Utah Jazz

New Orleans had no shortage of music to name a basketball team after, which is why the choice made sense on 7 June 1974 and stopped making sense five years later. Financial trouble in Louisiana — an 11% entertainment tax among the reasons — pushed the franchise out of the Superdome and into Salt Lake City in June 1979. The name came with it. Nobody renamed the club, and Utah has been home to a team called the Jazz ever since, a mismatch nobody outside the state much comments on anymore.

The Jazz have never won a championship. What they built instead, across the 1980s and 1990s, was a run defined by two names who stayed: John Stockton and Karl Malone, both drafted into a system built by Jerry Sloan and both still there when it ended, in 2003. That continuity took the club to the NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998, losing both times to the Chicago Bulls — and the two Western Conference titles it has to show alongside eleven division championships stretching from 1984 to 2022.

The arena has changed names more often than the roster has changed cities. Known now as the Delta Center, it holds 19,911 and has carried other sponsors' names in between. The purple has stayed constant enough to be the club's shorthand, refreshed most recently in June 2024 alongside black, sky blue and grey.

None of it carries the weight of the rivalry with the Los Angeles Lakers, sharpened in those same Stockton-and-Malone years into what got called the Battle for the Bottle — a fight, more often than not, for the Pacific Division and a reminder of just how far Utah's best teams still had to reach to get past Los Angeles.