Utah Jazz Trades: Ranking Two Decades of Deadline Deals
By Ryan Aston
With the 2017 NBA Trade Deadline looming, I ranked the best and worst deadline deals completed by the Utah Jazz over the course of the last two decades-plus.
Historically speaking, if there’s one thing the Utah Jazz brass aren’t, it’s probably a renegade group of hotshot, deadline-day wheeler-dealers. In fact, going back to the Jeff Hornacek trade in 1994, the team has only completed eight major deals in the days and hours leading up to the league’s deadline for deal-making.
As you’ll discover, “major” is a real stretch in some of these cases. On the other hand, some of the moves that really altered the course of the franchise were done on the eve of the trade deadline.
So, as Jazz GM Dennis Lindsey and his brain trust weight the pros and cons of deals ahead of Thursday’s trade deadline, I went through the exercise of ranking those deals. The caveat here is that I’ve only counted trades completed in the final 48 hours before the deadline. So, for example, the February 3, 1995 trade to re-acquire Blue Edwards from the Boston Celtics in exchange for Jay Humphries wouldn’t make the list.
Yeah, that was super obscure.
Nevertheless, we’re talking trade deadline deals and from where I sit, they shake out as follows…
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