The Jazz-Specific Impact of Every Deadline Trade

The Jazz will have to deal with Covington now on the new-look, small-ball Rockets. (Davis Sherman via timberwolves.com)

The Jazz didn’t make any deals at the NBA’s trade deadline, but that doesn’t mean their place in the basketball universe was unchanged. Teams around them made moves that could shift power one way or another, and squads they’ll face in the remaining 32 games got better, worse or just different.

It’s understandable that the Jazz didn’t make a move in a frenzied market, especially since they had already pushed significant assets into last summer’s deal for Mike Conley and a more recent in-season swap that landed them Jordan Clarkson. After those trades, the Jazz didn’t have that much to offer anyway. More importantly, the Jazz’s decision-makers believe that their team still has the right mix of talent and basketball IQ (the current 5-game losing streak notwithstanding). They could stand to upgrade a rotation spot or two, but they believe in the core they’ve assembled.

Still, that doesn’t mean the ground didn’t shift around them in a busy week for transactions.

Here is the Jazz angle on every deal made this week, including how it could impact their path to true contention and what each move could mean for the remaining two months of the season. 

Houston lands Covington in 12-player deal

• Houston acquired Robert Covington, Jordan Bell and the Warriors’ 2024 second-rounder, giving up Clint Capela, Nene, Gerald Green and this year’s first-rounder.
• Atlanta acquired Capela and Nene, after surrendering that 2024 pick the Warriors owed them plus Brooklyn’s 2020 first-rounder and Evan Turner. (They’ve already waived Nene.)
• Denver acquired Houston’s first-rounder along with Green, Keita Bates-Diop, Noah Vonleh and Shabazz Napier, giving up Juancho Hernangomez, Malik Beasley and Jarred Vanderbilt.
• Minnesota picked up the Brooklyn pick, Turner and the trio of outgoing Nuggets in exchange for Covington, Vonleh, Bates-Diop, Napier and Bell.

Houston and Memphis swap role playing forwards

• Houston flipped Bell to Memphis for Bruno Caboclo.
• Memphis acquired Bell and conditional second-round swap rights in 2023.

Let’s first take a look at Houston’s deals in the aggregate.

The Jazz once again have to be concerned about Houston, a team whose destiny seems to be tied to the Jazz’s, for better or worse. After locking into the 4-5 playoff matchup last spring, the two teams brought identical 32-18 records into the trade deadline. Both teams are significantly different from the rosters that faced each other last April, but certainly the Jazz have to be concerned about how they’ll match up if the fates again leave them across a bracket from the Rockets.

Houston got better with these deals, but they also got smaller. Covington can do more stuff than Capela, and lets the Rockets take their 5-out, switch-everything-on-D experiment to the next level. They don’t really have a rotation center left on the roster — Tyson Chandler has barely played and Isaiah Hartenstein is very raw. But Houston doesn’t seem to care. They’re going to try to stymie opponents with a hyper-switchy defense that essentially creates a forcefield around the paint.

On the one hand, seeing Capela go might hearten the Jazz. Capela had some success on Gobert in the last two years’ playoff series. But Utah has also struggled to execute at times against small, switchy schemes. That includes last week when Houston stopped the Jazz’s win streak despite playing the likes of 6-foot-5 PJ Tucker and 6-foot-6 Thabo Sefolosha at center.

Ultimately, this trade WILL matter to the Jazz — even if they don’t wind up on a crash course with the Rockets this off-season, they still have two remaining dates with Houston this month. The question of whether the Jazz can defuse Houston’s active, unique defense will certainly play a role in the final West standings. The Jazz are going to have to find a way to let Gobert dominate mismatches, and the addition of RoCo to Houston’s offense gives them one more spot-up shooter to keep track of.

We’ll see how this one plays out. Capela was an important part of their game plan against the Jazz, but now they can lean into a strategy that has also worked at times. The jury is out on whether this deal makes Houston harder to vanquish or easier, from a Jazz perspective.

Caboclo is more of a project, except that he’s in his sixth season already and has never really been a regular rotation player. It’s curious that the Rockets didn’t think Bell would help more, given the dearth of big men in Houston.

We’ll look at these deals from the other teams’ perspectives when we get to the other trades those clubs made.

Let’s talk about Denver next. In addition to the move above that netted them the Rockets’ pick and four new depth pieces…

Nuggets flip Napier

• Denver acquired Jordan McRae from Washington in exchange for Napier, whom they had just acquired in the 4-team deal above.

McRae is an interesting player, a combo guard who is having a career season. He has become more consistent as a 3-point threat — both in terms of taking and converting them — and he’s a decent passer. He will fit nicely into the bench guard minutes that Beasley’s departure opens up. He’s less explosive than Beasley, but the Nuggets already have other guys who do the types of things they got from Beas.

On the aggregate, they did fine this week. Hernangomez and Vanderbilt were lightly used anyway, so essentially the net impact of their two trades was to send out Beasley and bring in McRae, Vonleh and a decent prospect in Bates-Diop. But perhaps the biggest coup was that they squeezed Houston’s first rounder out of them. An extra asset like that can really make a different for a team that, like the Jazz, finds itself on the cusp of real contention.

That said, Denver didn’t really get tons better in the short term. Their deals mostly constituted a shuffling around of role players, and nobody they acquired should really change the tenor of the two remaining Rocky Mountain duels — or a potential playoff series between the two burgeoning contenders.

Speaking of Utah’s divisional rivals, Minnesota also wasn’t done after trading Covington for a valuable Brooklyn first-rounder and some role players like Turner and Beasley.

Minnesota finally lands Russell

• After long coveting D’Angelo Russell, the Timberwolves finally got him, along with Omari Spellman and Jacob Evans.
• In exchange, Golden State got Andrew Wiggins and Minnesota’s first and second-round picks in 2021 (with protections).

Three-team deal lands Iguodala in Miami

• Former Finals MVP Andre Iguodala wound up in Miami, who also took Jae Crowder and Solomon Hill in the deal. Miami gave up Justise Winslow, Dion Waiters and James Johnson.
• Memphis picked up Winslow, Waiters, and Gorgui Dieng from Minnesota after sending out Iggy, Crowder and Hill.
• Minnesota angled into the deal, landing Johnson in exchange for Dieng. 

Let’s cover Minnesota first.

Russell is a more natural complement to Karl-Anthony Towns, which is why the Wolves tried to get him last summer and seemed determined to make it happen this week. But he’s still not a positive factor defensively, and in each of his five seasons, his teams’ Net Ratings have been better when he sat than when he was on the court. (Except for his second Brooklyn season, when the Net Rating was an identical +0.2 whether he was in or out.)

In other words, this move probably doesn’t send them surging up the Northwest Division. That’s especially true since they also moved the useful Covington for a future asset (albeit a valuable one). Dieng also played a real role for them, and they traded him for Johnson, who is having one of the worst years in his career. Injuries and struggles have conspired to limit Johnson to just 18 games so far.

So in the aggregate, Minny didn’t improve itself immediately, unless something magical happens with improved chemistry. The KAT-Wiggins relationship had clearly run its course, and there has been some pretty bad blood up in Minneapolis this season. A fresh start could be good for everybody involved. The Brooklyn pick will also help Minnesota inch closer to a winning roster in the medium term.

But taken all together, their moves didn’t do anything to make me rethink the Northwest Division power structure, or even the outcome of the one remaining Jazz-Wolves date, a March 20 game in SLC.

Memphis, already a surprising contestant for a playoff spot, did well in their two deals. They got Winslow, Bell, Waiters and Dieng for Crowder, Hill and two players they weren’t using anyway. In the short term, they might have taken a step back. Winslow was the most interesting pickup and he has played just 11 games this year. Crowder was playing a big role for them, so losing him without being able to immediately replace that production with Winslow’s will hurt. Bell, Waiters and Dieng won’t swing a bunch of games for them. Memphis has just one game left against Utah, in Salt Lake in March.

Miami is already playing scary good basketball, and if Iggy is still good, this move could really cement their status as a rising contender. That said, Iggy is 36, hasn’t played for nine months, and his stats had already been declining steadily for a couple of seasons before this hiatus. There’s no real guarantee he’ll be the peak GSW version of himself for Miami. The Heat didn’t have to give up a ton to get him, but this deal isn’t guaranteed to work. All told, this deal only matters to the Jazz inasmuch as they have one game left against the Heat, next week at home. Catching them while Iggy is still shaking off nine months worth of rust could be good timing, but Miami is still a really good team.

We’ll cover Golden State shortly.

Clippers score an upgrade at the power forward spot

• LAC acquired Marcus Morris and Isaiah Thomas (the latter of whom they will waive), in exchange for Moe Harkless, Jerome Robinson, their 2020 first-rounder and a second-rounder Detroit owes them.
• New York picked up Harkless, the Clippers’ draft goodies and the right to the Wizards’ international draft prospect Issuf Sanon.
• Washington got in on the deal, getting Robinson in exchange for Sanon’s rights.

The Clippers are without a doubt one of the biggest obstacles to the Jazz mounting a real title run. And in that sense this deal is bad news for the Jazz. The Clips got better, at least on paper.

Morris is a real upgrade over Harkless — and this is a real boon for L.A. since even Harkless just landed in their lap for free last summer. (They actually were rewarded with a first-rounder for taking him.) Morris has become a 20-ppg scorer and one of the best stretch bigs around, at 44% from deep this year. Some of that is inflated on a bad team, but he can guard multiple positions decently, and he fills one of the only real holes on that Clippers squad. He’s also a bit of a strong personality — part of why this will be his sixth team in 10 seasons — but L.A’s megastars and Doc Rivers should be able to check that.

If there’s a downside to all of this, it’s that the Clippers continue to mortgage the future to go all-in for the short-term, so if it doesn’t work, they could really be left holding the bag. They’ve traded multiple firsts to assemble the current roster, which is a little nerve-wracking since their two stars can both opt out after next season, and Morris’ deal expires this summer. Yikes. They also just gave up on Robinson, a 2018 lottery pick, and they didn’t have a first-round pick in 2019. (They also sent the seldom-used Walton to Atlanta above in a money-saving move.)

But to be totally honest: so what? That’s what contenders do. When you sense that you have a real chance, using draft assets to improve your odds is the smart play anyway. Which is why the Lakers, Jazz and other teams in the upper tiers have done the same. Could it backfire, for the Clippers or for any of those teams? Sure. But the Clips realized they were one solid big man away from having a real shot this May and June.

The move doesn’t just fortify the Clipper’s position a half tier above the Jazz in overall terms — it could also help swing the tiebreaker and determine Western Conference standings. The Jazz are currently 2-1 against the Clips, but now they’ll have to deal with Morris spreading the floor when they host the final regular season matchup on April 7. Swing that one the Clippers’ way and the Jazz likely lose the tiebreaker. Since they already trail in the head-to-head count against the Lakers, Nuggets and Rockets, that could matter.

The Knicks downgraded in this deal, but got a pick for their troubles. The Jazz still have to visit the Garden next month, but nothing about this deal changes the fact that the Jazz should still be heavily favored in that contest.

And for the rebuilding Wizards, the pickup of Robinson and the McRae-to-Napier swap won’t really change their outlook. Utah will host the rebuilding Wiz on February 28, but their deadline moves shouldn’t change the forecast there.

Let’s wrap on Golden State. We already covered their DLo-for-Wiggins deal. 

Philly rents veterans from Golden State…

• The Sixers acquired Alec Burks and Glenn Robinson III, two veteran wings on expiring minimum contracts.
• The Warriors received three second rounders from the Sixers (Dallas ’20, Denver ’21, Toronto ’22).

…and then sends one to Orlando

• Orlando acquired James Ennis from Philadelphia.
• Philadelphia received LAL’s 2020 second-rounder from Orlando.

Golden State is embracing the tank: they have now acquired a first-rounder and five total second-rounders by playing “seller” in this trade market. (That includes the Willie Cauley-Stein deal they made back in January; we didn’t cover that here since this post is mostly about deadline moves.) And they got Wiggins, who is a talented player! Wiggins is starting to figure some things out, playing more efficiently and smartly on offense. He’s still not a defensive ace, and it’s unclear how he’ll fit with the Warriors’ stars when their team is reunited next season. But they salvaged assets in what was going to be a lost year either way.

There’s no short-term impact to the Jazz based on the Warriors’ moves — Utah already swept GSW in the season series, and it’s not like the Warriors will contend with the Jazz for playoff positioning. But here’s something to consider: the Warriors will get their All-NBA guards back next season, plus they’ll have a likely top-5 pick, Wiggins, a couple of big trade exceptions, and a bunch of other draft goodies. 

In other words, the Warriors could rebound really quickly and get right back into the thick of the Western Conference contender tier, which would certainly be relevant to Utah in 2020-21 and beyond.

The Philly and Orlando deals won’t really impact the Jazz at all. They’ve already gotten all their dates with the Sixers and Magic out of the way, and those low-cost veterans all expire this summer (except Ennis, who has a player option).

Cleveland picks up a 2-time All-Star

• Cleveland acquired Andre Drummond from Detroit.
• In exchange, the Pistons got Brandon Knight, John Henson and a future 2nd.

Drummond is still a good basketball player, but Detroit decided they had dead-ended with him at the helm, so they pushed the reset button and got off his contract. The return wasn’t great — two fairly average players and what will likely be a middling second-round pick. That’s another sign that life comes at you fast for big men who don’t spread the floor and aren’t elite paint protectors. 

Utah still has a game left in Detroit (March 7), and that game just got significantly easier. That said, Rudy Gobert has typically done fine against Drummond.

If Drummond wasn’t moving the needle in Detroit anymore, he likely won’t singlehandedly turn around the 13-39 Cavs. You could make an argument that his arrival might enliven the perpetually frustrated Kevin Love, who has already voiced his approval on social media. The question is only germaine to the Jazz because they still have both of their games against the Cavs still to be played: March 2 in Ohio, April 1 at home. In theory, a Drummond-Love combo could make it a little harder to emerge with two wins — but the rest of Cleveland’s roster is still a hot mess.

Sacramento dumps Dedmon

• Atlanta took Dewayne Dedmon from Sacramento, along with two second-round picks (2020 and 2021).
• Sacramento received the expiring Alex Len along with Jabari Parker, who has a player option next season.

For the Kings, this deal was all about erasing the mistake of giving Dedmon $40 million just to have him bounce in and out of the rotation. Dumping that salary cost them a couple of picks, but the consolation prize is that they get to be the next team to try to make something out of Parker. The former No. 2 overall pick can really score but has a stated aversion to defending. We’ll see if they actually have plans to use Len.

This deal won’t make a big difference to the Jazz, unless Parker has something of a renaissance on a team that the Jazz have to face 3-4 times per season. They’re done with Sacramento this year, though.

While we’re here on another Hawks deal, let’s quickly go back through the rest of their deals so we can get them out of the way.

More deals for Atlanta

• Atlanta took Derrick Walton Jr. from the Clippers, along with enough cash to pay his remaining salary, in exchange for a second-round pick that will never actually be conveyed.
• They also paid Portland to acquire project center Skal Labissiere.

The Jazz do have one game left (at home) against the Hawks in late March. That’s about the extent of the Jazz impact of their deals. That means Utah will have to deal with Capela and Dedmon in that last matchup.

One minor thing to note: after adding a pair of centers, the Hawks are probably no longer in the market for a starting-caliber pivot this coming offseason. They were one team that might have been interested in beloved Jazz alum and Atlanta native Derrick Favors. 

No big impact to the Jazz with the Blazers moving on from Skal. He has missed a bunch of games anyway, and was going to be out another month. That was Portland’s only move, obviously a cost-cutting gambit.

Notes about a few teams who sat out the trade deadline:

• The Lakers were also interested in Morris, per reports, but their cross-arena rivals outbid them. They were linked to some veteran point guards, but instead will probably look to pick someone up from free agency — potentially Darren Collison or someone who gets a buyout. Whether they do or not, it seems pretty clear that the Lakers are at least a half tier above the Jazz at the moment.
• OKC stood pat, after (reportedly) considering shipping Danilo Gallinari to Miami. The deadline passing also means that Chris Paul will finish the season a Thunder, which seemed inconceivable back in October. That means OKC will remain relevant, which might make the Jazz a little bit nervous — they’re only 1.5 games behind Utah in the West standings. The two teams are currently knotted at 1-1, with two games remaining.
• Dallas also kept their roster the same, although they did make some smaller deals in January, including the Cauley-Stein acquisition. The Mavs have been playing fairly mediocre basketball since December 29, and their 10-10 record over that span has dropped them to seventh in the West. Getting Luka Doncic healthy will matter more than any trade would have. The Jazz have seen them just once, and both remaining games are down in Texas.
• The Jazz still have three matchups left with San Antonio, and the good news is they won’t have to rewrite the scouting book for any of those games: the Spurs stood pat as well. Same goes for the Suns and Celtics (two games left against each) as well as the Raps, Bulls and Pels (one left).