On November 22, Will Hardy found himself in the bowels of the Moda Center, speaking with the media following Utah's 121-105 loss to the Trail Blazers. It was there that his frustration with himself and the team had finally come to a head.
"That was ugly," he said. "I just want them to take the same responsibility and ownership over this program. If you're gonna wear a Utah Jazz jersey, you've got to give a s**t about the Utah Jazz."
Hardy quickly made it known that it wasn't just the players he was holding accountable. Everyone within the locker room was to blame.
"This is collective," he added. "I'm with them, and they know that. … I go home after every game, win or loss, and I am constantly beating myself up about things that I did or didn't do."
Fast forward to the present, and three weeks later, Hardy once again found himself in that same room. However, this time, the postgame message had a slightly different tone.
"A really good team win on the second end of a back-to-back on the road," he said following Utah's 122-114 win Thursday night. "I thought everybody was connected, especially defensively. … Offensively, I thought the ball moved around great tonight. A lot of people had their moments. … It was a fun team win, I'm happy for the guys."
To figure out what changed over the past three weeks, you need to start at the beginning. Not the beginning of the season, but back to when Hardy was hired on June 29, 2022, and everything that has transpired since then.
"Coming into the season, I felt like we were a team that had hit the reset button 15 months ago," Hardy said. "We want to become a championship team. … And with that comes some pain. With that comes some hard moments, some tough lessons, and some crashing the car a little bit to learn how to win at a high level. We're in a phase right now trying to get the baseline parts down and make those consistent before we can move to the next step."
In short, championship teams or programs aren't born overnight. They don't come without their fair share of trials and tribulations. There's no magic formula to speed up the process. To be the last team standing, a team must go through darkness to find the light.
"As we are building our team, building our program, we're trying to become a team that's hunting a championship. … And the first thing we have to address is our mindset every night," Hardy said. "Our ultimate goal in Utah is to win a championship. ... Building the foundation, building the habits, and building the core tenets of our program, what we want to represent, takes a lot of work and takes a lot of focus."
It's not that the Jazz emerged from the fateful night in Portland three weeks ago with a new mindset. Instead, they're a team early in the process of self-discovery. They're figuring out the level of work that needs to be done daily to make it habitual.
"There's been a lot of work behind the scenes by our team to address some of the issues that we had earlier in the season, and tonight was a good reflection of the guys understanding that they're a team," Hardy said. "They're all dug in together, they're not making excuses. They're putting in a lot of work offensively and defensively, they're letting us coach them hard. … Nobody is making excuses."
Although nobody is making excuses, they're easy to find.
The Jazz have been hammered by injuries as All-Star Lauri Markkanen, Jordan Clarkson, and Walker Kessler have all missed multiple weeks of games. Add in games missed by prized offseason acquisition John Collins and sixth-man Kelly Olynyk, and it's left Hardy scrambling to find rotations that work while putting players in roles they're unaccustomed to.
Utah has had 13 different players start a game this year, tied for the most in the NBA with the Grizzlies and Heat. Yet, according to Hardy, none of that is an excuse — instead, it's an opportunity for others to step up.
"They understand because we talk very openly as a team. … This is part of the NBA," Hardy said. "The guys want to play, so in some ways, this is their opportunity to get out there and show us what they've got. I think the team has been pretty good about recognizing there's going to be some different lineups, and that they're all going to be put into situations maybe they didn't plan on or we didn't plan on."
While Utah's 9-16 record has put them off the pace of making the postseason this year — a goal nobody was shy about voicing during training camp — Hardy admitted that the team hasn't been good enough. While that may be true, he also added one more word to that sentence to accurately represent where the season is and where it's going.
"I would just add the word 'yet'. … We're not good enough YET," he said. "It's not that you're never going to be good enough. … It's that that's where we are right now or where we are tonight, we weren't good enough to win. I would always just try to spin it with the team because it shows you the level you have to get to. … It shows you why you're working on what you're working on.
"I think by adding just that word 'yet' on the end, it's like we can get there and hope is not lost."