SACRAMENTO — These are truly the dog days of the NBA season, especially if you’re a fan of the Utah Jazz or Sacramento Kings.
Unfortunately on Sunday night, those were the basement-dwelling teams that played against each other. As I sat watching the 116-111 Kings win, these are a few of the things I heard said by people around me:
“Are you sure we should have paid for these tickets?”
“This is not an NBA game. Sorry.”
“This is top, or at least top two, of the most uninteresting games of the season.”
And who could blame anyone for feeling that way? For the majority of the night, the Jazz were playing one standard roster player alongside four players who are either on two-way or 10-day contracts.
Along with the season-ending injuries to Walker Kessler, Jaren Jackson Jr. and Jusuf Nurkić, the Jazz are also playing without Lauri Markkanen, Keyonte George, John Konchar and Ace Bailey for various injuries. On top of that, the Jazz gave second-year forward Kyle Filipowski the night off on Sunday for rest. Kevin Love and Svi Mykhailiuk were healthy DNPs.
So the Jazz’s starting lineup was Cody Williams (the Jazz’s tallest starter), Brice Sensabaugh, Isaiah Collier — who later left the game with a minor right knee injury — two-way player Elijah Harkless and Andersson Garcia (on a 10-day contract).
The other three Jazz players who saw action on Sunday were two-way players Blake Hinson, Oscar Tshiebwe, and Bez Mbeng, the latter of whom sighed a 10-day contract with the Jazz on Friday.
The only small silver lining is that these games are quite the opportunity for the G League call-ups and two-way players who rarely get the chance to play in any NBA game, much less start and play heavy minutes.
“This is their opportunity to really put together their reputation,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “All young players need opportunity. Most young players get a little bit of opportunity, and it can be a little bit spread out.
“To get a chunk of games where you play heavy minutes, you can develop a reputation that can be good, can be bad, it can be somewhere in between.”
But if we’re thinking about the future of the Jazz, there’s not much to take away from this, and there likely won’t be much to draw from the remainder of the games this season.
There’s really no way to sugar coat this. We have reached the point in the season where the only thing that truly matters is the standings.
You can watch for incremental development from someone like Williams, who had a career-high 34 points on Sunday, but the role he’s playing when flanked by four players who won’t be getting minutes for the 2026-27 Jazz is so far from what his everyday role will be with a Jazz team that is trying to win.
That doesn’t mean that what he is doing now isn’t applicable. He’s accomplishing translatable things, but he’ll have to adapt to a new role when the games start to matter and his teammates are higher on the depth chart.
Hopefully for them, the Jazz will have a high lottery pick coming to the roster through the draft in June, and they are going to be making decisions on which young players are worth moving forward with, not adding more young development projects to the roster.
So as much as it’s fun to look at the defensive capabilities of Harkless or Garcia or the scoring talent of someone like Hinson, it is highly unlikely that they even break the rotation of this Jazz team if they remain on the roster next year.
The rest of the season is going to be rough. The games will be ugly. But the end is near.