The Utah Jazz are one of the best teams in the National Basketball Association. Having said that, they may be a savvy trade away from removing the “one of” qualifier from that sentence.
They also probably didn’t bring Danny Ainge on board to rest on his laurels. He’s got a reputation around the league for wheeling and dealing. In all likelihood, he’ll want to put his stamp on this Jazz club.
Not that they should be making any trades for the sake of making them. The Utah Jazz are 27-10. They’ve got the best Offensive Rating (118.48) in the league, the fifth-best Defensive Rating (108.35) and most significantly, the best Net Rating (10.13). They don’t have to do anything at all.
Still, the notion that they should add a defensive-minded wing remains fashionable. It may even be true. Joe Ingles is a willing defender, but at 34 (and never the most impressive athlete in the league) he’s not always the most able. His Defensive Box Plus/Minus (DBPM) is trending downward, from 0.9 last season to 0.5 in 2021-22.
That’s only a marginal decline, but sometimes the margins are significant. None of which is to say the Jazz should trade Jingles. Spoiler alert: he’s not involved in any of these hypothetical deals.
He’s woven into the fabric of these Utah Jazz. Plus, from a more functional point of view, his spacing is integral to Quin Snyder’s system. The Jazz shoot too many threes to part with one of the best snipers in the NBA.
True, Ingles’ accuracy has waned this year. He’s canning 37.6% of his 7.1 threes per game, down from 45.1% on his 7.8 attempts in 2020-21.
No matter. That’s still a solid combination of accuracy and volume, and Ingles is likely to trend upward as the season progresses. Anyway, the threat of his long ball opens up too much space in Snyder’s three-point dependent system. The main focus of this exercise is to improve the Jazz’s defense while compromising their spacing as little as possible.
Here are three trades that do exactly that.