Careful, now...

As Jazz fans, we are all devastated to see Deron go. We have watched him grow and flourish. He has gone from absurdly underrated to league-wide appreciation under our watchful eyes. And now he is gone. It is too bad, but as a fan and as a Utah native, I will still cheer for the Jazz. To me, the team is not constructed of any number of specific players or coaches, but rather as a collection of those two as well as fans, memories, perceptions, and emotions. No removal of any one piece or of any combination of pieces changes that meaning, which spans across multiple dimensions and is manifested in different materials.

One concern I have is the backlash against Williams. Was he frustrating at times? Certainly. Was he uncomfortably close to the Sloan retirement? Yes. He was also, however, a Jazz player and a champion at heart. He had a great relationship with fans, tried hard, was incredibly competitive, and did not mix with national media. What is more Jazz than that? Let us remember the good times and not blame him for a trade that he did not ask for. Furthermore, I do not like the tone of many rebukes aimed at Deron. From slcdunk.com, the premier Jazz blog for content, there have been a number of posts that discuss putting Deron in his place, demanding that he respect the front office and the state of Utah and so forth. These paint him as some LeBron character, who held the franchise hostage. That is absurd and revisionist. It is a convenient narrative to paint over a painful reality. Kevin O'Connor is actually very mediocre. He drafts horribly in first rounds, and drafting is the only thing that has made the Jazz good in the past. Furthermore, he does not take responsibility in interviews when the team plays poorly and instead blames coaching and player effort. None of this is very Jazz like. It was his decision to shop Deron and it was he who called Miller to push the trade. So please leave Deron out of it.

I also will not stand for what I consider to be racial undertones throughout this process. Forcing Deron to show respect to the state and to respect a front office (one that has not earned any respect from my perspective) and other quips of this nature seem to me echoes of an earlier and uglier time in Jazz history in which white players were loved for their hard work, loyalty, team spirit, and dedication, and black players were begrudgingly accepted due to their natural basketball talents. LeBron's backlash was deserved to some extent, but not the racial slurs that people threw at him via twitter. Deron's trade was neither self-initiated, even if that narrative is more comfortable to deal with, nor was it due to some characteristics in which he did not show proper respect to the state or to management. It was an unfortunate mismanagement that led us here and let us remember history as it actually happened.