jimmy eat jazz
Well-Known Member
Welcome to Jazz Fanz 2011, where with no evidence, a small contingent of Jazz fans have decided to boo their star point guard.
If done, will this act push Williams in the direction of leaving the team? And if he does leave the team under those pretenses, will any other black player ever want to play on this team again? A team who's fan base turned on their star player in quick fashion. It's obvious that the days of innocent until proven guilty are long gone and now one is tried in the media and on the internets.
Jazz fans as a whole have always felt marginalized by the rest of the league and the sports media world. This much is true. But will that feeling of marginalization be the catalyst for the demise of the franchise as a whole?
The major sports interweb sites have all but blamed Williams without so much as a concrete fact, while the front office, the ownership and the player have all spoke to the contrary. In complete "ironical explosion" fashion, the mainstream sports media which Jazz fans have felt so marginalized by, is now accepted as the truth teller.
Welcome to Utah.
"Innocent until proven guilty" applies to courts of law, not to public opinion. It's a principle oft quoted but seldom practiced.
That said, I think it's foolish to boo D-Will. He didn't do anything intentionally to drive Sloan away. He and Sloan butted heads, but so too did Sloan butt heads with Malone and other players over the years, at times likely as bad or worse than with Williams. Sloan appears to have decided that it's not worth it anymore. Sloan's relationship with his players hasn't changed; what's changed is Sloan's willingness to grind through it like he used to.
I don't know whether booing Deron will drive him away, but I can guarantee that as a franchise we we will be materially worse off without Deron (or without a superstar) than we would be with a slightly used up iconic coach and no Deron.