That is a very valid observation. Unfortunately, the game style and financial framework in the NBA change every several years and nobody has the luxury of waiting for the sample size to increase and only after that start making moves based on the sufficient". Teams react and copy each other very quickly. But you can increase the sample a bit by adding to it another small-market team that recently went to the Finals, the 203-24 Mavs. The Mavs were built pretty similar: two large contracts , 2 All Stars (and one of them was a top-5 player) and many two-way players on low contracts, including two key players on rookie salaries. They were able to get away with Doncic being bad on defense because he was together with Jokic and LeBron one of the best offensive players at the time..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.
What the Jazz has been doing is the exact opposite of how those three teams were constructed. They gave a large contract to the player whose prime will not be aligned with Ace and the 2026 pick. They drafted a bunch of one-dimensional players who will be inevitably targeted in the playoffs, they keep trading for expensive vets like Sexton, Collins and Andersen. Trading for Svi and holding on him simply defies logic...
I think the Jazz are not building a true contender but rather a team "good enough" for playoffs and fans. Which is fine with me but many people on this board eagerly anticipating the emergence of a true contender are setting themselves up for disappointment. Anyway, the Deron-Boozer Jazz were fun and I will not mind watching the assembly of a similar team.