The Utah Jazz made a pretty big move on Wednesday.
In a three-team deal, the Jazz will send Mike Conley, Nickeil Alexander-Walker and three future second-round picks to the Minnesota Timberwolves. The Los Angeles Lakers receive Jarred Vanderbilt and Malik Beasley from the Jazz and D’Angelo Russell from the T’Wolves. The Jazz will be getting Russell Westbrook, Juan Toscano-Anderson, Damian Jones and the Lakers 2027 first-round pick (top-4 protected).
The way the Jazz see it
First things first — nobody should expect for Westbook to don a Jazz jersey. I fully expect the Jazz to buy out Westbrook as soon as possible.
The real prize for the Jazz here was the Lakers’ 2027 first-round pick.
They’ve wanted one of the Lakers’ future first-rounders for a while now and they succeeded while having only light protections added to the pick. So long as the Lakers pick doesn’t fall in the top-4 of the 2027 draft, it will belong to the Jazz. If it does happen to become a top-4 pick, the Jazz will receive the Lakers’ second-round pick that year (more on that below).
Despite the fact that Conley is still impactful, as a trade piece his age and his contract size probably made it difficult to net a first-round pick. Along those lines, Vanderbilt and Beasley have both seen their value decrease this season. But add them all up together and it was worth a first-rounder, which adds to the Jazz’s treasure trove of future assets.
To put things plainly, Conley wasn’t going to be winning a title in Utah and while he’s been incredible for the development of some of the Jazz’s younger players, the Jazz front office felt like this was the right time to move off his contract while they could still get a future asset.
Ditto for Vanderbilt and Beasley. They were not in the Jazz’s future plans. As for Alexander-Walker, though he was a plucky, young player that showed some promise, he was on the fringe of the Jazz’s rotation and his contract was perfect for some salary filler.
The Jazz will be happy to see what they can get out of Toscano-Anderson and Jones, but outside of the Lakers’ pick, the other real value the Jazz see in this trade are not things that are incoming or outgoing.
The Jazz will end up with just over $60 million in cap space after sending Conley’s contract to Los Angeles. That, along with 15 first-round draft picks the Jazz have over the next seven years, puts the Jazz in an incredible position to make blockbuster deals that could accelerate the rebuilding timeline.
Also, the Jazz’s rotations open up a ton with Conley, Beasley and Vanderbilt gone. The Jazz can spend the rest of the season with Collin Sexton taking on a much larger role, giving more playing time to guys like Talen Horton-Tucker, Ochai Agbaji and Simone Fontecchio and they can really work to develop these guys into legitimate NBA role players.
Even if some of these players don’t end up staying with the Jazz long term, if they have enough success with real NBA minutes, their value could increase and that would be a net positive for the Jazz.
Undoubtedly this move makes the Jazz worse this season, but that’s also a benefit for the Jazz at this point. Making the playoffs would have been fun for the Jazz, but it’s not like they were going to be a real threat in the Western Conference. Instead, the Jazz will fall in the standings and that improves their chances at getting a high-lottery pick with their own 2023 selection in the upcoming draft.
The TLDR (you know, too-long-didn’t-read) version of this — the Jazz traded away a veteran and three players that weren’t in their future plans for a large expiring contract and they get one of the most coveted first-round picks on the market.
What’s not to like?
Critics of the trade will say the Jazz traded away three second-round picks, Conley, Beasley, Vanderbilt, Alexander-Walker and all they got back was a protected first-round pick and a couple of players who have played a total of 52 games this season between the two of them.
Let’s go through these one at a time. The second-rounders are probably not going to be very good, and even if they do end up being high second-round picks, the Jazz have so many first-rounders that the seconds just don’t mean as much.
I don’t know if the Jazz could have got more value out of Conley on the trade market. This actually feels pretty good.
As for Beasley and Vanderbilt, I think that there is some fair criticism that can be made. The value of both players was higher earlier in the season and if the Jazz had traded them in, say, November, maybe they could have actually gotten another first-rounder. But then, what would they have needed to include in a Conley deal in order to get the Lakers future pick?
Hindsight is also 20-20, but if we are looking at the value the Jazz got out of Vanderbilt and Beasley today, in February, I think we have to be realistic. They’ve been traded together three times now and each time away from a team that is looking to get better for the future. Vanderbilt has a high motor, but he’s inefficient at best and often takes value away from the team on the court. Beasley is a good 3-point shooter but he isn’t great and it’s hard to find other areas of his game that are appealing.
The rest of the league has caught on to the fact that Beasley and Vanderbilt aren’t really all that great, so it was only going to get harder to trade them if the Jazz hung on.
Now, the first round-pick. The Lakers are expected to not be good in 2027. There’s no promise that LeBron James will still be in L.A. and by that time he’ll be 42 years old. Anthony Davis will be 34, and I can’t imagine he’s going to age well. So there is a really good chance the Lakers are going to be in the lottery. Of course, that means there is risk that the Lakers’ 2027 pick ends up being a top-4 selection and then becomes just a second-round pick for the Jazz.
But I do not think the Jazz are going to be hanging on to this pick hoping that they’re going to strike gold in the 2027 draft.
Lauri Markkanen and Walker Kessler have given the Jazz an incredible foundation to work with in their rebuild and they don’t want to waste Markkanen who looks like he is entering his prime. The amount of cap space the Jazz are opening up signals that they want maximum flexibility so that they can make some big moves over the next couple of years. And during those years is when that Lakers pick will have its highest value — and that’s as an asset to use in a trade.
As for the players coming back to the Jazz, we’ve discussed Westbrook, who will likely never even set foot in Utah as a Jazz player. With Toscono-Anderson the Jazz are getting a gritty, do-it-all guy who knows what it takes to win an NBA title, because he did just that with the Golden State Warriors. That’s a good guy to have around to show some of the young guns the ropes. And Jones could end up being useful as a backup to Kessler.
Grading the trade
Like I said above, the Jazz might have been able to get better value in a trade if they would have moved away from Vanderbilt and Beasley earlier on. That’s fair. And, giving up three second-rounders might feel like a lot, depending on where they end up falling. But I don’t really want to play the what-if game too much right now.
I think there’s actually a chance the Jazz might have even been able to get better value for Conley in the offseason or earlier this season, but the value they got from Conley in how he helped to develop the rest of the roster (Sexton, Agbaji, Kessler) was more important.
The Jazz truly have some direction now and they have a clearer path to get where they want to go. They have a mountain of assets, they’ll have a ridiculous amount of cap space and they have the rest of the season to just work on development and growth.
I feel like the Jazz really accomplished what they set out to accomplish with this deal and though they might have waited a little too long to make it happen, I see a lot of positives for them moving forward. Grade — B+