Utah Jazz: Predicting stats for every starter in 2021-22

The NBA offseason may not feature NBA games, but it’s no time for solemn reflection for fans of the Utah Jazz or any other team across the Association. Instead, it’s a time for rampant speculation, premature conclusions, and most importantly, wildly arbitrary predictions about individual player’s statistics.

Maybe that’s overly cynical: the predictions don’t have to be arbitrary. In this article, we’ll be looking at the trend in each Utah Jazz projected starter’s numbers over the past several seasons, factoring in their ages, and making an educated guess from there. Of course, every player’s career does not follow the same curve. Some players seem to defy Father Time until the unlikely transitions into the impossible. Others fall off at seemingly a moment’s notice, leaving fans to wonder what happened to the All-Star caliber player they’d grown accustomed to.

The possibilities are endless, and maybe that’s the fun of the offseason. The season itself is when the majority of NBA fans hopes are dashed, while an extremely small minority taste the glory of an NBA championship. The offseason is the time that those hopes are fostered.

Nonetheless, we will not be giving into the temptation of blind optimism here, either. We’ll try to make the most realistic predictions for every projected starter on the Utah Jazz that we can.

We’ll also only be predicting the stats that are most relevant to the player’s general statistical profile: simply put, you probably don’t care about Mike Conley Jr.’s rebounds per game, and neither do we.

We just hope we don’t dash your hopes too aggressively, or ruin your offseason in the process of making these predictions.