Inside the Bond Between Two Seven-Footers in Utah

Welcome to the Morning Shootaround, where every weekday you’ll get a fresh, topical column from one of SI.com’s NBA writers: Howard Beck on Mondays, Chris Mannix on Tuesdays, Michael Pina on Wednesdays, Chris Herring on Thursdays and Rohan Nadkarni on Fridays.

Last March, with the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering the NBA and Rudy Gobert publicly targeted as the reason why, Mark Eaton fired off a few text messages to his seven-foot friend.

“I just told him to hang in there and that it would pass,” Eaton, the ex-Jazz center, said in a telephone interview. “I think looking back if it wasn’t him, it was going to be somebody else within the next day or two that was going to kick it off. I just kind of…