Examining Whether Jazz are to Follow Danny Ainge's Boston Rebuild
With the assumption that the Utah Jazz will be sent into a full rebuild very soon, fans will have to look toward an uncertain future. No question, executive Danny Ainge will have plenty of draft capital to build a new era of Jazz basketball, including the five draft picks extracted from the Rudy Gobert trade, and any comparable number of selections from any prospective Donovan Mitchell deal.
Beyond these two deals, the Jazz have plenty of valuable veteran assets that could translate into even more draft picks and young assets. Jordan Clarkson, Bojan Bogdanovic, Mike Conley, Patrick Beverly, Malik Beasley, Rudy Gay, just to name a few, are still great players that contending teams would be willing to pay to increase their chances for contention.
The Jazz could very well be sitting on a gold mine of draft picks that would give Ainge the flexibility to rebuild the team on a reasonable timeline. It would be a likely strategy that Ainge tries to mirror the success he had in slowly building the Boston Celtics into the championship contender they are today.
Ainge built the whole Celtics team from the ground up while making controversial trades, including trading Isaiah Thomas to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Kyrie Irving. At the time, it wasn’t viewed as a popular move by Celtics fans, especially seeing Thomas’s devout loyalty to the team and his leadership that led them to two straight Conference Finals.
Unfortunately, the Irving Celtics never met the expectations, but that was a trade that made sense then. From 2014-2019, Ainge accrued an insane number (18) of draft picks. From those draft picks, the Celtics put together four of their starting five in their latest finals appearance.
The assets that Ainge received gave the Celtics the flexibility to build a young contender with a more viable window and a much brighter future.
The Mitchell and Gobert era of Jazz basketball was a successful run. Together they won many games and gave fans many memorable moments. Unfortunately, that never translated to a true championship contention, and as the roster aged more and more, the window disappeared.
The team had no choice but to commit to its core at the time, which locked it into a luxury tax nightmare that gave little flexibility to convert the current roster into a more viable team built around Mitchell. The possibility of 2-3 more years of these teams, as good as Gobert and Mitchell are, was probably never going to lead to a championship in the final analysis.
What we can conclude — despite the downfalls of the team — from a transactional perspective, the Gobert/Mitchell duo raised their value immensely together and also the value of their teammates. A full rebuild may not be popular among Jazz fans but it may be the best time to sell and open a new window of contention.
Follow Andrew on Twitter @ArembaczNBA.
