The Mitchell Question is Central To Utah’s Post-Gobert Path

Winning without Gobert either means building around #45 — or a massive reset. (via espn.com)

In the 43 seasons the Jazz have belonged to Utah, just three of the franchise’s players have achieved all-league status at least four separate times: Karl Malone (14), John Stockton (11) and a certain Frenchman who’s suddenly figuring out how to forward mail to Minneapolis.

In other words, being competitive without Rudy Gobert on the roster is going to be a challenge. According to various stats that attempt to apportion credit for a team’s record (EPM, RPM, RAPTOR, Win Shares, LEBRON, etc.), the Jazz have gotten a bonus of somewhere between 10 and 17 wins just by having the Stifle Tower on their roster. Over the past five seasons combined, only three players have impacted winning more than Gobert as measured by luck-adjusted Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Steph Curry and Nikola Jokic, who have six MVPs between them.

And yet that appears to be exactly what the Jazz will try to do: win without Gobert.

Unless the Jazz trade away another All-Star this offseason — a possibility we’ll explore momentarily — the approach appears to be focused on building as competitive a roster as they can around 3-time All-Star Donovan Mitchell. The club’s general manager, Justin Zanik, has become fond of saying the team is targeting “primary players” who can help Mitchell and new coach Will Hardy define a new Jazz era.

While it’s unclear exactly which players fitting that description might be available between now and the start of the 2022-23 season, the sudden stockpile of draft assets likely helps the Jazz get into some discussions. While they still owe a 2024 first-rounder to Oklahoma City for taking Derrick Favors’ salary off their books, they can trade up to three picks of their own with the right conditional language. They also have as many as five firsts coming their way in the next seven drafts as a result of their trades involving Gobert and outgoing wing Royce O’Neale. That amount of draft capital, along with matchable salaries attached to still very good players could get them into some interesting conversations.

Indeed, plugged-in folks tell me that the Jazz are not done roster-building yet. They’re just also not in a massive hurry.

Gobert trade or not, this free agent market was always going to be a tricky place to find reinforcements at that level because of specific supply-and-demand dynamics. With very few true stars available, the bidding was likely to result in some overpays with the next few tiers down. The Jazz were always more likely to redefine their identity via trade than free agency, and the trade market doesn’t have as finite a timeline to get things done. They had and have irons in multiple fires, I’m told.

There are also situations that could be holding up action at the league level, like the Kevin Durant stalemate that might have some teams wanting to keep their powder dry. Elsewhere, a deal involving Malcolm Brogdon was delayed by physicals, and that could have been keeping some related dominos from moving. Now that his deal is done, Indiana will have the space to pounce on DeAndre Ayton, so we may know more soon about the Suns’ plans (and their seriousness about joining the Durant sweepstakes), and so forth. The Ayton add (should Phoenix decline to match) could also make Indy more likely to consider offers for current starting center Myles Turner.

That’s not to suggest that there is any one specific deal or sequence the Jazz are waiting on, but there are those who think that some movement in the coming days could at least increase the level of conversation around targets that could directly or indirectly matter to the Jazz’s plans.

It still takes two teams (at least) to make a trade, so there are no guarantees. But at the moment, the Jazz appear focused on getting Mitchell some help in the form of another star and/or high-level role players.

There’s also no reason to believe the Jazz have completely ruled out trading the 25-year-old star. They clearly haven’t. As of right, though, smart people have hinted that nothing is even close to meeting the threshold the Jazz would require to consider moving the star guard.

Of course, as we’ve already seen once this offseason, things can change in a hurry.

There was a point in time when the Gobert deal appeared all but dead. Multiple suitors had presented enticing offers, but the Jazz expected a package befitting the top-15 player Gobert has shown to be. I’ve heard from a few different directions now the same sentiment Wolves GM Tim Connelly verbalized last week: that the Wolves weren’t just bidding against other interested teams, but also against Utah’s reluctance to move him. The degree to which the Jazz were trying to trade the 3-time DPOY winner has largely been overstated, and nobody had yet compiled a pile of assets tempting enough for Utah.

Even as June wound down, with free agency officially underway, the momentum just wasn’t pointing toward a deal crossing the finish line. The thinking had begun to shift back to how they might improve the roster around their two returning All-Stars. Of course, at the time they were only 12 or so hours from calling in the trade — they just didn’t know it yet.

Ultimately, Minnesota juiced the offer, and the Jazz came away with something not all that unlike the packages that superstars like Anthony Davis and James Harden netted their former teams. (At least in terms of draft assets; the players Houston and New Orleans got in exchange for those megastars were arguably better than the veterans sent in the Gobert deal.) The haul was objectively a great return for Utah, but the point here is that it came at a point when the deal had apparently flatlined.

That’s why I’ll stop short of guaranteeing that Mitchell doesn’t change addresses this summer; stuff changes constantly. As high as the bar ultimately was for the Jazz to move Gobert, I’d guess the threshold is similar or even higher for a Mitchell deal. There’s growing evidence to suggest that teams offering a bunch of decent-ish stuff for Mitchell just aren’t even in the ballpark, at least for now. That could change in a hurry… or not.

If it does change, the Jazz could suddenly find themselves in the middle of an honest-to-goodness rebuild. Many fans have noticed that it seems like a good year to dip into the lottery, with eight or nine potential stars atop the 2023 draft. But again, that doesn’t appear to be the way franchise brass are talking at the moment.

It sounds far more likely that they’ll sniff around a complementary piece or two once some other dominos around the league start falling. A reasonable bet would be that they are in the market for wings and bigs, since their current roster is guard-heavy.

If we take Zanik’s “primary players” designation to mean they want at least a borderline star to pair with Mitchell, the potential target list starts to get more finite. And where that circle overlaps on the Venn diagram with “bigger players” and “realistically gettable,” there are some obvious names to start with — though to be clear, these are purely this writer’s speculation. John Collins is still sitting there despite the whole world knowing of Atlanta’s desire to move on. Is he enough of a star at this point to fit the label? How much would the Jazz have to give up to get Turner on an expiring deal? Is Harrison Barnes more available than he was at the trade deadline? Is Toronto intent on keeping its glut of wings? Or is someone else available that we don’t know about? If that tier of player is unrealistic, there are non-star difference-makers who could help make Utah bigger and younger, if they’re available: P.J. Washington, Larry Nance, Jakob Poeltl, Kenrich Williams.

Of course, back to Gobert’s all-world impact metrics we opened with, even a couple of really nice acquisitions like the ones listed above could still leave the Jazz a bit further from the mountaintop than they were with a pair of top-25 players. The biggest question this summer, then, isn’t necessarily about how the Jazz can better in the most absolute or immediate terms. It’s whether they can reimagine their ceiling in tandem with Mitchell’s continued growth.

Mitchell’s regular season stats plateaued last year, and then he had what could be accurately described as his worst postseason as a pro, especially struggling with defense, outside shooting, and some aspects of playmaking. But overall, he’s a player who’s still climbing. A new ecosystem could provide the backdrop for another mini-leap, and honestly Mitchell crossing that last tier into All-NBA waters is probably the only way of staying truly relevant in the short term. That’s a lot to ask of the young man, essentially saying he has to be an MVP candidates or the Jazz will backtrack — but that’s about the shape of it.

If the Jazz do return to contention in the medium term, it will likely be a function of Mitchell solidifying his place in the league’s power structure — or, alternatively, it could be a function of what the Jazz grab with draft assets they produce by moving on.

Because if the determination is that he can’t lead a team to the mountaintop — and there is some (unconfirmed) noise behind that theory — then yes, at some point it probably does make sense to see if there’s a Gobert-esque trade package out there somewhere.

At the moment, the Jazz have options. And leverage. And time. But there’s not an infinite supply of any of those; at some point, the Jazz will have to play their cards and make it more obvious which path they’re heading down.