Jazz whiffed on Corbin. But they also paid him the agreed-upon salary, so I find it difficult to feel bad for him. Transition is hard for everyone, and there is always loss and upheaval with transition. He was just the wrong guy at the wrong time. But he's still coaching, and ultimately he owes the Jazz a lot for the career he has. He will always have an assistant position in the NBA, which is still a very exclusive club to be a part of (and be compensated for).
Hopefully he has since found a better tailor. Some of his suits were approaching the effect of
Jorge Oteiza's post-modern abstract work.
More good news: The Jazz reverted to a hierarchical mechanism during the Sloan/Williams fiasco of 2011, which resulted in them going with Corbin instead of Hornacek. Had they bypassed Corbin, we would now be feeding off of the nostalgic pablum of observing Hornacek's post-Sloan career unfold. Which is not to say that I think Jeff would do a bad job (not at all). But it would be a continuum of Sloan's (via Dick Motta) coaching philosophy, which was great but had its limitations.
Hornacek is not necessarily a Sloan clone. And the players we have now would most certainly have benefited from his experience and philosophy. But the quality and attention to detail that accompanies the philosophy that we get with Snyder is just a little more valuable, IMO. This is because it descends from Popovich's coaching tree instead of Motta's.
Popovich has always professed praise and respect for Sloan, and rightfully so. But he has also won championships amid all of that lip service while Jerry won none. Talent had plenty to do with that, but there is something else there: Sloan's teams always relied on execution and toughness while implementing a rigid routine when it came to his rotations. Popovich's rotations have been far more cerebral and adaptive over the years, attending to hot hands, mismatches, and an ability to wield the 3-point shot as a legit weapon (instead of as a last resort) in a much more fluid approach. The results were teams with much more freedom and confidence to go along with a similar standard of execution and toughness. So we are only talking about small differences in the details, but those differences have yielded awesome results by comparison.
I am much more happy to have switched to Gregg's philosophy and approach via Quin Snyder. The Jazz' failings under Corbin were painful, but the new course that the franchise has set out on by hiring Quinn promises to be superior to what we have traditionally ended up with under Motta's basketball rationale. Corbin was a casualty of this transition, but it's not like he lost a limb in the process.