The Utah Jazz are facing the most elevated expectations that they’ve faced since the days of John Stockton, Karl Malone and Jerry Sloan. Sure, they’ve had some good teams in between with the likes of Deron Williams, Carlos Boozer and Mehmet Okur, and even the squad of Gordon Hayward, George Hill and Rudy Gobert was expected to (and in many ways did) do great things.
But after the incredible rise of Donovan Mitchell, the continued ascent of Rudy Gobert and the ultra-aggressive summer the Jazz pulled off which included adding Mike Conley and Bojan Bogdanovic to their ranks, suddenly, just making the playoffs isn’t good enough anymore.