He would need to take on the role of mentor and to guide the Jazz’s young players through a strange season and make sure that development was possible despite game results. His role in the locker room was the priority. He was going to play a little bit, not a lot, and the level of his on-court production was not necessarily important. He was angry, and that anger didn’t help the already tense locker room.Īnd while there’s always multiple sides to every story - from Gay’s perspective he was brought into the fold and told that he would have a big role, that he would be playing and that he was needed - the fact is that Gay did not live up to expectations for the 2021-22 Jazz.Ĭoming into the 2022-23 season, with a different coach, a different roster of players and different overall expectations for the team, Gay was given an entirely different role.

Gay lost his spot in the rotation in 2022 and didn’t play at all during the Jazz’s playoff run. This season, Gay was neither expected to play well nor to contribute to winning, and that really changes the way that we should look at how he fared.

“Rudy Gay was billed as the player that was going to solve a lot of the Jazz’s problems and then he turned out to not solve any of them.” In the 2022 offseason, when looking back at the performance of the players on the Utah Jazz roster, I gave Rudy Gay a D for his contributions and said this:

When evaluating an NBA player’s performance, expectations matter. Editor’s note: Seventh in a series evaluating and grading every player that was on the Jazz’s final 2022-23 roster.

Rudy simone