Athletes are incredibly habitual. It’s true that the mark of a great athlete is an ability to adapt and adjust, but make no mistake, they really like it when things are routine and predictable.
The problem is, sometimes when things stay the same, they can grow a little stale.
At the beginning of the 2023-24 NBA season, the Utah Jazz had a group of players starting that had mostly played with each other last season. The familiarity was a source of comfort for many of the players on the team.
Obviously with John Collins and the incoming rookies, the Jazz were trying to incorporate some new members of the rosters and they were going through some of the normal growing pains that come with that. But there were also issues cropping up that couldn’t be attributed to acclimation of new players.
There were spacing issues that were clearly an issue of fit, there was stagnation and more often than not after losses everyone mentioned how communication needed improvement.
Jazz coach Will Hardy is not afraid of change or experimentation, but also understands that the ecosystem of a locker room is delicate. So, one of things he really wanted the team to buy into, especially as he saw that things were a little off, was that everyone was going to need to be flexible.
The memo was clear — nothing is set in stone. That goes for starting lineups, closing lineups, rotations, length of playing stretches, positional use and number of minutes from one night to the next.
So Hardy started to tinker with the lineups and rotations, initiating some of the experimentation that has been so prevalent this season. He implemented a number of different types of defense, forcing the players to ramp up how much they were talking on the court. Then a slew of injuries hit the Jazz, one after another, and experimenting with rotations and lineups became a thing of necessity.
The silver lining was that even though Hardy was forced to try out a lot more than he had anticipated, he found a lot that worked along the way.