Utah Jazz coach Will Hardy jokes that the other coaches in the league have assistant coaches that will come after them and pull them away and calm them down when the head coach gets angry at the officials during a game, but he doesn’t have someone that will do that on his staff. The reason? Well, they don’t want to stop him from getting ejected and ruin the hilarity of the situation.
When I recently mentioned that assistant coach Lamar Skeeter sometimes comes after Hardy when he approaches officials, Hardy laughed.
“Lamar comes up and just kind of wants to be nearby,” Hardy said. “You could go back and watch, no one has ever come up and grabbed me and said like, ‘Hey, you’re good, you’re good, back off.’”
But if Hardy is being honest, he’s also kind of looking forward to being ejected from an NBA game for the first time. He’s hopeful that it happens at the Delta Center because he thinks Jazz fans would enjoy it, that it would energize them and the team in the right situation.
So far, though, Hardy has been a long way from an ejection. He has eight technical fouls to his name this season, which he thinks feels like the right number.
As someone who watches Hardy coach every game, I have to respectfully disagree. There have been times that he has cursed or continued to yell at officials long after a play and has used insults and not received a technical, and in those instances I’ve been pretty surprised.
My theory on why Hardy doesn’t have more technicals is twofold. I think that he’s been given a little bit of grace during his first two seasons at the helm of the Jazz. As he acclimates to the head coaching world, I think he’s been given some warnings that later could be harsher penalties. The second part of my theory is that Hardy is a really affable person and he has a pretty good relationship with many of the officials, and I think that gives him some latitude in the heat of the moment.
Of course, these are just my theories.
“It’s never personal, I never end up in a spot where I feel like the referees and I have a bad relationship,” Hardy said. “I mean, some of the guys who have given me the most technicals are guys that I have the best relationships with. It’s just part of (the) job.”
The way that Hardy sees back-and-forth with officials is different depending on the team and type of players. If a team has star players who are extroverted and feel comfortable taking on the officials in heated moments, then they carry more of the responsibility. But the Jazz don’t really have players right now who take that on regularly.
“If each team has 100 units of fighting with the ref, some teams their star players doing 60 and then their secondary players doing 20 and that leaves 20 for the coach,” Hardy said. “With our team, I’ve got like 95 and that’s just the reality of it. And I’ve explained this to the officials this year and they’re great about it.”
I think that supports my theory that communication and relationships with the officials have benefitted Hardy. Either way, we can all agree that we are waiting for the moment that pushes Hardy to go just a little too far. And I agree with him; hopefully it’s at the Delta Center.
