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OKC as a blueprint

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jazznik

Well-Known Member
OKC just won a championship. They provided a very good realistic template for the Jazz on how to assemble a contender: OKC is a small-market team in a less-then-desirable city without a rich owner. They won by having an MVP-level player (SGA)+ 2 All-Stars (Williams, Holmgren)+ 3 above-average-starters (Hartenstein, Caruso, Dort) + quality bench (Wallace, Jaylin Williams, Wiggins, Joe). Of note, the Thunder has only two large 30+ million contracts in SGA and Hartenstein.

Now, lets look at what the Jazz have. We can argue that in the best case scenario Lauri would be equal to Jalen Williams and Kessler can become our Hartenstein. Being very optimistic again, we can argue that the group of Hendricks, Collier, Cody and Flip can produce 1 above-average starter and 2 quality bench players. Even if everything goes right the Jazz are still short of an MVP-level player (SGA), a second All-Star (Holmgren), 1 above-average starter and a couple of quality bench players.

What's more, keeping Lauri and Kessler means that the Jazz already have their two big contracts by paying them. That means that the only realistic scenario for the Jazz to become realistic contenders is for Ace +2026 pick to reach the level of SGA and Holmgren in 3-4 years, while still being on their rookie contracts. And that the Jazz will somehow successfully pick up or develop several key role players (Caruso, Wallace).

Now, how realistic is that? It looks like paying Lauri and Kessler big money really constricts realistic options for the Jazz to become real contenders with them on the roster. And trading one or both of them would not help much either: the Jazz will have to replace their production with someone else. It does not make me very optimistic about the Jazz becoming a real contender any time soon. Can anyone point out the holes in my reasoning and show that the Jazz do in fact have a realistic path to contending?
 
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I just looked up the Pacers as another blueprint. They also had only two large contracts (Haliburton and Siakim), Turner on a very friendly contract and a bunch of very good role players on rookie deals. It is a very similar situation to OKC.
 
After trading for SGA, the Thunder had 3 losing seasons, and 2 of those were quite bad losing seasons. This was their 5th season after trading for their eventual star. 5 seasons is an eternity in the NBA: Lauri's contract would be up by then. Maybe if the Jazz seem like possible contenders, he'd be willing to sign a small contract to go for a title. If you're asking if the Jazz will be contending in 2 years, then the answer is no. But there is so much time for them to find additional talent and figure out the current players' potential.

It is true that we need to hit on Bailey or 2026 as an All-NBA level talent if we're going to get anywhere soon. And the other will probably need to hit all star level at least. That seems optimistic, but I'm not sure its unrealistic. We'll just have to see how the lottery goes next year.
 
Unfortunately I don’t think there is a blue print, especially for a small market team that doesn’t attract free agents. OKC is great largely because of SGA and no one could’ve predicted how good he’d be. You have to get lucky in the draft and hope that player doesn’t leave.
 
Max Porter said:
Unfortunately I don’t think there is a blue print, especially for a small market team that doesn’t attract free agents. OKC is great largely because of SGA and no one could’ve predicted how good he’d be. You have to get lucky in the draft and hope that player doesn’t leave.
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OKC traded for SGA. And the Pacers traded for Siakam and Haliburton.
 
You have to be lucky and your front office needs to be excellent.

The Jazz FO has been truly awful with their decisions for three years now and the luck part seems to be missing as well.
 
jazznik said:
OKC just won a championship. They provided a very good realistic template for the Jazz on how to assemble a contender: OKC is a small-market team in a less-then-desirable city without a rich owner. They won by having an MVP-level player (SGA)+ 2 All-Stars (Williams, Holmgren)+ 3 above-average-starters (Hartenstein, Caruso, Dort) + quality bench (Wallace, Jaylin Williams, Wiggins, Joe). Of note, the Thunder has only two large 30+ million contracts in SGA and Hartenstein.

Now, lets look at what the Jazz have. We can argue that in the best case scenario Lauri would be equal to Jalen Williams and Kessler can become our Hartenstein. Being very optimistic again, we can argue that the group of Hendricks, Collier, Cody and Flip can produce 1 above-average starter and 2 quality bench players. Even if everything goes right the Jazz are still short of an MVP-level player (SGA), a second All-Star (Holmgren), 1 above-average starter and a couple of quality bench players.

What's more, keeping Lauri and Kessler means that the Jazz already have their two big contracts by paying them. That means that the only realistic scenario for the Jazz to become realistic contenders is for Ace +2026 pick to reach the level of SGA and Holmgren in 3-4 years, while still being on their rookie contracts. And that the Jazz will somehow successfully pick up or develop several key role players (Caruso, Wallace).

Now, how realistic is that? It looks like paying Lauri and Kessler big money really constricts realistic options for the Jazz to become real contenders with them on the roster. And trading one or both of them would not help much either: the Jazz will have to replace their production with someone else. It does not make me very optimistic about the Jazz becoming a real contender any time soon. Can anyone point out the holes in my reasoning and show that the Jazz do in fact have a realistic path to contending?
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You are right. You should probably just stop following/watching the jazz.
 
Max Porter said:
Unfortunately I don’t think there is a blue print, especially for a small market team that doesn’t attract free agents. OKC is great largely because of SGA and no one could’ve predicted how good he’d be. You have to get lucky in the draft and hope that player doesn’t leave.
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Yes and no. Indiana is in also a small market team that doesn’t attract free agents and they did not get exactly lucky in the draft but they had a very good chance of winning this year too.

I think the blueprint for the teams like the Jazz do exist and it contains several key components:
1. Only two large contracts.
2. Two or three All Stars, with one of them being a top-10 player. And these All Stars need to be either two-way players or someone as good as Jokic.
3. Several quality two-way role players on rookie deals (or somehow very underpaid).

Indiana and Oklahoma had these components and went to finals. Denver had three large contracts instead of two (and not enough good players on rookie contracts) and because of that could not buy the necessary depth.

My problem with the Jazz is that they don't have any potential quality young two-way players (maybe, Hendricks?): Keyonte, Brice, Flip, Collier, Cody - and even Kessler - are all one-dimensional. So, even if Ace suddenly florishes and the 2026 pick develops fast who will be their Dort, Cason Wallace, Nembhard, Nesmith? We will not be able to buy them because the money will be tied up in Lauri and Kessler. And if we tried to trade Lauri and Kessler for them who will be the ones replacing Lauri and Kessler?

I think that the only way to build an actual contender is to trade both Lauri and Walker for picks and trade Keyonte, Brice and Collier either for picks or at least for a young two-way player. That will greatly prolong the tank but that seems the only way to have all three components of the OKC blueprint 4-5 years from now.
 
Tanktastic said:
You have to be lucky and your front office needs to be excellent.

The Jazz FO has been truly awful with their decisions for three years now and the luck part seems to be missing as well.
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Lauri should’ve been traded that first offseason after Lauri’s first season here to expand the rebuild. Also trading for Collins was the most unnecessary move ever
 
Draft big stars, then trade your stars for big packages and somehow convince other stars to ask for a trade to your team then trade that star for a big package. That's the OKC model.
 
Really makes you wonder if they never traded Mitchell and Gobert. Somehow they made up and built around them. The avenue to become a championship caliber team now is 5 years away.
 
Over the past decade or more, I've often expressed frustration with the utilization of recency bias in terms of having a template on winning, where we look at whoever last won the championship, employing a survival bias, and declare that to be the new and/or only formula for winning in "today's NBA." I do understand that you're drawing upon some similarities between the franchises that are relevant so I'm not 100% specifically stating this directed at you but more the larger context. Formulas don't work until they do. Winning a championship is such a rare event (one per year, and only ten in a decade) that the sample size is really difficult to extrapolate in terms of what works and what doesn't but we like to speak very definitively on what does or doesn't work for building a true contender. The reality, in my view, and the only pathway forward for any franchise, is to play the hand you're dealt as best as possible. Sometimes you get a good hand and sometimes you don't, but you have to play it, and only by playing it as best as possible do you put yourself in a situation to come out on top (and therefore become the new "model" for everyone else). Don’t pretend your hand needs to be like others’. If someone dropped a 10 and a 6, you don’t have to also because they have different cards, and likewise you don’t need to hold a jack or a 3 because that’s what someone else (or even everyone) did — again you’re holding different hands.

And I guess to beat a dead horse that's almost nearly killed a multi-decade intense fanship for me, but we had the best hand we've had in 25 years and decided to draw 5 new cards because our hand didn't look like the other hands people were holding. So we'll sit on the sidelines until we draw a royal flush. But, back to the survival bias, every team has flaws that can be exposed. Because there has to be a winner each year, it appears like those flaws weren't exposed. I think we're chasing a hypothetical where we're going to have some structure that we can move forward with in confidence without the perceived flaws. It's so much easier to have little expectation and I think there were legitimate beliefs about a championship happening after we'd been chasing it so long that being burned in the fashion we were with the previous iteration of this franchise. That has us very afraid of being vulnerable again without having great more security to allow ourselves to get to that point by hoping for a hypothetical team without perceived flaws (or as significant of flaws). It's much less emotionally painful to sit at the bottom with hypothetical assets and dream of all the ways it could be amazing if everything bloomed just right, in season, and without exposure to wind, hail, frost or storms. We balked at the idea of expending even one more asset on the last iteration of the team, as we could possibly ruin this team’s competitiveness for up to a decade taking that approach. Well, here’s the pathway we’ve opted for, three years later, looking at another tanking year, and being a contender in a best-case-scenario looks a lot closer to that ten year mark that we were somehow destined to jeopardize if we didn’t blow it all up…

But now our best bet, since dropping all five cards, is that we somehow hope like hell that we can draw a fresh hand that lands us something in the ball park of four of a kind or a full house. You know, kinda like the hand we just dropped. If we’re lucky.

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Max Porter said:
Unfortunately I don’t think there is a blue print, especially for a small market team that doesn’t attract free agents. OKC is great largely because of SGA and no one could’ve predicted how good he’d be. You have to get lucky in the draft and hope that player doesn’t leave.
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A lot of teams were shocked when the Clippers traded SGA. He was already looking very promising at the time. I dont think they projected he would be this good but he was a very promising player when he was traded.

Also, OKC flipped players that weren't good enough quickly. I think that was a key to their success. They evaluated talent that they had quickly and didnt hesitate to say no to even first round draft picks when it wasn't right.
 
The Jazz Wonderbra said:
We are on year 3 with Keyonte knowing he is not a 2 way player. OKC would have already flipped him and given Dort a chance.
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Who are all these first-rounders (meaning guaranteed contracts) that OKC abandoned before year 3. Let's go back a decade and look at first round picks that the Thunder didn't hold onto.

Josh Huestis? 3 years. Cameron Payne? 3 years. Terrance Ferguson? 3 years. Darius Bazley? 5 years. Josh Giddey? 3 years. Tre Mann? 2.5 years.

That leaves Mitch McGary who left the NBA after 2 seasons after some drug problems. And sort of Bolmaro, an international player who I think they just ended up relinquishing the draft rights for.

Like. I get it. The Thunder have done well and are in a great position. And the fact that they have done it from a small market is particularly interesting to us as Jazz fans. But there is a lot of mythologizing going on too.

If we hold onto Keyonte/Brice/Hendricks etc past their rookie contracts and they still haven't shown anything, I will agree that we are holding onto our players too long. It's true that the Thunder did tend to move on after 3 seasons if that player didn't feel like a piece of the puzzle. But as agonizingly long as these seasons have felt at times... it's still only been two seasons.
 
jazznik said:
OKC just won a championship. They provided a very good realistic template for the Jazz on how to assemble a contender: OKC is a small-market team in a less-then-desirable city without a rich owner. They won by having an MVP-level player (SGA)+ 2 All-Stars (Williams, Holmgren)+ 3 above-average-starters (Hartenstein, Caruso, Dort) + quality bench (Wallace, Jaylin Williams, Wiggins, Joe). Of note, the Thunder has only two large 30+ million contracts in SGA and Hartenstein.

Now, lets look at what the Jazz have. We can argue that in the best case scenario Lauri would be equal to Jalen Williams and Kessler can become our Hartenstein. Being very optimistic again, we can argue that the group of Hendricks, Collier, Cody and Flip can produce 1 above-average starter and 2 quality bench players. Even if everything goes right the Jazz are still short of an MVP-level player (SGA), a second All-Star (Holmgren), 1 above-average starter and a couple of quality bench players.

What's more, keeping Lauri and Kessler means that the Jazz already have their two big contracts by paying them. That means that the only realistic scenario for the Jazz to become realistic contenders is for Ace +2026 pick to reach the level of SGA and Holmgren in 3-4 years, while still being on their rookie contracts. And that the Jazz will somehow successfully pick up or develop several key role players (Caruso, Wallace).

Now, how realistic is that? It looks like paying Lauri and Kessler big money really constricts realistic options for the Jazz to become real contenders with them on the roster. And trading one or both of them would not help much either: the Jazz will have to replace their production with someone else. It does not make me very optimistic about the Jazz becoming a real contender any time soon. Can anyone point out the holes in my reasoning and show that the Jazz do in fact have a realistic path to contending?
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The OKC "model" hinges on getting a future league MVP in a trade. Without that bit of luck (nobody expected SGA to be THIS good), it seems improbably that OCK would have won the title. That aspect of its rebuild is highly unlikely to be replicated by the Jazz or anyone else. In general terms, OKC traded well, drafted well, and did a good job of finding and developing supporting talent. Those aspects of its rebuild are potentially replicable, but without SGA, they don't sniff the title.

Let's hope that the Jazz are able to turn the corner soon. I did an analysis of team rebuilds covering the modern tanking era and leading up to it, and no team that had a rebuild lasting 6+ years generated 6+ years of sustained playoff appearances, let alone sustained deep playoff runs. In other words, rebuilds lasting more than 5 years uniformly fail to deliver a positive return on investment. We better hope, therefore, that the Jazz FO has a plan for turning this around by the end of next year, or our 6+ years of losing are unlikely to generate a commensurate return of 6+ years of winning.
 
Schrödinger's Gerbil said:
The OKC "model" hinges on getting a future league MVP in a trade. Without that bit of luck (nobody expected SGA to be THIS good), it seems improbably that OCK would have won the title. That aspect of its rebuild is highly unlikely to be replicated by the Jazz or anyone else. In general terms, OKC traded well, drafted well, and did a good job of finding and developing supporting talent. Those aspects of its rebuild are potentially replicable, but without SGA, they don't sniff the title.

Let's hope that the Jazz are able to turn the corner soon. I did an analysis of team rebuilds covering the modern tanking era and leading up to it, and no team that had a rebuild lasting 6+ years generated 6+ years of sustained playoff appearances, let alone sustained deep playoff runs. In other words, rebuilds lasting more than 5 years uniformly fail to deliver a positive return on investment. We better hope, therefore, that the Jazz FO has a plan for turning this around by the end of next year, or our 6+ years of losing are unlikely to generate a commensurate return of 6+ years of winning.
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OKC also had three MVP's they traded away
Durant, Harden, Westbrook
How do you explain that
How many championships might they have won if they kept them?
Do realize it was salary issues Could not pay three MVP's max money but seems unfair if there were all drafted by you
 
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infection said:
Over the past decade or more, I've often expressed frustration with the utilization of recency bias in terms of having a template on winning, where we look at whoever last won the championship, employing a survival bias, and declare that to be the new and/or only formula for winning in "today's NBA." I do understand that you're drawing upon some similarities between the franchises that are relevant so I'm not 100% specifically stating this directed at you but more the larger context. Formulas don't work until they do. Winning a championship is such a rare event (one per year, and only ten in a decade) that the sample size is really difficult to extrapolate in terms of what works and what doesn't but we like to speak very definitively on what does or doesn't work for building a true contender. The reality, in my view, and the only pathway forward for any franchise, is to play the hand you're dealt as best as possible. Sometimes you get a good hand and sometimes you don't, but you have to play it, and only by playing it as best as possible do you put yourself in a situation to come out on top (and therefore become the new "model" for everyone else). Don’t pretend your hand needs to be like others’. If someone dropped a 10 and a 6, you don’t have to also because they have different cards, and likewise you don’t need to hold a jack or a 3 because that’s what someone else (or even everyone) did — again you’re holding different hands.

And I guess to beat a dead horse that's almost nearly killed a multi-decade intense fanship for me, but we had the best hand we've had in 25 years and decided to draw 5 new cards because our hand didn't look like the other hands people were holding. So we'll sit on the sidelines until we draw a royal flush. But, back to the survival bias, every team has flaws that can be exposed. Because there has to be a winner each year, it appears like those flaws weren't exposed. I think we're chasing a hypothetical where we're going to have some structure that we can move forward with in confidence without the perceived flaws. It's so much easier to have little expectation and I think there were legitimate beliefs about a championship happening after we'd been chasing it so long that being burned in the fashion we were with the previous iteration of this franchise. That has us very afraid of being vulnerable again without having great more security to allow ourselves to get to that point by hoping for a hypothetical team without perceived flaws (or as significant of flaws). It's much less emotionally painful to sit at the bottom with hypothetical assets and dream of all the ways it could be amazing if everything bloomed just right, in season, and without exposure to wind, hail, frost or storms. We balked at the idea of expending even one more asset on the last iteration of the team, as we could possibly ruin this team’s competitiveness for up to a decade taking that approach. Well, here’s the pathway we’ve opted for, three years later, looking at another tanking year, and being a contender in a best-case-scenario looks a lot closer to that ten year mark that we were somehow destined to jeopardize if we didn’t blow it all up…

But now our best bet, since dropping all five cards, is that we somehow hope like hell that we can draw a fresh hand that lands us something in the ball park of four of a kind or a full house. You know, kinda like the hand we just dropped. If we’re lucky.

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Very well said.
 
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