With only a few days left till the season starts, the Utah Jazz have a clearer vision of their future with a clearer purpose. They have committed fully to the youth movement and will allow their young players to earn their way into starting roles, with the hope that one or two of them will become cornerstone players to build around.
However, there’s still one element of the team and its future that isn’t very clear: Lauri Markkanen.
It feels like I have written about 20 versions of this article over
the last year or so. With the Jazz owing their pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder unless it falls into the top-8 of the lottery, it puts them in a serious bind, considering they aren’t a playoff-contending team yet. That said, and written many times, the fit of Lauri Markkanen is awkward at best and dangerous at worst. If you play Markkanen, and he plays well, you risk falling out of the top 8 of the draft. If he plays poorly, then you keep your pick, but you’ve already committed to a $238M contract. And this doesn’t even consider what Lauri Markkanen feels, a player that has never even played a playoff game in his eight-year career. Does Markkanen end up getting frustrated with the direction of the Jazz? He has 238 million reasons to be fine, but it may be hard to hide his frustration with another losing season.
On top of that, I saw something today that’s pretty disheartening: the HoopsHype top-50 players list was released, and Markkanen isn’t on it.
In fact, Markkanen isn’t even in the top 100. Now, this ranking is a catch-all type metric that obviously doesn’t take context into account. Regardless, it’s an issue. The Jazz have a unique problem. They either need to keep playing Markkanen or trade him. The issue is, how much can they get for a player not in the top-100 in a simple list like this? And his $46M a year ascending contract makes it even harder to trade.
This leaves the Jazz in a situation where they have to play Markkanen to showcase him for a possible trade if that’s something they even want to do. And in a season where losing games is the best outcome, it puts them in that awkward position they’ve been in the last three seasons. To top it off, the Jazz aren’t manipulating lineups this year, according to the new President of Basketball Operations, Austin Ainge.
If you’re reading the tea leaves here, you can see where this is leading. And if a team like the Detroit Pistons is interested in a Lauri Markkanen trade that includes real pieces like Jaden Ivey and picks, it makes sense for the Jazz to look at a trade like that. We’ll see what happens as the season starts, but this entire situation remains a difficult one and may come to a quicker end than we think with some sort of move.
