The Utah Jazz surprised everyone when they whooped the Los Angeles Clippers on opening night. The all-around beatdown was a team effort, as the Jazz finished off the Clippers, a team expected to vie for a title, in a wire-to-wire blowout victory. While fun to watch in real time, the win may have revealed that the Clippers are much weaker than we thought, meaning the Jazz have another inadvertent tanking threat.
On the season, the Clippers are 3-7, have had to depend on James Harden a lot more than they should, given his age, and haven't had the always undependable Kawhi Leonard. Now, they have lost Bradley Beal for the season. Needless to say, this is a pretty grim start for them, and it might get worse.
Of course, they entered the season with one of the oldest teams ever assembled, so that was already a big enough risk to take. Already, some of their gambles have backfired on them, and unless Leonard comes back and has a consistently healthy season - something the Clippers cannot count on at this point - things could get so much worse from here.
And not just because they could finish at the bottom, but because their pick automatically gets conveyed to Oklahoma City after this season.
This could be a problem for the Jazz
The Jazz haven't been much better than the Clippers this season at 4-7, and while their long-term prospects look so much better now than they did a year ago, this season looks like it's going to be more growing pains, which means more losing, which also means that at some point, they will go all in on the tank.
Perhaps their direction would have been more ambiguous had it not been for Walker Kessler's devastating injury, but having won only two games since he went down seems somewhat indicative of how this season will unfold for them.
Anyway, having the Clippers down there with them is problematic, even if that's not what LA had intended, and not just because they could impact the Jazz's lottery odds. The Clippers potentially being worse than the Jazz would increase the odds of pushing them outside of the bottom-eight in the NBA, which, if their pick finishes as such, would also lead to them giving the Thunder a pick.
Utah not getting a high lottery pick would already be problematic on its own, but to give the reigning champs another lottery pick, knowing both how good their long-term prospects are and how much of a draft maestro Sam Presti is, could be a real issue for them.
That's not just because they would further reinforce the Thunder's potential reign of terror in the NBA, but also because when the Jazz start being good again, those two picks that hypothetically get forked over to OKC could be what prevents them from getting to that next level.
This isn't a problem yet for Utah, but there's a good possibility that it could be.