Utah Jazz: Lyles for Mitchell and the Top 7 trades in team history
By Ryan Aston
5) Turning Trey Lyles into a potential superstar; June 22, 2017
The Jazz send Trey Lyles and draft rights to Tyler Lydon (pick No. 24) to the Denver Nuggets for No. 13 overall pick Donovan Mitchell.
Weirdly, the Jazz have the Denver Nuggets to thank for delivering their star duo of Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell. We’ll get to Gobert a bit later in the countdown — right now it’s all about the Amazing Spidaman.
When Gordon Hayward left the Jazz, it was a proverbial kick to the nards for both the team and its fans alike. Just like that, a years-long rebuild was squashed just as the Jazz were set to enter the ranks of the league’s elite. In short order, though, Mitchell healed a lot of those wounds. Now, he has Jazz Nation excited for the future once again.
Through the first 40 games of his career, he’s put up 19 points, 3.4 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 1.5 steals per contest. Along the way, he’s also posted shooting splits of 44-35-85. For the record, it took Hayward five years to put up a comparable line; Mitchell was Utah’s go-to guy by month two.
Before the move, Trey Lyles had been languishing on the Jazz’s bench. The once-promising big looked ready for the scrap heap following his final season in Salt Lake City. The fact that the Nuggets are apparently the ones who called Utah offering a future superstar for his services seems crazy at this point. But sometimes truth is crazier than fiction.
Lyles (and Tyler Lydon, for that matter) may end up being a quality player and 10-year pro, but Mitchell is a franchise guy. The Nuggets got taken behind the woodshed on this one.