Utah Jazz: Roots of Utah's team planted in New Orleans

Utah Jazz fans are very familiar with Hot Rod Hundley's pet name for the long shot, "from the parking lot."

Most longtime Utah fans know it as the call Hundley used for those Darrell Griffith bombs.

But before the words fit Griffith's lengthy rainbows, Hundley used them to describe Aaron James' jumpers in 1974-75, the first year of the Jazz franchise in New Orleans.

James was a second-round New Orleans Jazz draft pick from Grambling, and it was before the NBA adopted the 3-point shot. But Hundley, the radio voice of the Jazz all these years, recalls, "He would have buried them from back there" if he'd had a 3-point shot then. "He could really shoot it deep.

"When he'd take a shot, I'd say, 'A.J. from the parking lot,"' said Hundley, reminiscing about that first Jazz season.

"A.J. would fire from so far out, I couldn't believe it. He was out in the parking lot.

"They made T-shirts up like that. They parked cars out in the parking lot, with A.J. shooting above it, elevated in the center of a basketball crowd, and he's got the shot going, and it says, 'A.J. from the parking lot."'

"There's a lot of memories," agrees David Fredman, back with the Jazz again as their chief college scout after a time in the front offices of the Denver Nuggets and the D-League Utah Flash. "A lot of them good, and a lot not so good."

Fredman joined the Jazz in their first year of existence as what he calls a "go-fer." In today's terms, he'd have been an intern, still a college student. He told Bill Bertka, then the team's president of basketball operations, that he'd do anything to get into pro sports, and Bertka liked his attitude.

Bertka had also lured his friend Hundley to New Orleans with more money than Hundley was making as an on-the-air analyst for the Phoenix Suns. Hundley took the job without ever having been to New Orleans, then had second thoughts as his cabbie refused to turn on the air conditioning because it would cost him money, and a sweating Hundley observed the dirty streets for the first time through open cab windows.

Fredman overheard "bad conversations to bill collectors" in the New Orleans offices of the Jazz, and he talks of some of those early games when the Jazz played most of the time at the Loyola University Fieldhouse, which had a raised court, "almost like a stage."

"The players' association was concerned about that, and they made them put a net around the court so players couldn't fall off into the stands. I'll always remember that," Fredman said.

"You look back at those days, and you go, 'wow."'