tacks, rubber bands, pencils, erasers, tape dispensers, fingernail files and toenail clippers collected in a heap, alongside a hammer, in a cluttered corner.
Snyder has found use for every bit of that junk. And the hammer, too.
Better said, he’s helped that junk realize it isn’t junk, after all.
It’s pretty damn important, necessary even.
Joe Ingles, for instance, and Ricky Rubio, and Jonas Jerebko and rookie Royce O’Neale and Jae Crowder and Raul Neto and Ekpe Udoh and Alec Burks.
And another rookie, a 13th pick, name of Donovan Mitchell, whose talents were apparent, but that, as a useful contributor, had to be refined and utilized in a manner that benefited the player and his teammates, that had to get past first-year mistakes without too severely damaging and disrupting the greater good.
That coordination and development doesn’t just happen. It occurs via a coach and a group of assistants who work in concert, in deep detail with players on their particular skills and on their blending together — as Snyder says so often, their connectivity — to produce an outfit, a result that extends beyond individual parts.
Throw in the adversity — substantial injuries to that hammer, Rudy Gobert, Dante Exum, Thabo Sefolosha and Neto.
And the distractions — talk that Derrick Favors would be traded (he wasn’t) and Hood (he was) and that Joe Johnson would be let go (he was).
Snyder handled all of it.
He did more than that. He transformed the Jazz down the back-half into one of the most dangerous teams in the league, a team headed not just for the playoffs, but for a postseason position and disposition that few opponents look forward to facing.
The Jazz are performing at a higher level than they did a season ago, and since the end of January, when they heaved and labored at 19-28, have played as well as any Jazz team ever, including Sloan’s best teams. They’ve won 21 of 23 games. They have the best defensive rating of any team by a wide margin, and a better-than-average offensive rating.
Given parameters, their turnaround/playoff push, as recently measured by Mychal Lowman of SLC Dunk, is the greatest transformation on record going back to 1975.
If the Jazz finish at 47-35, which is way conservative considering they were 40-30 heading into Tuesday night’s game against Atlanta, that would make them 28-7 to close the season, the best closing percentage among teams that were at least eight games under .500 as of Jan. 22 over that lengthy span. That’s a finishing winning average of 80 percent. And it could end up even better than that, given the Jazz’s current form.
Who does that?
Nobody, that’s who.
Most folks, indeed, thought the Jazz were nobody before the season started. A hammer and a bunch of junk.
Now they are the hottest team on the planet, led by a coach who, like a man before him who became a legend here, probably couldn’t care less about anybody’s award.
That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t win it.
Gordon Monson hosts “The Big Show” weekdays from 3 to 7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.