Transaction Terms Reveal Jazz Priority: 2025 Optionality

Deal details spell out the Jazz’s desire for ongoing optionality.

The Jazz have made their three free agent signings official, and there’s a pattern to those deal structures that sends a pretty strong signal around what they’re trying to accomplish with their books moving forward.

All of Drew Eubanks, Svi Mykhailiuk and Johnny Juzang signed contracts that are not guaranteed after the upcoming season (and Patty Mills signed for a single year). That’s clearly intentional, and it makes it obvious what Utah’s goal is: preserving flexibility so they have multiple ways of pursuing talent upgrades next summer.

Jazz brass told us heading into the summer that they hoped to pursue talent upgrades, and there are rumors that suggest they meant it. But you can’t just will guys into being available to you, so when their wildest dreams didn’t pan out, they rolled the optionality forward and now have a number of ways they could approach next offseason.

Even after exercising rookie contract options and selecting their 2025 draftees, the Jazz’s currently salary commitments could leave them just under the expected 2025-26 salary cap again. That’s before factoring in potential trades involving the nearly $60 million in what will then be expiring salary owed to John Collins, Collin Sexton and Jordan Clarkson. Utah could realistically be just one veteran trade away from being a cap space player again next summer — despite Lauri Markkanen’s extension kicking in.

The Jazz will go into next offseason with:

• An All-Star locked up on a slightly sub-max deal
• A likely top-5 pick in the 2025 draft, plus two additional 2025 firsts
• 9-12 (but most likely 11) total firsts in the subsequent seven drafts
• Six guys still on rookie contracts (plus a #32 pick with three years left, and draft rights to two recent second-rounders)
• $59.8 million in expiring salary for trades
• $11.2 million in non-guaranteed salary they can clear, use in trades, or keep

That’s a pretty good grouping of assets, with which the Jazz could go a lot of directions. They could open up significant cap space without major sacrifices, they could turn into buyers if the right trade opportunities come up or they could get even younger and kick the flexibility can out another year.

So first, the cap space route… Let’s say the Jazz pick fifth with their own pick, and that Cleveland and Minnesota (20th and 27th last year) stay in the same draft range. That would add $16.3 million in cap holds to Utah’s 2025 books, placing them within $3.5 million of the expected cap if they waive the non-guaranteed guys and pick up rookie options.

Because their recent free agent signees are non-guaranteed for next season, Utah could get slightly under the 2025 cap, even before any trades.

But there are pretty realistic ways to open up more than that. For example, if at some point this season they gave Collins away to a team for expiring salary, just that one move would give them nearly $30 million in 2025 cap space, in addition to the other assets listed above. Reasonable people can certainly disagree about how likely it is the Jazz find a taker for Collins, but my position on this is that he’s a career 16-and-8 guy who will still be 27 and make just 17% of next season’s salary cap. So I don’t find it that wild to believe that at some point someone will make that value play, the same way Utah did when it acquired Collins essentially for free in 2023.

But fine, even if the Jazz can’t move Collins specifically… they could also trade Clarkson (who will essentially be making Mid-Level Exception money next season) into space or a traded player exception, or consolidate draft picks. Sexton surely has the most value of the non-star vets. Point is, they have options.

The cap space route is most intriguing if the Jazz have a way to use that to get competitive right away. Would a core of Markkanen, their ’25 draftee and whoever they could sign/acquire with cap room next July be a good enough core that Utah could start the climb back to relevance? It definitely depends on who those additions are, but if you’re rooting for the rebuild to take a sharp turn back towards winning, that might be one of the most realistic paths.

Even if they’re operating without cap space, the amount of stackable salary they have (upwards of $70 million, even without including Markkanen or any of the recent draftees) gives them a lot of ways to construct pick-centric trades. The veteran contracts will be less intimidating when they’re expiring deals, and Utah would also have the option of guaranteeing some portion of Eubanks’, Mykhailiuk’s or Juzang’s salary to make a trade work. (Side note: one under-discussed aspect of these signings is that it’s useful for teams to have smaller salaries they can add into trades that aren’t attached to recent draftees. Eubanks’ $5M, Svi’s $3.5M and Juzang’s $3.1M could become useful at some point.)

To be clear, the real currency in such a trade would be draft capital, not the veterans. It would be similar to the trade the Knicks made — and the Jazz reportedly tried to make — for Mikal Bridges. Or the trade Boston made — and the Jazz reportedly tried to make — for Jrue Holiday. You need a Bojan Bogdanovic (part of the Bridges deal) or Malcolm Brogdon (included for Jrue) for the salaries to work, but those trades happened because the teams met a threshold of draft compensation and young prospects. Utah has plenty of both kinds of assets; the question is whether someone they view as a timeline changer becomes available, and whether they can finally move to the front of line.

Those two paths aren’t mutually exclusive, either, because the Jazz have enough stuff to put a really good player next to Markkanen and their 2025 draftee and still have some powder dry for a later move. A trio of Markkanen-Cooper Flagg-(insert acquired borderline star here) might be enough for Utah to start the climb while still having the assets to monitor the market for another big fish. What about Markkanen-Dylan Harper-(same said dude) or Markkanen-VJ Edgecombe-(the guy)? Ace Bailey? Nolan Traore? Drake Powell?

These, of course, are everything-goes-right scenarios. Utah knows all too well that having the flexibility to chase talent upgrades doesn’t make the next core magically materialize.

Which is why (incoming caveat alert) there’s another way next summer’s flexibility could end: they could miss on all their intended targets and once again try to kick the can. Just like we said this offseason, Utah’s hope for a “big game” acquisition was always dependent on the right guys being available and the other team (or free agent) accepting what the Jazz have put on the table. Sometimes it doesn’t go that way, and if Utah is in the same position next July, the boring answer is they might just draw it out a whole other year.

By the summer of 2026, the contracts of Collins, Sexton and Clarkson will have expired. Walker Kessler will be a restricted free agent (or have a new extension), but Utah could still have as many as eight guys on rookie deals, if they use all three 2025 picks. They could keep their own 2026 pick if it’s in the 1-8 range post-lottery, and could create upwards of $60 million in cap space with just Markkanen, all their young guys, and Kessler’s free agent rights on their books.

Nobody really wants the rebuild to drag on that long. In this scenario, the Jazz would be mediocre to bad for four straight seasons before even starting the climb to true contention, which could require additional years and nailing more moves around the margins. That doesn’t sound thrilling. But if the deals they want in 2025 aren’t there, it’s probably a better option than whatever will be next summer’s equivalent of throwing $52 million at Tobias Harris.

Nobody knows exactly how this will play out, or how long it will take the Jazz to finally reel in a target worthy of sharing the marquee with Markkanen and (if things go a certain way) Utah’s pick from atop a loaded draft. But the point is, the Jazz obviously wanted to give themselves a few different ways to keep pursuing the big game that eluded them this offseason.