The Los Angeles Lakers have added a few Utah Jazz alumni this summer. With Walker Kessler and Collin Sexton on the team, they are becoming the Los Angeles Jazz in a way. Okay, not really, but even if Jazz fans certainly won't root for their success in LA for obvious reasons, at least Kessler and Sexton get the chance to do something in LA they never got to do in Utah: genuinely compete.
Both Kessler and Sexton were quality players who, unfortunately, played for Jazz teams that never competed for anything meaningful despite their best efforts. Don't get it misconstrued: the Jazz's failures didn't truly reflect on them. They were playing for a team that gradually embraced its rebuild with each passing year they were teammates.
With the Lakers, it's a completely different situation. Now their efforts go into surrounding some excellent players, like Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves. Now whether they succeed is yet to be determined, but at least their contributions will go into something.
The Jazz added them to see whether they would factor into their long-term playoff plans, and they ultimately decided they wouldn't. The Lakers evidently believe the opposite, and now they get the chance they've wanted for quite some time.
In a way, it's a shame they never got that chance for Utah
Even though the Jazz gradually embraced their tank, it wasn't entirely clear whether that was the direction they were headed when they blew it up in 2022. Because Lauri Markkanen and Will Hardy exceeded expectations, Utah even tried to bring in a few quality players (Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday) to improve the team, but after their efforts failed, they gradually went the opposite route.
If they had succeeded in adding better players around that core, it's very possible Kessler's and Sexton's legacies as Jazzmen would be much different than they wound up in the end. Both of them proved what they were good at in Utah, but because those teams proved to be weak overall, their impact as individual players never got much credit.
Granted, going the other way has led to Utah constructing perhaps their most exciting team in decades, as they not only have Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr., but have also added exciting young talent like Ace Bailey and Darryn Peterson.
It's as the old saying goes: you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Hence, Kessler and Sexton were casualties of a bygone and forgettable of Jazz basketball, but at least they can look forward to a maybe better future in Hollywood.
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