{"id":746195,"date":"2026-05-28T13:00:46","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T13:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/746195\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T13:00:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T13:00:46","slug":"ryan-smith-is-building-the-jazz-mammoth-around-utahs-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/746195\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Smith is building the Jazz, Mammoth, around Utah\u2019s identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The initial round of Ryan Smith\u2019s Utah Jazz rebrand didn\u2019t go according to plan. That is, unless the plan was to make Walker Kessler visible from space while simultaneously removing any concept of \u201cdesign\u201d from the team\u2019s identity.<\/p>\n

\"Utah<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler\/NBAE via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Highlighter yellow on a bed of black. The new threads in Utah were clearly hideous and universally panned as perhaps the worst primary uniforms in all of professional basketball. A harsh overcorrection from new ownership, which saw the Jazz\u2019s seemingly endless color palette and determined that this basketball organization needed something that had been slowly fading away: identity.<\/p>\n

They knew this, of course. In the immediate aftermath of Utah\u2019s rebranding fiasco \u2014 a crime of fashion, if you will \u2014 the team quickly scraped together an even newer rebranding announcement: purple is back.<\/p>\n

Thank the basketball gods for that.<\/p>\n

Paired alongside an all-new colorway for the Jazz was an anchoring thread that desperately held the organization to its early roots. Fans hated the State of Deseret-themed yellow-and-black apparel, but couldn\u2019t get enough of the purple alternates. The ugly rebrand was overtaken by the return of the purple mountains\u2019 majesty, and a second round of rebranding gave way to perhaps the most beautiful set of uniforms in the entire NBA.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Getty Images<\/p>\n

Purple and white, with a powder-blue accent, is a winning combination. The nerdy girl just took off her glasses, and now she\u2019s turning heads in the hallway. Utah found its identity, and it is hot!<\/p>\n

With this in mind, a recent quote from owner Ryan Smith caught my attention.<\/p>\n

Recalling his conversation with Gail Miller amidst the process of purchasing Utah\u2019s NBA franchise from its owners of 35 years<\/a>, Smith shared the following:<\/p>\n

\u201cGail sat us down multiple times,\u201d Smith remembered. \u201cA little bit like \u2018buyer beware, are you guys sure you know what you\u2019re getting into? [\u2026] I know you\u2019re going to do it differently than us, but you care about Utah, and you\u2019re going to keep [the Jazz] here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we\u2019ve thought about what our \u2018why\u2019 is, and Utah is a big piece of that, and probably the biggest piece and our community. When you see the Mammoth on the screen, it says \u2018Utah\u2019 as opposed to \u2018Mammoth\u2019. [\u2026] It\u2019s not by accident that \u2018Utah\u2019 is on the jersey. This was all thought through to the \u2018why\u2019 for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason why the Utah Mammoth hockey team displays the word \u201cUtah\u201d and not \u201cMammoth\u201d on their uniforms \u2014 both home and away. A closer look at the Jazz\u2019s newest round of redesigns shares that same pattern; the word \u201cJazz\u201d is nowhere to be found. Ryan Smith has been effusive in his belief in the Beehive State as a national stage.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In his eyes, there is much more to Utah than the greatest snow on Earth; Utah isn\u2019t the exclusive, impenetrable zone that larger markets like LA, New York, Miami, etc. often believe it to be.<\/p>\n

The Jazz and Mammoth are ambassadors for a Utah community that Smith holds dear to his heart, and that community is the driving force in his teams\u2019 identities.<\/p>\n

Calvin Barrett<\/a> is a writer, editor, and prolific Mario Kart racer located in Tokyo, Japan. He has covered the NBA<\/a> and College Sports<\/a> since 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The initial round of Ryan Smith\u2019s Utah Jazz rebrand didn\u2019t go according to plan. That is, unless the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3785],"tags":[7,423,37786,6,422,427,3972],"class_list":["post-746195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-utah-jazz","tag-basketball","tag-jazz","tag-jazz-news","tag-nba","tag-utah","tag-utah-jazz","tag-utahjazz"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116652336000434713","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}