Will the Utah Jazz take home any season awards?

More than two months after the final game of the 2017-18 NBA regular season, the day has finally come for the 2018 NBA Awards Show! Who will take home the MVP award? How painful will the presentation of the awards be to watch? Why does the NBA wait until the middle of the offseason to give out awards that should’ve been over with in April? All these questions are about to be answered! (Except the last one, no one has an answer to that.)

The biggest question for the Utah Jazz tonight is will this finally be the year that the season award drought in Salt Lake City ends? There’s a good chance, with the Jazz having three finalists for the awards: Donovan Mitchell for Rookie of the Year, Rudy Gobert for Defensive Player of the Year and Quin Snyder for Coach of the Year. Rudy seems most likely to take home his respective award, and Donovan Mitchell made his thoughts on the matter clear on a recent appearance on J.J. Redick’s podcast, where he had this to say:

Do I want to win it? Yes. Do I think I will? Probably not. But I won the award from my peers, so I don’t care what analysts think. They’re not the ones who have to guard me.

Speaking of our rookie extraordinaire, Mitchell showed off another new piece of personalized Adidas apparel yesterday. His followup to the (maybe, possibly, definitely a dig at Ben Simmons) rookie definition shirt is another definition shirt, this time defining his nickname, Spida.

It reads: “A basketball species, usually found above the rim; equipped with superhuman senses, shot-slinging abilities and unrivaled bounce.”

It’s an awesome shirt, and with all that Adidas is already doing with Donovan, you have to think a signature shoe will be coming along sooner than later.

Speaking of basketball players and clothing, Mitchell’s shirt wasn’t the only piece of apparel that made some waves online yesterday. Jazz Twitter was briefly aflame after a video was published by SLAM online of LeBron in the crowd watching his son Bronny’s game. LeBron is wearing a backwards white baseball cap in the video, but in a brief moment when he turns his head, a logo is visible that had Jazz fans squinting their eyes, turning their heads and trying to contain their excitement.

It’s small and low quality, but at first glance it certainly appeared to be a Jazz note logo. The speculation didn’t last long, though, as it was quickly realized that it was just a Nike logo with the swoosh under the wordmark, as pointed out by Twitter user @stvnprk:

Look, is LeBron coming to Utah? Probably not. Will Jazz fans still talk about it until the moment he signs elsewhere? Absolutely.

We all have our fingers crossed for Rudy to complete his DPOY quest tonight, but in the meantime Deseret News writer Eric Woodyard dropped a great piece about something that helped fuel the Stifle Tower’s dominant defensive campaign this season. It’s all about charity.

In October, Gobert launched his Rudy’s Kids Foundation. Instead of promoting it with a standard press conference or media-friendly event, he took a unique approach.

For every blocked shot during selected games, the foundation would donate $1,000 to select charities — and not just in Utah. The Sacramento Children’s Home and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Houston were a couple of the recipients of Gobert’s public non-profit foundation in opposing cites from those March 3 and May 8 performances.

Rudy is a franchise cornerstone on the court and a community and humanity cornerstone off it. Give the article a read.

In former Jazzman news, a couple of former Jazz coaches found new gigs over the weekend.

As a head coach, Ty Corbin left something to be desired. However, it’s my (probably unpopular) opinion that he’s a pretty good assistant coach. That seems to be apparent in the fact that he keeps finding jobs on NBA sidelines.

As for Sidney Lowe, well, he’s good for some defense in the corner every once in a while, I guess.