The Utah Jazz have been bad this season, but not because they're hopeless. While injuries have played a part, guys resting or having curious 'illnesses' that keep them out of games at a time are pointing to a similar outcome as last season - a tank job to hold their first round pick.
It's getting old, and hurting the team in the long run, as the core of the team will know nothing but losing, many of them for their entire NBA careers. This isn't the way to build a great team, and Jazz fans know it.
Losing grinds on any player and any team, but when it's persistent, and there's no visible way out, it can frustrate everyone involved: the players, coaches, and fans. Even if it's in pursuit of "one last draft pick," it's best to actually see measurable progress so everyone sees the light at the end of the tunnel.
Sarah Todd, the Jazz beat reporter at the Deseret News, recently covered this, and she suggested that the Jazz roster was being manipulated to hold them back, which is keeping the team from finding its identity. And how healthy players have been held out to this end in recent games.
Players like Taylor Hendricks, Cody Williams, Kyle Filipowski, and Isaiah Coller are suffering as a result, with roles that aren't clearly defined or geared toward winning basketball, and lacking the support from a team structure that isn't set up to fail into the lottery this summer.
Where did it all go wrong?
The team, which started the season with promise, could view the loss of Walker Kessler as the turning point that made the season hopeless. However, the Jazz have gone 14-21 in games in which their star player, Lauri Markkanen, has played, a pace good enough to stay in play-in contention if projected over the full schedule.
But when Lauri sits, they are an abysmal 1-13 and lose by an average of 16 points a night. And while the Jazz were 10-15 on December 15th, Lauri was held out of three of the next four games, which started a 3-10 stretch that destroyed all the good vibes, quickly extinguishing any hopes of contending for the play-in or exiting the tank.
And we saw it in the team, the constant lineup changes, not knowing who was in and who was out, which has led to a 3-14 mark in January, one of the worst marks in franchise history that felt a lot like last March, when a tanking lineup went 1-16 down the stretch of a 17-65 season.
Eventually, Jazz fans will tire of watching the struggles on defense, the lack of a competent big man rotation, and the direction pointing toward a bottom-eight record. They'll vote with their wallets and stop coming to the games until things improve. It has happened in other cities with much larger fanbases than Utah's.
The Jazz brass should take note and prevent that from happening, even if it means taking the risk of winning a few too many games this year. Jazz fans want to see measurable progress and have something to root for.
The team has a great cap situation, a young roster overall, their best player signed long-term, and enough tradeable pieces to turn things around and get to 30-40 win territory in 2026-27 and be a playoff team in 2027-28. That's what the fans see, and let's hope the management sees it as well and gets the ball rolling toward success soon.