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Rest Easy, The Jazz Will Be Awful


There is no honor in tanking... there is also a big potential reward. The honor gained by winning 29 games instead of 23 will not bring a big reward.

I'm just not sure there is a deal at this point that does what we need. Not sure the Lakers would do Mike/JC/NAW or Gay straight up for Russ. Indiana may not change their tune but the only big move is going to be Russ related.

I think we could offload JC... Might even be able to talk Indiana (who is so weird about this stuff) into taking JC into their excess cap space. Two birds with one stone. Might be able to do a Phx deal with JC or Mike.

Hopefully we take a bunch of lumps the first 20 games and a vet trade opportunity manifests itself. Right now I don't see any that aren't obvious we are dumping talent for nothing type of deals and they have said/proven they aren't on board with those.
 
Based on SCHOENE player projections and RAPM, ESPN projects the Jazz to be 12th in the west with 34.9 wins. There are 5 teams with worse projections than the Jazz in the NBA.

I really wish we could move at least Conley. IMO he's still a winning regular season player and will raise our floor if he stays the whole season.

I expect the models to all have us between 33-40 wins. Models aren't perfect, and we have certain players that I feel get overrated on paper, but if we're aiming for a top two pick we need to be around 20 wins. There's a massive gap between what we "need" to be at for a top pick and the talent of this group.

I think it will be especially hard to tank because 1) our talent is spread out between 7+ guys and 2) we don't have a young prospect that demands time. It's easy for OKC, for example, to get really bad really quick because they can bench SGA and voila, they're a terrible team. The Jazz would have to bench 3-4 guys to have the same effect. It's easier to artificially be bad if you can do so by benching a smaller subset of players. We also don't have that Jalen Green type prospect, who's very promising but doesn't help you win games and plays a lot of minutes. The Rockets are stacked with these guys. They are promising enough to get time but not good enough yet to win games. The Jazz have a different situation where we have a ton of youngish guys who are young enough to keep investing in, but also have matured enough to produce winning basketball to some extent. Even if we bench Conley, Clarkson, Olynyk....I don't see us benching Vando, Lauri, Sexton, Beasley etc a ton.
 
I side on the full tank mode for 2023 at least, perhaps 2024 as well (next years draft could also be juicy/deep given the add'l prospects entering given eligibility rule changes).

We can easily tweak the roster to become competitive in 1-2 years. One year of absolutely sucking for strategic purposes does not mean we are automatically a loser franchise. That logic is highly flawed.
 
The Jazz have exactly two players who can move the ball, Conley and Olynyk. You remove one or both of them, the offense stagnates completely. Both will need load managing throughout the season, maybe game to game.

It becomes obvious that the current back ups at point are NAW and TNT and both are gonna get work. And either one or both learn something, which would be monumental, or we suck. The only other option is to roll out Butler who may not even be on the team.

If the Jazz were to offload Conley, we would be straight summer league as he is the cog that makes things go. The drop off between him and NAW is pretty spectacular. As long as we are losing I would prefer to have Conley to develop the other players. If things get too good, we can go to NAW ball which is good for the tank, but I don't want to watch.
 
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No there isn’t
 
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No there isn’t
I'm over the talk about how you can't build a winning culture and also have two seasons were your record is awful... whether through tanking or rebuilding. Spurs tanked and won what like 4 titles. Warriors tanked a couple years ago as well as the year that they got Barnes. It yielded some benefits and they didn't magically have some toxic culture.

Part of what TJ is getting at is true. Like you want players to play hard and try to win. That is why tanking is not the coach's job... its the FO job. And it would be legitimately difficult to drop into the bottom 4. But at very least we should make a move or two that ensure we are #5. Maybe with some luck you can get to #4. If SGA is healthy OKC could jump us... and there will be like 6-7 teams eyeballing the OKC injury report for tomfoolery.
 
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