SALT LAKE CITY — Rudy Gobert’s appeal lies in his quiet but smoldering intensity. When Gordon Hayward left for Boston, Gobert turned the next season into an affirmation. He filled a leadership role Hayward never embraced.
But respect can be elusive; in the last two weeks, the Jazz center made headlines for a perceived lack of it. He felt he was being held, hacked and endangered while officials looked away. Gobert hinted at retaliating against opponents, darkly predicting things were about to “get ugly.”
The controlled burn that turned him from an unpolished rookie into the league’s most feared defender was becoming, in firefighting terminology, a “blow-up.