The Utah Jazz’s solution to youth vs. veterans: Make every player fight for their place

The Utah Jazz are heading into the 2025-26 season with nine players on the roster from the last three NBA drafts. It’s an incredibly young team, and that’s by design.

“There’s no way that we’re going to be able to get to our ultimate goal of winning a championship if it’s not through a youth movement,” Jazz owner Ryan Smith said at media day on Monday. “And we’re pretty stoked on where it’s going, and it should be a really exciting season.”

There’s No. 5 overall pick Ace Bailey, rookies Walter Clayton Jr. and John Tonje, second-year players Cody Williams, Isaiah Collier and Kyle Filipowski, and third-year hopefuls Taylor Hendricks, Keyonte George and Brice Sensabaugh.

But how will the Jazz decide who gets minutes and who plays together, especially considering the veterans on the roster? Georges Niang is back in a Jazz uniform, Lauri Markkanen is the team’s best player, Walker Kessler will be playing to prove he’s worth the kind of lucrative, long-term deal the Jazz seem hesitant to offer and the trio of Jusuf Nurkic, Kyle Anderson and Kevin Love have a combined 39 years of NBA experience they’re bringing to the table.

The Jazz brass made a point of saying that minutes and opportunity on this team can be earned and they can be taken away.

“We want it to be hard. We want it to be a challenge. They have to fight for it,” Jazz president of basketball operations Austin Ainge said. “And when they make mistakes, there are guys ready to come in and take those minutes. ... There are definitely ways that they can earn those minutes, and we want them to try. We want it to be hard.”

There are likely to be moments in the season when fans will be dissatisfied with an older player getting minutes over a younger player who needs reps and opportunity to develop. But Jazz head coach Will Hardy is wary of giving playing opportunity to young players just because they are young.

“I think the word ‘earned’ is very important,” Hardy said. “If we don’t set it up in a way where it’s a meritocracy, you’re going to have a team that’s split. You have a group that knows they’re going to play no matter what they do, and then you have a group that knows they’re not going to play no matter what they do. So then neither group really cares that much about what they’re doing, and that’s unproductive.”

Ultimately, the message to every player on the team is simple: If you want minutes, you have to earn them. The players will have to fight, scratch and claw their way into making Hardy, the rest of the coaching staff and the front office believe that they deserve an opportunity more than the person next to them on the depth chart.

There are, of course, going to be some fluid variables. Hendricks could have a minutes restriction to start the season, so someone else could get opportunity in his place. It’s unlikely that Love is taking up valuable time on the court (unless Hardy is trying to send a message) or that Nurkic will supplant Kessler in the starting lineup. But, injuries, illness and performance as the season progresses could shake everything up.

And then there’s the worry that the Jazz could win a little bit too much and put their top-8 protected 2026 draft pick in danger. So, always playing the best team and the players who deserve the minutes could be a strategy that stands in contrast to keeping a high lottery pick.

“I think opportunity is something that we have to give some of our young players, if it’s earned,” Hardy said. “But we also have to hold standards that keep them accountable, that helps us maintain our identity as a group, that helps us maintain both respect and self respect that we’re not just giving something to somebody who’s undeserving.”

There also needs to be some balance between young players and experienced players on the court. As the Jazz loved to say last year, pups don’t raise pups. Five inexperienced NBA players on a court together could continue to make the same mistakes over and over. But with some veteran guidance in a lineup, they could help to push the young guns in the right direction. At least, that’s the hope.

Niang, who is heading into his 10th NBA season, was a second-round draft pick in 2016 and knows exactly what it means to have to earn a spot on a roster and earn minutes and prove his NBA mettle.

“I may be being dramatic, but it’s almost like you do anything to get an opportunity, right? Like, treat every day as if you’re fighting to get oxygen,” Niang said. “That’s how bad you have to want it ... and there’s going to be some guys that do that, and then there’s going to be some guys that don’t. That’s where the separation comes.”

We may begin to see some of that separation this season.

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