As With Jazz-Lakers Trade, Vet Deals May Precede the Big Domino

The biggest domino has yet to fall, but the Jazz are still making moves around the margins like acquiring Horton-Tucker. (Rick Egan, sltrib.com)

It’s easy to forget given all that has happened since, but the Utah Jazz’s first major piece of offseason business had nothing to do with their All-Stars. Before they dealt Rudy Gobert to Minnesota or began seriously entertaining Donovan Mitchell trade talk, the Jazz swung a comparatively minor transaction, sending starting wing Royce O’Neale to Brooklyn for a 2023 first-rounder (and a trade exception).

So in a way, it’s not surprising that they just swung another deal involving a non-star veteran, even while Mitchell’s future remains unclear.

Patrick Beverley, part of the Gobert trade package, will be rerouted to the Los Angeles Lakers, reports say. In exchange for the vociferous veteran, the Jazz will bring in Talen Horton-Tucker and Stanley Johnson.

It’s exactly the kind of deal a rebuilding team should make. Beverley is 34 years old, and it might have made sense for a team with competitive goals like last year’s Jazz to squeeze whatever they could out of the feisty guard. But the Jazz are evidently pivoting, and the focus now is on increasing the likelihood of finding the next great Jazz core. To do that, you take every chance you can at parlaying assets forward and taking a look at younger guys who have a chance to alter their trajectory.

THT and Johnson haven’t been great. But they’re 21 and 26 years old, respectively, and both have wingspans of seven feet or more. Both have problematic shooting numbers and compound the Jazz’s excess of guards. There’s a chance neither guy plays a big role for the Jazz, but the idea here is that they’re trying the type of thing rebuilding teams should try.

And they very likely are not done with those types of deals.

Veterans like Bojan Bogdanovic, Mike Conley Jr. and Jordan Clarkson are probably anxious to know what their immediate basketball future looks like. In a perfect world, the Jazz might prefer to fry the biggest fish first; if they do wind up trading Mitchell, the exact haul there might make the goals clearer on other veteran deals. But also, sometimes the right offer is there and you take it.

The same was true of the O’Neale deal. Utah had other options on the table for the 3-and-D specialist, and could have instead swapped O’Neale for a youngish veteran from one of a couple teams looking to balance their squad with an offense-for-defense move. But when the chance arose to get a guaranteed first for O’Neale, the Jazz took it. It will likely be a pick in the 20s (the least favorable of Brooklyn’s, Houston’s and Philly’s), but it’s guaranteed to convey next season. Getting that pick also freed the Jazz up to trade a 2023 first if they chose to become buyers — remember, this was before the Gobert deal. So ultimately that deal checked the boxes independently of whatever happened with the big fish.

If suitors come with interesting offers for Bogey, Conley, Clarkson or any other Jazz player, it wouldn’t be shocking to see them jump on a deal even with Mitchell’s stuff still up in the air.

Sometimes the big dominos fall first. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

With training camps starting within the next month, the next Jazz deal could happen at any time — and could involve any player. But the goals in veteran trades are certainly different now, since a reconstruction is likely on the horizon. It’s been a while since Jazz fans have lived through a true rebuild, and the last one was fairly brief. So it’s probably worth revisiting what a rebuilding team wants (and doesn’t want) as trade capital.

The Jazz are likely not going to be results-oriented in the immediate future, so don’t expect to see them pursue useful players on short term deals (unless there’s an opportunity to flip them). Assuming the Jazz do move forward with a Mitchell deal — now or at the trade deadline — their whole focus will shift to how they can put together the next core group. That means they’ll be looking for specific types of assets:

• Blue chips: Ideally, rebuilding teams want as much stuff as possible that *could* yield a star-level player down the road — such as acquiring a youngster with star potential, or the unprotected picks the Jazz got back in the Gobert deal.
• Picks, picks, picks: Absent those blue-chip assets, rebuilding teams generally like collecting any kind of draft capital, because those picks (especially firsts) can be used to take swings on cheap young projects OR as currency in later deals. Think the O’Neale deal, or what teams like OKC and Houston have done to amass impressive draft caches.
• “Second draft” experiments: If you can’t get picks for your veterans, you might as well try to get younger, and take an extended look at a guy who might have some unrealized potential. That’s the thinking behind the THT acquisition.

Basically, a rebuilding team should be all about taking swings. That will be a change in mindset for Jazz fans who are used to evaluating trades based on what helps the Jazz today. We’re all going to have to change the lens through which we view deals. It doesn’t matter if THT is better than Beverley; it matters which of them represents a better shot to yield something that could be part of the next competitive version of the Jazz. Full stop.

This informs how they might be thinking about the Mitchell return, but also what the other veteran trades could look like.

Utah’s cadre of veterans likely won’t yield any blue-chip assets on their own, but they might if they use that considerable salary to help a team erase salary commitments. The scenario floating around social media lately is the one involving Russell Westbrook’s $47 million salary. The Jazz could easily hand the Lakers some good players to complement LeBron James in his push for a sixth title while also helping them get off of Westbrook’s massive final year.

The Jazz’s motivation to do such a deal would have nothing to do with Westbrook — they likely wouldn’t even ask the 9-time All-Star to report to Salt Lake City — so my guess is they would only be interested if they could get mutliple good assets in return from the Lake Show. Los Angeles can trade its 2027 and 2029 firsts, but in order to legally trade both, they’d have to be unprotected or have now-or-never convey conditions. Asking two picks in exchange for useful veterans AND a $47 million salary dump is more than reasonable. The question, then, is whether the Lakers feel like they could get better players in that scenario by offering draft compensation to another team along with Westbrook’s unwieldy salary.

The Beverley swap could be a sign that the Westbrook-to-Jazz scenario is dead. Or it could mean that the Lakers have some offers parked while they shop for something more convincing, but that both parties wanted to go ahead with this piece of business in the meantime. Either way, that TYPE of deal is the Jazz’s best shot of getting premium assets for guys who are essentially short-term rentals. Bogey expires next summer; Conley has a partial guarantee for 2023-24 and Clarkson has a player option.

(Malik Beasley is interesting because he’s also a veteran with a team option for 2023-24, but at 25 he could also represent a “let’s give him a look” opportunity if there’s not an asset-producing offer out there. Jarred Vanderbilt is even younger (23) and cheaper ($4.37M), so maybe he gets a shot, too. Leandro Bolmaro and Walker Kessler are low-cost swings.)

There isn’t a great history of teams paying through the nose for non-star players on expiring contracts, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Conley is a season removed from his All-Star season and had a whale of a year from an impact metric standpoint (before struggling in the playoffs). Bogdanovic is a bona fide scorer. Clarkson can create out of thin air. At some point, someone will need those skill sets enough to pony up a middling asset or an interesting young dude who has a chance to help the rebuild, either by being good or by parlaying some value into the future.

And as the Beverley and O’Neale deals show us, that could happen before OR after the Jazz are done frying the bigger fish.

That said, as long as we’re here, let’s check in on the big fish.

Here’s what we know from recent reports about a potential Mitchell deal: the Jazz either definitely did or definitely didn’t ask for as many as seven first-round picks, they either definitely do or definitely don’t want RJ Barrett in the deal, and a deal with either be done in the coming weeks  or it won’t.

Clear enough?

The guess here: I am dubious of any report that says the Jazz have a magical number of raw picks they want, and I think the talk of SIX! SEVEN! EIGHT! picks is an expectation management ploy by the Knicks. (Consider that almost every such report has come from NYC-area media.) Maybe they leak those high numbers to Chris Berman and Stephen A. Smith so that if the deal is made with less than that they look like they won the staring contest.

It’s just hard to believe that the Jazz’s sticking point is the raw number of first rounders as opposed to, say, the projected quality of said picks and the protections on them. Again, when you trade a star, you ideally want at least some assets that represent a non-trivial chance of yielding a piece of your next core. Not every pick does that. New York could offer the seemingly outrageous seven picks Berman said Utah wants, but if the picks offered were the four protected ones they are owed and three lottery-protected picks of their own, that would still be a package the Jazz would likely decline. Conversely, a package of fewer picks might be enough if the majority were unprotected.

It’s simply not about the total number of first round picks.

(For what it’s worth, I’m also instantly skeptical of any report that is positioned as “Danny Ainge is demanding XYZ in trade talks.” My understanding is that GM Justin Zanik is still very much the Jazz exec taking and making calls. Maybe it’s a small quibble, as I’m sure Ainge’s influence is felt in the negotiation as a whole. But when I hear someone represent a rumor as though Danny’s the one engaged in the actual dialogue, I instantly wonder how plugged in that individual really is.)

As for the question of which young Knicks might interest the Jazz the most, I’ll refer back to what was said above: the focus will be on acquiring guys who either a) could be a part of the next good Jazz version, or b) could get them those players later.

My guess is that’s why they are rumored to like players of the Quentin Grimes ilk. Will Hardy will want guys who can help him establish good habits even if the short-term goal isn’t about results, and Grimes’ skill set could make him the perfect utility player if he’s still around when the Jazz climb back to competitiveness. They’d have the option to employ him on the cheap for three seasons, and then they’d have matching rights if he felt like a part of the future. On the other hand, with someone like Cam Reddish they’d only get 82 games to decide if he was a piece worth building around.

Other quick notes:

• No, I don’t know who the mystery team is, but I am not at all shocked that other teams are poking around — especially with KD off the market. Mitchell is a top-20 player, the market for such a dude is definitely not going to be limited to any one team.
• Also, smart folks have reiterated to me that entering the season with Mitchell is a legitimate possibility. Mitchell’s character and competitiveness are such that the Jazz feel confident that he won’t be a disruptive influence if his future isn’t settled by October’s season opener. He hasn’t demanded a trade, and ownership hasn’t mandated anything, so the Jazz aren’t negotiating from a position of weakness here — they will accept an offer if one meets their threshold.
• We had previously reported that the max salary would limit how much of Mitchell’s 15% trade kicker he could receive in the event of a deal. However, the salary cap increase was significant enough that his trade bonus won’t be eliminated altogether, just amended downward. The bonus can’t take Mitchell’s salary above this season’s max salary, which is set at $30.91M based on a set percentage of the salary cap. That does however reflect a roughly $562K increase over the salary called for in his contract, so he will receive *something* in the event of a trade. However, the difference between those two figures still won’t be large enough to complicate the trade math. (Larger gaps can be harder to address since the sending team calculates its max return based on the pre-bonus salary, but the acquiring team has to send enough money out to take on the player’s salary with a trade bonus required.)
• The Jazz also still have a $9.7M trade exception (left over from Joe Ingles) and a $9.6M trade exception (from Gobert), as well as some smaller ones. They also generated a trade exception in the O’Neale deal, but then used most it to acquire the smaller salaries from Minnesota so that they could preserve a larger Gobert TPE.

Ken Clayton will be fielding reader questions issues in a Friday mailbag, so if you have more questions about cap mechanisms, trade rules, roster construction or other basketball-related stuff, fire your question off to Ken.