Utah Jazz

The NBA franchise that runs as a major narrative thread through Driven, the autobiography of Larry H. Miller. Miller bought the team from Sam Battistone — racing to commit before a loan deadline — and on May 10, 1985, “some three months after receiving the Jazz’s letter,” officially became part-owner of an NBA franchise. He framed the purchase against his own reputation: people held “two different perceptions—one of a successful Larry Miller and one of a crazy Larry Miller for attempting this,” and when asked which was right, he replied, “Only history will tell.” The Jazz, along with the arena that became the Delta Center, sat inside a Larry H. Miller Group of roughly 90 companies — but as a piece of Capital Allocation it was sui generis: Miller noted owners “don’t get in this business to make money,” and that if the Jazz were a Toyota dealership “they would have been only our fourth-largest Toyota store in terms of annual revenue in 2008.”

In the book the team is also the clearest measure of how Miller’s work ethic cost him. His wife Gail recalls that after a loss “you couldn’t talk to him at home”; he agonized that fans “weren’t getting their money’s worth.” Most poignantly, his all-consuming busyness made him miss “the greatest moment in the Jazz’s history: John Stockton’s last-second shot in Houston that sent us to our first NBA Finals in 1997.” His devotion ran to the end — after a terminal calciphylaxis diagnosis, told he had only days if he stopped care, Miller interrupted the doctor to ask, “How did the Jazz do last night?”

Context: The Utah Jazz are an NBA franchise based in Salt Lake City, owned by the Larry H. Miller family from 1985 until 2020. The Stockton-to-Malone teams reached the NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998.

Where this appears

• Driven — the franchise Larry H. Miller bought from Sam Battistone (1985); a centerpiece of the book’s arc on reputation, the economics of sports ownership, and the family cost of his work obsession.