Analysis: Are the Utah Jazz winning too much? The answer is, yes

The Utah Jazz won again last night. They improved to 10-15 on the season. But improved isn’t really the right word.

Ten wins by midway through December is too many.

Yes, the players want to win and Will Hardy coaches his players hard and coaches them to do the things that lead to wins. And he deserves to see the fruits of his labor pay off by way of progress through development.

But the Jazz are on pace to win more than 30 games this season and if they do that, they’re going to lose their 2026 draft pick. But this isn’t just about losing a draft pick or tanking for another player that can hopefully save the Jazz’s future — though that’s definitely part of it.

This is also about not handing over complete control to the teams that already seem to have the future of the Western Conference firmly in their grasp.

On Saturday night, the San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder played in an NBA Cup semifinal game and the whole of the NBA was watching as Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs beat the Thunder.

Prior to Saturday, the Thunder had lost just a single game this season — to the Portland Trail Blazers on Nov. 5. Prior to that, the last time they’d lost a game was on June 19 — the Game 6 Finals loss to the Indiana Pacers that preceded their Game 7 victory.

Following the Thunder’s successful title run last season, which was led by league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who will be a finalist again this year for MVP, there was no championship hangover. They stormed out to a 24-1 start to the 2025-26 season that matched the best 25-game start in NBA history set by the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors.

The Thunder have a chance to break the single season win record, 73, set by that Warriors team. They have absolutely clobbered teams this season, and they’ve done so even when their stars are resting in the fourth quarter, even when they are shorthanded and even when they come up against some of the so-called best teams in the league.

On Saturday, when the NBA world saw Wembanyama, a basketball alien, topple the Thunder, what it saw was two Goliaths that are supremely young with otherworldly talent. They saw the future of the Western Conference.

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What’s worse (for the rest of the West) is that the Thunder are set to receive four 2026 first-round draft picks. That is not a misprint. F-O-U-R, four. They are owed an unprotected pick from the Los Angeles Clippers, a team that is absolutely floundering (so that could end up being a top-three pick). The Thunder are also owed a top-eight protected pick from the Jazz — which means if the pick falls out of the top eight, it belongs to the Thunder.

They also are owed a top-four protected pick from the Philadelphia 76ers, and an unprotected pick from the Houston Rockets.

*Technically, in the case of the Clippers and Rockets, the Thunder get the two best picks from Houston, Los Angeles and their own. But since the Thunder will likely have the top record this season, it’s safe to assume they’ll be getting both the Clippers’ and Rockets’ picks.

Because the Clippers are so horrendously dropping the ball this season, it looks like the Thunder are going to end up with a blue-chip prospect. Just let that sink in. The already NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder — a team that clearly is not in need of any extra young talent — is going to get one of the most highly touted prospects in the draft.

That could be AJ Dybantsa. Imagine the Thunder adding Dybantsa to the mix. That’s a nightmare scenario for every team not named the Thunder.

But let’s just imagine another scenario where the Thunder end up picking someone near the top of the draft and that player ends up being a bust. Not great for that player, but great for the rest of the league, right?

The problem is that Sam Presti and his staff of asset-hoarding front office executives are really, really good at drafting, especially when they have multiple swings. And the Jazz could be one of the teams that gives them a really tasty top-10 swing.

I can guarantee you that is not what the Jazz want. It’s very certainly not what the front office wants. And if you truth-serumed Will Hardy and the players, they would probably say that they also do not want the Thunder to be handed the keys to four first-round swings and the top of the Western Conference for the next decade.

The only hope for other teams in the West is to make sure that the Spurs and Thunder get as little as possible in the coming years. That they don’t get more swings, that they don’t give Gilgeous-Alexander or Wembanyama any more weapons they can use to carve their way to wins.

In order to absolutely ensure that the Jazz keep their top-eight pick, they would need to finish with at least the fourth-worst record in the league this season. They would have a pretty good chance at keeping the pick if they had the fifth-worst record. A record higher than that and things start to seem pretty dicey.

Last season, the team with the fifth-worst record (the Sixers) finished with 24 wins on the season. In 2024 it was the Spurs with 22 wins. Today, there are about seven teams that are on pace to finish with fewer than 25 wins.

That’s what the Jazz are up against.

Over the next 57 games, they can’t really afford to win more than 12. Because if they do, not only will the Jazz lose their shot at a top pick in the upcoming draft, they’ll hand that pick right over to the one team that already looks nearly impossible to beat.