OK, class, time for a quiz:
How many players have the Utah/New Orleans Jazz drafted during their 50 years of existence who went on to be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame?
Answer: three — John Stockton, Karl Malone and Dominique Wilkins, who was traded to Atlanta and never played for the Jazz.
How many players have the Utah/New Orleans Jazz drafted who went on to be named to an All-Star team while playing for the Jazz?
Answer: eight — Stockton, Malone, Mark Eaton, Andrei Kirilenko, Mo Williams, Deron Williams, Paul Millsap and Gordon Hayward (if you’re feeling generous you could include Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, both of whom were drafted by the Nuggets but were part of draft-day trades that sent them to Utah).
This is where we are going with this: The Jazz have staked their entire future on their ability to draft talent. They have torn apart their roster twice, in 2022 and 2023, trading away their best players in exchange for 13 first-round draft picks (and possibly 14). The results on the court have been fait accompli: a steady, methodical decline. Since winning a league-high 52 games during the 2020-21 season, the team’s win totals have been 49, 37, 31. This year they’re on pace for 24-25 wins.
So, they’re all-in on the draft. They’ve burned the boats. There’s no going back.
Just one big question: If you staked the success of your business on one thing, wouldn’t you want to be, you know, good at that thing? Historically, the Jazz have not fared well in the draft. They have drafted 202 players since the franchise was born in 1974. Only nine of them became all-stars — around 4% — while playing for the Jazz. So, roughly four out of every 100 drafted players achieve all-star status.
The NBA’s formula for success usually includes a couple of all-stars and another player who is close to that level — think Stockton, Malone and Jeff Hornacek, who was an all-star one season when he played for the Suns before joining the Jazz.
Finding these players — predicting the success of young players — is the difficult part, to say the least. The Ringer studied the top five players taken in each draft from 2004 to 2021 and discovered that fewer than half of those players became all-stars, “and that fact holds true even when accounting for the likelihood that some recent top-five picks (Deandre Ayton, Ja Morant, LaMelo Ball) should receive that honor in the future.” Zach Kram of The Ringer continued in his 2021 story, “And at the very tip-top of the draft, none of the past 12 No. 1 picks have won an MVP award — or even received a single first-place vote. The top spot is still the most valuable by far … but the No. 1 pick isn’t a guaranteed legend, either.”
In other words, it’s a big gamble for the Jazz — or any other team — to bet the house so entirely on the draft. It’s a crapshoot. The odds of hitting the jackpot in the draft are only a little better than playing the roulette wheel, and everyone knows what a good investment that is.
To use another gambling metaphor, the Jazz have pushed all their chips onto the table after scrapping their roster in 2022 and again in 2023 in an attempt to collect other teams’ first-round picks and improve their own position in the first round. The truth is, it doesn’t matter much where you pick unless there is a player who is a generational talent. The Jazz found most of their eight all-stars in the least likely draft slots, more evidence of how uncertain it is.
Only two of them were lottery picks — Deron Williams (third overall) and Hayward (ninth). Malone was 13th (not a lottery pick at the time), Stockton 16th, Kirilenko 24th, Mo Williams and Millsap 47th. Eaton was the 72nd pick.
Stockton and Malone were taken in the middle of the first round and no one was sure what the Jazz were getting at the time. Stockton’s selection was booed. The reaction to Malone’s selection was dismay — who’s that?
After all the pain of starting over twice, after all the losing, it’s worth noting that the highest draft picks the Jazz have been able to secure so far under their current raze-the-roster plan are No. 9 in 2023 and No. 10 in 2024. They have not found a centerpiece player to build around.
There is one more thing to consider. Even if the Jazz’s plan succeeds and they eventually build an elite team through the draft, how long does such a team endure in this era of free-wheeling player movement? Is it worth years of losing and the alienation of fans?
It’s probably too late for such questions.
