Jazz’s Will Hardy reveals biggest piece of advice to young core amid tanked season

With the NBA Playoffs long out of reach and NBA Draft lottery odds the only scoreboard that matters, Will Hardy has shifted his message to a young Utah Jazz roster. Forget rigid scripts. Think for yourselves. The Jazz want their players to become decision-makers, independent thinkers capable of directing their own careers. Speaking after the All-Star break, Hardy laid out a philosophy that stands in stark contrast to the hyper-structured world of modern NBA player development.

The Jazz, sitting near the bottom of the Western Conference with one of the league’s worst records, are leaning into the realities of a rebuild. Wins are scarce. Minutes for the young core are plentiful. They need to find out who has the capacity to seize control, rather than simply follow orders.

“With all of our young players, we are encouraging them to be free thinkers about their own career, about their own development,” Hardy explained. “It’s about who they want to be as people, where they want to end up as players, because I think in today’s world, we have so many individual trainers. We have strength coaches, and staffs have gotten bigger.”

The alternative, Hardy warned, is a dangerous passivity.

“So it can be easy for players,” admitted Hardy, “if they’d like, to check their phone, see the schedule that’s laid out for them. They come to the facility and get what they should have for breakfast. We say here’s the vitamins you should take. They go into the weight room, and it’s two sets of something with eight reps of each. We got on the court and tell them where to shoot. They can go all day without making a decision for themselves.”

That hands-off existence, Hardy believes, carries long-term risk. One day, the structure vanishes. Free agency arrives, a trade means joining a new team, or life after basketball has to be considered. Players discover they never learned how to steer their own ship.

“That can be a slippery slope,” Hardy noted, “because there will be a day they realize they have no control over what they’re doing.”

Hardy was careful not to prescribe a single solution. Agency, he acknowledged, is not something every young player is immediately ready to embrace.

“I think it’s a case-by-case basis, but it’s one we have to encourage all of our athletes to think about,” Hardy shared. “As you get further along in your process, some guys may feel taking that agency. Certain people may not want to take that agency because they are not sure what to do with it.”

In a season defined by tanking allegations (the Jazz were fined $500,000 by the NBA earlier this month for resting healthy players in ways the league deemed detrimental), Hardy’s approach doubles as both practical and philosophical. With little to lose in the standings, the franchise can afford to let players experiment, fail, and adjust on their own terms. The goal is not to manufacture more losses but to manufacture more self-reliant pros who will thrive when the franchise eventually contends again.

Whether every player embraces the freedom remains to be seen. Hardy acknowledged that some will crave the comfort of a printed schedule. However, in a rebuild where the future far outweighs the present, the Jazz are betting that the ones who do step up and decide for themselves will be the ones who matter most when the tank finally ends.

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