To all the "Jazz front office has no interest in building a championship level team" people- please tell me the move we should have made, but didn't that would have made us a contender this year?
I don't think you can point to one move that would have made us a contender. For a small market team, you have to play chess. It's the many small moves. Like Golden State - they dumped a little salary, drafted a good player (Curry), dumped a little salary, traded for Iggy, drafted a good player (Klay), drafted a good player (Draymond), tanked and drafted another good player (Barnes). Then made sure they had max space for a max guy like Durant. You could also do this for San Antonio, Detroit, others.
Here are the moves I question just in the last 12 months:
- Paying Favors $17 when hardly any team had more than $8.6 MLE million to spend. Paying him $12 million would have opened the door to other moves. And by giving Favors so much, we had to pay Exum because this big Favors contract took all our cap space. SAVE $5 MILLION
- Bringing Thabo back at $5.25. We like him, but we could have declined his option and re-signed him for half of $5.25 which is more than he would have gotten elsewhere coming off an injury and that weed suspension. SAVE $2.5+ MILLION
Just those two moves above saves us almost $8 million. Add that money to the money saved in the Burks/Korver deal, and we would have had a much easier time facilitating a trade deadline deal. We could have absorbed much more money while staying under the luxury tax. And taking more money would have given other teams more incentive. Regardless, it's bad business to pay much more than market value for guys.
We could easily speculate on other deals we could have done, but the deals we did do not only limited growth this season, they will probably damage hopes for next season as well.
