Is this the worst rebuild in NBA history?

[Saint Cy of JFC]

We do have some nice young talent and the "rebuild" has been managed very poorly. Both of those can be true.

Very poorly? Cmon now.

Im not saying there cant be critiques, but very bad? The Jazz produced an all-star during the rebuild (Lauri) and a guy who looks like a future all-star (Keyonte). Jazz will have max cap-space next off-season to sign a player or multiple players. I would say it's been managed well.

 

[NUMBERICA]

There is nothing special about an organization chasing the sugar-high of regular season wins at their own expense. All the bad and mediocre organizations do it all the time.

Contrary to popular belief, tanking is *not* what makes the Kings the worst organization in the NBA; chasing regular season success and not having a plan is.

The Jazz are a B-tier organization. I suppose we should just be happy with that, by golly!

 

[HeatCheck]

I don't feel like piling on but the thing that gets me is the Wemby Spurs had a higher lotto pick than the Jazz the past two drafts. OKC looks to be a potential dynasty and at this point they could likely have a higher lottery pick in '26 thanks to the hapless Clips. Both those teams esp the Thunder are loaded with future picks too.

Not to mention the uncertainty of the Jazz '26 FRP potentially going to OKC. Obviously that is not the fault of the current FO though.

Yes as a fan it is frustrating especially since the draft should be the main resource for adding talent for this team. Kinda hard to catch up to the talent level on these other teams if they keep landing higher lottery picks..

 

[YoungJefe]

So the worst rebuild in history is a bunch of promising young guys, a breakout star, another older star (that has a game that's posible to age gracefully), and is only able to lose enough in year four because of a season ending injury to their starting center after 5 games ?

I'm going ahead and take a guess that problably there's been worse.

Tore down a one seed with two superstars, to build a bad team with 0 superstars that won't be top 5 in the conference in our lifetime.

 

[NUMBERICA]

Not to mention the uncertainty of the Jazz '26 FRP potentially going to OKC. Obviously that is not the fault of the current FO though.

It’s the same ownership. And JZ has been here throughout.

That trade was an ownership decision to cut costs. The responsible parties for that catastrophe are the same ones making the decisions around this issue.

Bridging the topics further: I think the protected pick is actually a brilliant scheme if they knew it would basically force them to tank and they had the resolve to see it through correctly. Instead, they very curiously have mostly been toying around and ultimately seeking to merely keep the worst possible pick.

In the last year, this organization is increasingly demonstrating that not only does it have no plan, it is flailing.

 

[SojoDave]

The two most important factors in rebuilding an NBA franchise is making smart decisions and luck.

The bad decisions are the Favors trade, the Cody pick, not tanking hard enough to get Wemby and not trading Lauri.

The bad luck was not getting higher draft picks in the lottery, Taylor and Walkers injuries, and Cody being a bust.

Seems like the Jazz haven't been lucky nor have they made the best decisions.

Since we probably won't get our pick, I think the Jazz need to go for it and build instead of tank and hope for better luck.

 

[Schrödinger's Gerbil]

There is nothing special about an organization chasing the sugar-high of regular season wins at their own expense. All the bad and mediocre organizations do it all the time.

Contrary to popular belief, tanking is *not* what makes the Kings the worst organization in the NBA; chasing regular season success and not having a plan is.

The Jazz are a B-tier organization. I suppose we should just be happy with that, by golly!

I don't know from whence the popular belief has sprung that the Kings are tanking. They've been trying, unsuccessfully, to win since 2006. One playoff appearance in 18 years is not a tank; it's monumental organizational incompetence and dysfunction.

The King's experience is not a cautionary tale of tanking, per se, but of the perils of serial lottery drafting and how hard it can be to get off the lottery treadmill once one is firmly on it, which is itself a sobering cautionary tale for those embarking, or thinking of embarking, on a structural teardown, and, thus, purposively venturing onto the lottery treadmill.

 

[Schrödinger's Gerbil]

The two most important factors in rebuilding an NBA franchise is making smart decisions and luck.

The bad decisions are the Favors trade, the Cody pick, not tanking hard enough to get Wemby and not trading Lauri.

The bad luck was not getting higher draft picks in the lottery, Taylor and Walkers injuries, and Cody being a bust.

Seems like the Jazz haven't been lucky nor have they made the best decisions.

Since we probably won't get our pick, I think the Jazz need to go for it and build instead of tank and hope for better luck.

The odds were always against us landing Wembanyama. Even if we had tanked harder, the most likely outcome is that we still wouldn’t have won the lottery. There is no credible “if we’d only tanked harder, we’d have Wemby” argument, and it’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

More to the point, aside from maybe Amen Thompson—and even that’s debatable—who among the players drafted ahead of Taylor Hendricks in 2023 is the transformative star we supposedly missed? Scoot Henderson? Brandon Miller? Ausar Thompson? Anthony Black? Bilal Coulibaly? Jarace Walker? It is entirely plausible that we ended up with the second-best player in that draft at #16. Had we tanked harder, there is no guarantee we’d be better off, and several very plausible scenarios in which we’d be worse.

The “just tank more” argument also assumes that whatever assets we could have extracted for Lauri would be similarly transformative. That assumption ignores recent history. We already acquired a mountain of assets for Mitchell and Gobert, and most of those have either been flipped, project as role players at best, or are now routinely dismissed by fans as insufficient—prompting calls to dump them for yet more speculative future assets. It’s an infinite regress.

At this point, everyone—the front office, the players, and the fans—is exhausted by the tank. Unfortunately, the short-sighted decision to trade Favors has locked us into one more year of it, which may be too difficult to execute anyway, given how many teams either genuinely stink or have little incentive to win.

The league office, by all accounts, is also fed up and is exploring ways to discourage tanking further. I hope it acts decisively. Tanking is corrosive to the league, alienating to fans, and ultimately self-defeating for too many teams. Rooting for your own team to lose year after year drains the joy out of the sport. It’s bad basketball, bad entertainment, and it needs to end.