No. Please, no. This is the kind of idea that sounds clever right up until you think about it for more than thirty seconds. Bringing Zion Williamson onto your team doesn’t solve problems; it replaces them with louder, more expensive ones.
Zion doesn’t join a roster; he annexes it. Everything becomes about managing him: his minutes, his body, his mood, his availability, his latest “encouraging update.” The team’s identity bends around the hope that this will finally be the healthy year. It never is. Ask New Orleans how that’s gone.
And New Orleans really should have moved on years ago. They didn’t because of strategy or patience, but because of the oldest trap in sports: sunk costs and gambler’s fallacy dressed up as optimism. Yes, the last roll came up snake eyes, and the one before that, and the one before that, but surely one more roll of the dice will hit the jackpot. After all, you can’t walk away now; you’ve already invested too much. That logic has kept Zion in place long past the point where the pattern was obvious.
This isn’t unique to the Pelicans. NBA franchises fall for this all the time, clinging to problematic “superstars” because the theoretical upside still sparkles just enough to blind them to reality. The league is littered with teams waiting on a pot of gold that never appears, convinced that abandoning the chase would somehow be worse than wasting another year.
The Pelicans aren’t shopping Zion because they’re bored. They’re shopping him because they’ve finally accepted that as long as he’s there, progress remains hypothetical. The talent is undeniable, but so is the cycle: a brief burst of dominance, a surge of breathless optimism, and then another injury report written in careful euphemisms.
Add him to the Jazz and suddenly a young, disciplined rebuild turns into a $40-million annual exercise in waiting. Waiting for conditioning. Waiting for health. Waiting for the version of Zion that exists mostly in highlights and memory. The Jazz are trying to build something durable. Trading for Zion is how you turn a long-term plan into a recurring medical update.
The Jazz are trying to get whole. Why inject a virus directly into a body that's already struggling to get whole?
