Let the Weird Fun Begin: The Jazz Rebuild is Here

Here it goes. A rebuilding era potentially unlike any other in Utah Jazz history offically gets underway on Monday when a couple dozen mostly unrecognizable dudes (in completely unrecognizable garb) kick of training camp with media availability.

The last time the Utah Jazz lost an All-Star, the resulting “rebuild” — if you want to call it that — lasted a few weeks.

Sure, they started the post-Gordon Hayward era 7-11 (and later 19-28) while they tried to reorganize around their incumbents, such as seeing if Rodney Hood had the, uh, intestinal fortitude to be a primary option. (He did not.) But before long, they reimagined their offense around a quick-blooming rookie and doubled down on their defensive identity behind an all-world paint protector. Soon, they were right back to being as competitive as they were before Hayward bolted, if not more so. They finished that season 29-6.

This next rebuilding period will likely be more protracted than that. That fast bloomer is now a Cleveland Cavalier, and their defensive anchor will now patrol Minnesota’s paint instead. In all, 80% of their starting lineup will be different, and the lone holdover — Mike Conley Jr. — could also vanish quickly if the right deal materializes.

“It became very apparent… that this was the path we needed to start on,” general manager Justin Zanik said two weeks before Monday’s media day. “We were tapped out from a potential standpoint, and we needed to reset that.”

Immediately to Zanik’s left, Danny Ainge concurred. The CEO of Jazz basketball once tore down the Boston Celtics and then rebuilt them into a 2008 title winner. Ainge agreed that it was “unanimous” that the Jazz needed to change direction with a drastic roster reconstruction, and then detailed the thought process that prompted the Jazz to trade Rudy Gobert in early July and then deal Donovan Mitchell just two months later.

“What I saw during the season was a group of players that really didn’t believe in each other,” Ainge explained with a matter-of-fact tone.

With that determination made, the franchise now embarks on a journey that will assuredly take longer than the post-Hayward pivot. If all goes perfectly, it may have a different outcome as well.

A head start

Many rebuilds start with a protracted period of asset accumulation as teams figure out how to restock the warchest by making deliberate moves over a long period of time. By starting the rebuild on their own terms, the Jazz gave themselves a nice headstart. Including their owns picks, they currently hold the rights to 14 first-round picks over the next seven drafts, plus two rookies chosen in last June’s first round.

The Jazz won’t roster all of those players. Some of those picks could be used as currency next time a star or borderline star winds up unexpectedly available. Earlier this summer, the Atlanta Hawks pounced when All-Star Dejounte Murray hit the trade market. The price for Murray: matching salary and three first-rounders. Back then, the Jazz didn’t legally have a way of packaging three firsts because of pick-trading limitations spelled out by the league. Now, they could not only get in that conversation — they’d be central to it.

“When it became apparent that there was a ceiling and an expiration date to that group, this is what you do so that you can be part of those conversations,” Zanik said. “Now we can build a team multiple ways.”

With those 14 picks, the Jazz will be involved in the conversation any time a team goes into “seller” mode. Remember when the Mitchell sweepstakes got underway and everybody marveled about how the well-stocked Knicks could trade as many as eight picks for the 3-time All-Star? The Jazz could make a trade today involving as many as 10 if they wanted to (two of their three in each of 2023 and 2025, and up to six of the remaining ones, if the right conditional language is attached). 

The Jazz have also done themselves a favor by lining up a number of very matchable vet contracts. Atlanta couldn’t have done the Dejounte deal without a Danilo Gallinari-sized salary to swap. Take Miami, for example: rumor is they’d have loved to add someone like Bojan Bogdanovic or Jae Crowder, but sending the right salary out in a trade for those guys is really difficult because they don’t have reasonable 8-figure contracts on their books. Their three stars make $28M-plus, they don’t want to give up $5.7M Tyler Herro, nobody wants Duncan Robinson at $16.9M, and every single other tradable salary on their books is below the veteran minimum salary. Getting to Bogdanovic’s $19.6M or even Crowder’s $10.2M in a trade is near impossible unless they can talk someone into taking Robinson.

The Jazz won’t find themselves in that particular dead end. They start training camp with six salaries between $10 and $16.5 million, a great range for piecing together deals. Of those six, Collin Sexton can’t be traded until December 15, and three others can’t have their salaries aggregated in trades for now. But at the deadline and beyond, Utah will have multiple ways to ladder up to a burgeoning star’s salary if an opportunity arises to use some of their cached picks in a deal like Atlanta’s.

But the best star, the one that justifies their rebuild as a whole, might not be the one that arrives via trade. The Jazz could also find themselves with a shot at landing a generational star with their own draft picks.

Finding THE guy

During the Jazz’s last *real* rebuild, fans grew attached to a quintet of homegrown youngsters they’d lovingly call the “Core Five.” They were five guys drafted in the lottery in drafts between 2010 and 2013. But here’s the funny thing: only one of those five was still with the team by the time the Jazz were relevant again, and their best player from that era of drafting actually wound up being the guy they drafted with the 27th pick.

(Similarly, Milwaukee got really lucky finding a franchise star at 15th, and even Golden State’s dynastic reign started with a seventh pick — not quite the moon shot of 15 or 27, but still extremely rare to find a 2-time MVP midway through the lottery.)

But bottom line: when a team decides to tear it down and rebuild, it’s almost always in search of a blue-chip piece they can build around. The 2023 draft has a couple of guys who could be that, and the drafts that follow will likely see a flood of talent at some point if the league and player’s union make the widely expected move of allowing jumps from high school to the NBA again. The Jazz’s chances of landing a generational talent are higher as they climb towards the top of the draft board. Which raises the question: are the Jazz bad enough to come away with a once-in-a-generation piece?

In addition to three rookies with varying levels of promise and potential, the Jazz have nine guys who have been regular starters (or in Jordan Clarkson’s and Talen Horton-Tucker’s cases, at least played starter minutes) in their career. That doesn’t even count Cody Zeller, who will have to fight for a final roster spot. Some fans see all that depth and wonder if the Jazz will lose enough games to enter the NBA draft lottery with a real shot at Victor Wembayana or Scoot Henderson.

On the other hand, Conley is the only current Jazzman who posted more than 3.0 Wins Above Replacement last season, and he’s 34. The Jazz might have more rotation-level depth than a classic rebuilding team, but they have very little star-level firepower.

Aside from that, the lottery odds have been flattened to the point where you no longer have to be the very worst team in the Association to head into the drawing room feeling good about your chances. In the revised system, the five worst teams each year will have the following respective odds at owning the top pick when the ping pong balls are done bouncing: 14%, 14%, 14% 12.5% and 10.5%. After that, the odds drop into single digits (9% for sixth worse, 7.5% for seventh, etc.), but as long as a team can engineer its way to a bottom-5 record, it has OK odds of coming away with a real prize.

The Jazz can get to bottom-5. Their lack of starpower has convinced Vegas to put them precisely in the fifth worst spot in terms of win total over-under bets (24.5), and the Jazz maybe not even be done conducting vet trades yet.

Wembayana or Henderson have a chance at being not just franchise-defining talents, but the type of NBA-ready superstars that could instantly have Utah U-turning back toward relevance after a single lottery dip. But whenever they start the climb, the Jazz would be best served to make sure they have their blue-chip piece before they head into the next phase of rebuilding.

Which leads straight to the next question: can the Jazz make this a quick rebuild?

The case for patience

We already covered the post-Hayward pivot, a weeks-long adventure where the Jazz experimented before eventually realizing that rookie Mitchell could be a centerpiece on offense.

The reality is that even the prior rebuild was a truncated one. Sure, they started with the trade of Deron Williams, but it wasn’t until summer 2012 that they finally bit the bullet on a full reconstruction by letting veterans Al Jefferson and Paul Millsap walk.

And then, by late 2014, they were already back on the path to being good again. By then, they had hired a new coach, developed Hayward into a scorer, and recognized what they had in a young prospect who would grow into an all-world defensive force. They didn’t make the playoffs that season (or the one after), but they had the key pieces in place and were on the ascent just a couple of years after launching a full-blown retool.

The post-statues rebuild felt a little more drawn out, but not by much. The 2003-04 team overperformed, so they were only really fully out of playoff contention in 2005, the year that yielded a pick that (when combined with other assets from the mini-rebuild) became Deron Williams.

Had they been a little more, um, strategically un-good leading into the 2004 and 2006 drafts, they might have come away with something like Andre Iguodala or Luol Deng in 2004 (instead of Kris Humphries), or J.J. Redick or prime Rudy Gay in 2006 (in lieu of Ronnie Brewer). Winning feels better than losing, even though the reward for a 35-win season pales in comparison to the reward for a 25-win season.

That’s one of the hardest things about rebuilding: weighing the value of your young team’s progress against the cost of getting too good too fast. New Jazz coach Will Hardy will never ask his guys to do anything other than go out and try their hardest to execute their game plan and build winning habits. Some nights, that will result in wins that leave everybody with a conflicting feeling, even though that’s kind of the point of sports and player development and team-building. That’s fine.

As followers of a franchise that hasn’t done too much long-term rebuilding, we’ll all need some practice at navigating those competing desires.

As followers of a franchise that hasn’t done this a lot, we’re also about to learn/re-learn a simple truth about rebuilding: it is kind of weirdly fun.

Rebuilds are a weirdly fun time to be a fan

My first year covering the Jazz on credential was that 2003-04 team, right as the Jazz were entering what probably counts as the closest the franchise has ever come to a true, down-to-the-studs reset (until now). Every single positive thing the Jazz accomplished that season was the equivalent of house money. There were no expectations to live up to, so the whole endeavor became a thought experiment of sorts.

Most experts picked the Jazz to finish dead last in the conference and/or league. One pundit — Sonics beat writer and frequent ESPN contributor Frank Hughes — went so far as to say he thought the Jazz would set a new league record for futility by failing to reach nine wins all season. In a perfect ironic twist, Hughes was in the building when the Jazz torched the visiting Sonics 98-81 to get their ninth win of the year — in just the 15th game.

Each win was sweet. The losses stung less since they were somewhat expected, and still provided a window into the Jazz’s future, as they unleashed the versatile Andrei Kirilenko and played with a freer, more entrepreneurial spirit. Jerry Sloan — notoriously rigid during the Jazz’s competitive years — switched up elements of the offense. After being the NBA’s version of a metronome for several years, the Jazz’s identity was suddenly more fluid, in a way that was actually kind of exhilarating.

Weird stuff happened almost nightly. Ten-day pickup Mikki Moore scored 15 points in a single quarter to power a come-from-behind Jazz win, but didn’t score more than 13 in any other game that season. Ben Handlogten, a 30-year-old rookie, tore his ACL in the backcourt, but stayed in the play for a cherry-picked fastbreak layup before checking out for the year. Greg Ostertag became a wise veteran voice, and Michael Ruffin started 23 games. Raúl López dunked.

But some really important stuff happened too, aside from Kirilenko’s development into one of the game’s most versatile and creative wings. A midseason trade netted the Jazz a future asset that would turn into the Hayward pick years later. Another trade — DeShawn Stevenson for Gordan Giricek — got them a piece they’d later use to acquire Kyle Korver as a complement to the next competitive version of the squad.

While the outcomes of the games didn’t matter all that much, each time out was an opportunity to answer questions that really mattered as the Jazz envisioned their climb back to relevance. Could Raja Bell become a rotation weapon with his defense and outside shooting? (Yes.) Woud it be Carlos Arroyo or López who earned Sloan’s confidence as a medium-term answer at the point? (Neither, it turned out.) Did Matt Harpring’s brand of opportunistic, cut-and-curl scoring make him dependent on Hall of Famers to get his? (No, and he’d be an important complement when the Jazz were ready to climb the ladder again.)

Ultimately, that season provided the team with some important clues about how to move forward. And along the way, games were fun and weird and completely free of the weight of expectations.

That’s the kind of year ahead for those who follow the Jazz. Individual game outcomes won’t really matter, but we’ll start to see the Jazz figure out things that could matter when they are eventually trying to be great again. They may discover pieces of their new core — or, just importantly, discover that someone won’t  be part of that core. That matters, too. They may start (or continue) a train of transactions that gets them closer to having the right complementary pieces for some future version of the contending Jazz.

Some nights, nothing massively meaningful to the future will occur, and that’s fine too. It’ll still be fun to watch whatever the equivalent is to Moore’s 15-point quarter, some random blip that feels fun even though it changes little to nothing about the future.

Along the way, fans and pundits will all start to buy into different guys. The metaphor I’ve used before is that we’ll all essentially be penny stock traders, glomming on early to some player we’re convinced about for one reason or another. We’ll stay up late debating whether Simone Fontecchio’s NBA future is brighter than Ochai Abgaji’s, or about whether Jared Butler or Nickeil Alexander-Walker should be getting more developmental minutes. We’ll even debate the very relationship between “development” and “minutes.” It will be weirdly, tediously, gloriously fun.

It’s not for everybody. A lot of more casual fans will tune out and take a Wake-Me-When-They’re-Good-Again approach. Cool. They’ll miss out on some stuff, and when they eventually rejoin the conversation, the rest of us will be in on a hundred, a thousand, a million inside jokes they will have missed completely. We’ll chuckle knowingly in five years when someone mentions whatever the equivalent is of Wide Right, or the Buckner thread, or Sloan marveling at Aleksandar Radojevic diving on the floor. We’ll laugh at ourselves in hindsight for how hard we believed in all the Sasha Pavlovices and Kirk Snyders along the way. We’ll visit trade checker websites a million or so times. And all of it will be stuff we wear like a badge whenever the Jazz are ready to come out the other side. “I was there,” we’ll say. “I lived the whole damn thing. I earned this.”

(Whatever “this” is.)

The end goal

Eventually, the Jazz will decide they have a core worth giving a shot to, and that’s when the climb will start. Maybe that will come quick if the Jazz reel in a Wembayana-level draft prize right away, or maybe they’ll be more deliberate.

Whichever way it goes, eventually the Jazz will have a group of guys they believe in and they’ll go for it again.

“We have a plan for that,” Zanik said. “It’s gonna take a lot of work, but we’re really excited about the base that we’re starting from.”