The initial round of Ryan Smith’s Utah Jazz rebrand didn’t go according to plan. That is, unless the plan was to make Walker Kessler visible from space while simultaneously removing any concept of “design” from the team’s identity.

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’s seemingly endless color palette and determined that this basketball organization needed something that had been slowly fading away: identity.

They knew this, of course. In the immediate aftermath of Utah’s rebranding fiasco — a crime of fashion, if you will — the team quickly scraped together an even newer rebranding announcement: purple is back.

Thank the basketball gods for that.

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’t get enough of the purple alternates. The ugly rebrand was overtaken by the return of the purple mountains’ majesty, and a second round of rebranding gave way to perhaps the most beautiful set of uniforms in the entire NBA.

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

With this in mind, a recent quote from owner Ryan Smith caught my attention.

Recalling his conversation with Gail Miller amidst the process of purchasing Utah’s NBA franchise from its owners of 35 years, Smith shared the following:

“Gail sat us down multiple times,” Smith remembered. “A little bit like ‘buyer beware, are you guys sure you know what you’re getting into? […] I know you’re going to do it differently than us, but you care about Utah, and you’re going to keep [the Jazz] here.”

“As we’ve thought about what our ‘why’ 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 ‘Utah’ as opposed to ‘Mammoth’. […] It’s not by accident that ‘Utah’ is on the jersey. This was all thought through to the ‘why’ for us.”

There’s a reason why the Utah Mammoth hockey team displays the word “Utah” and not “Mammoth” on their uniforms — both home and away. A closer look at the Jazz’s newest round of redesigns shares that same pattern; the word “Jazz” is nowhere to be found. Ryan Smith has been effusive in his belief in the Beehive State as a national stage.

In his eyes, there is much more to Utah than the greatest snow on Earth; Utah isn’t the exclusive, impenetrable zone that larger markets like LA, New York, Miami, etc. often believe it to be.

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’ identities.

Calvin Barrett is a writer, editor, and prolific Mario Kart racer located in Tokyo, Japan. He has covered the NBA and College Sports since 2024.