No. 1: Healthy and trying to prove people wrong
It may be more than halfway into the season, but for the most part, the Jazz finally have a fully healthy team for the first time of the 2017-18 campaign.
As a team that had injuries to key players such as Rudy Gobert, Derrick Favors, Rodney Hood, Joe Johnson and more, Utah finally got all of those players back on the floor together in January for the first time since basically the start of the season.
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What had the biggest impact were the two separate knee injuries suffered by Gobert. But Gobert returned — hopefully for good — on Jan. 19, and the Jazz have in return tallied a 7-2 record in those nine games.
Another aspect to the turnaround in Salt Lakes City is Utah’s mission to try and prove people wrong.
Less than a month of go, the Jazz looked to be finding their permanent place in the bottom half of the Western Conference standings, basically starting a free-fall to join the bottom teams in the conference.
That sparked many to begin to think — and continue to think — that Utah would start to blow things up and turn into sellers before the NBA trade deadline on Feb. 8.
But that seemed to kickstart something for the Jazz, including surprising improvement by two players who have had their names in and out of trade rumors in Rodney Hood and Ricky Rubio.
There’s no denying it, one of the biggest reasons Utah has begun to turn things around is it being healthy, and now the Jazz are starting to even play with some fire underneath them.