Joe Ingles was hard to replace, I cannot deny that and his injury/age is probably something we (including myself) don't give enough consideration again. If we were to do this all over again, we would have just rolled with Ingles/Mitchell as the backcourt and blown the wad on a wing instead of Conley,
Having said that, the Jazz did a really piss poor job of building around Don/Rudy.
So your answer is hindsight? I'm asking about what the Jazz were supposed to do this offseason to even maintain pretender status. I can do hindsight all night long but that's not what we're talking about.
I also don't think they did a piss poor job building around Don and Rudy. I think Don and Rudy are kinda hard to build around; you need really specific types of pieces since Gobert couldn't do anything with a basketball in his hands (or at least wasn't allowed to) and Mitchell never developed and implemented the glue guy skills he needed to have at his size (most notably running an offense/passing the ball, and playing even good defense).
Around those two, Ingles is the most perfect guy they could've had. Full stop. Given the importance of the off-the-court dynamics, it's like he was made in a lab. Then they needed another scorer/legit star that was taller than Mitchell. They needed a legit point guard that was wing size. They needed a swing big that could guard on the perimeter, reliably space the floor, be an average rebounder, and be able to cover ground to block shots in a switch scheme.
Yeah, in hindsight, maybe blowing the wad on Conley and Bogdanovic wasn't the right call, but considering the difficulty in finding these very uncommon players above, maybe it was since the best window to acquire the best pieces they could was then. That was the offseason to make their move and so they made the moves they could. What that meant was, "**** it, we'll just get the best PG we can and the best spacing big wing that can masquerade as a PF and we'll just bomb away and let Rudy cover the holes."
It could've gone way worse than it did, but the 2020 draft is really the deathblow of all of this and that bungle is the most unforgivable of the bad moves since in one offseason, they:
-passed on two of the rare specimens that could've actually been great pieces in a build around Don/Rudy
-traded out like 4 or 5 second round picks, further limiting their flexibility or ability to improve
-in the process of passing on Bane and McDaniels, they drafted THE ONE GUY that anyone that knew anything could've told you was clear-as-day mistake. They followed that up with signing the corpse of Derrick Favors - a guy that the Jazz had an overabundance of knowledge of his health issues - for the full ****ing MLE THAT PLAYED THE SAME POSITION AS THE GUY THEY JUST DRAFTED (and the same position/skillset as the guy they just spent the Superman on). Then they had to trade a lightly-protected 1st to get rid of him which throws a wrench in all scenarios to come: rebuilding or retooling. The protections make it hard to trade later picks, but they are light enough to very realistically convey a lottery pick.
But again, that's not the point of this exercise. The point is that the Jazz hit a dead end and the question is what to do next, not what should've been done in the past.
