Utah Jazz rookie Walker Kessler was visibly upset following Wednesday night’s game.
It wasn’t because the Jazz had just been blown out by a depleted Minnesota Timberwolves squad at Vivint Arena, and it wasn’t because he didn’t have a stellar game.
Kessler had just experienced the NBA as a business, and it was a hard pill to swallow.
Shortly before tip-off against the Wolves on Wednesday, the Jazz finalized a deal that sent Mike Conley and Nickeil Alexander-Walker to Minnesota while shipping Jarred Vanderbilt and Malik Beasley to the Los Angeles Lakers.
The Jazz, who also sent three future second-round picks to the Timberwolves, are getting the Lakers’ 2027 first-round pick (top-4 protected), Juan Toscano-Anderson and Damian Jones.
But it wasn’t really the details of the trade on Kessler’s mind. His voice shook as he described how difficult it was to go through a night when he had to say goodbye to teammates right before a game started.
“You know that trades are like a legitimate thing, but to go through it,” Kessler said before trailing off. “I’m a very empathetic person, so you just kind of feel for them.
“I’m not saying anything was done wrong. It’s part of the business, but it’s definitely a hard thing to go through.”
While Vanderbilt, Beasley and Alexander-Walker were certainly well-liked players in the Jazz locker room and they were respected by their teammates, Conley was a leader of this team, on and off the court.
As early as the first game of the 2022-23 season, Kessler was talking about how much he’d learned from Conley through training camp and the preseason.
“Playing with Mike in the pick-and-roll is like the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Kessler said in October.
“Just the way he’s patient and holds off his man. I mean, he’s helped me so much. He shows me how to hold the screen, the angle of the screen, how to help him, how to get other guys open. He’s just been so unbelievably helpful.”
And that was the sentiment throughout the locker room on Wednesday night. Talen Horton-Tucker, whose locker was right next to Conley’s, said the players all found out about the trade shortly before the news broke.
Despite knowing he was going to be traded, Conley got dressed and went out onto the court to go through his warmups in order to create some normalcy for the team and not tip off anyone else about the impending news.
“The ultimate professional,” Horton-Tucker said. “I told him that I appreciate the type of person he is — being really open and having open arms to all the younger guys, teaching us things.”
While there were certainly some feelings of sadness that the Jazz were losing guys who had helped create the identity of the team this season, Rudy Gay helped to shed light on the more personal side of what trades are like.
Gay, who has known Conley for close to two decades, talked about the fact that Conley is having to move his family to another city and the difficulties involved with that.
Conley has a wife and three sons, and they either have to uproot their lives immediately, or if they decide to delay their move until the end of the school year, it will mean him being away from his family for months.
“I really honestly don’t think y’all understand how hard it is,” Gay said. “I can sit here and talk (about it), but I don’t think any of you guys are moving your families anywhere tomorrow.
“It’s definitely tough, but it’s something we sign up for, and this is part of the league.”
There has been a bit of a cloud hanging over the Jazz locker room for a couple of weeks now. As the trade deadline creeped closer and closer the players figured that they wouldn’t come out the other side with the same roster.
But it hit the Jazz locker room a little harder than expected when it turned out to that the first player being dealt was Conley.