The fact that Utah is so injured makes me think the league wide injury problem might be unsolvable, even if they reduced the schedule or took similarly radical measures. You understand why OKC might be injured with their intense style of play and multiple deep playoff runs in a row.

But Utah both maximized the amount of rest all their players got and minimized the amount of competitive minutes their players played. This effectively reduced their schedule the past year+ and they’re still all injured right at the beginning of the season.

Cause they dont, their starters missed 14 games combined.

OKC has 27. Orlando has 16.

And those are the only 2 I checked.

The Kessler trade kind of nuked their ability to defend. Then couple that with JJJ and Lauri getting injured. Not much to look forward to.

Minnesota needed a new owner group, coach, and star after 15ish straight gutter seasons.

I think so.

Charlotte Hornets, Pelicans, and Kings also come to mind as teams in recent memory that for a number of reasons can’t switch on to start winning.

Sacramento did have that Light the Beam year but that team’s been partly reset again too and hasn’t won the same way since.

A team that has actively been trying to lose for multiple seasons is going to take a long time to learn how to win NBA games. Crazy how the people who supposedly know the league best overlooked that so much with them.

Carlos Boozer was literally working for the team.

Perhaps don’t trade a bunch of picks for a center with a lengthy injury history

Can’t change reddit usernames, this dude put all his chips on one square 😭

Must be ancient in reddit years.

that’s how you know he’s a real one

absolutely goated🤣

Yeah it’s horseshit tbh, as much as I don’t want you guys having another top pick lol

The lotto odds were good. The rules around top 1 and top 5 are very weird for teams that own oth teams picks

Definitely

Yeah honestly no way this shit lasts.

First time a team like the thunder who are actually good but are snakebit for a year manages to get the number one pick, the league will freak out.

Like imagine if Wiseman had been a superstar how mad you all would’ve been

SOMETHING needed to change. This might not be the answer but overreacting before we even see how it play out is dumb as fuck.

Hard disagree. Players’ entire careers get derailed by teams actively not wanting them to play winning basketball for 3+ years.

I still it should be based on the picks you got, and not the overall record, but dumb franchises need to be punished for being bad. If the jazz had a brain they could’ve had the same amount of picks and Kessler instead of Lauri. Better timeline wise, and better fit wise.

Last year was horrible with teams making up fake injuries to rest their veteran players for a better pick. Something had to give.

The trade off with these rules is that the genuinely bad teams that aren’t doing it on purpose like the Kings are sort of fucked. But I like that it incentivizes teams who would’ve deliberately tanked to actually go and compete.

That’s funny, my Jamaican coworker Jazz fan told me he expected mormon

I mean Mormons do love basketball

Thats 15 years

It’s 2026 bro

Had the best odds for the cooper Flagg draft and dropped to 5 that’s kinda rough

There is a world where they are running Keyonte/Harper/Lauri/Boozer/Kessler right now, and I can’t lie, that’s one of the best starting 5s in the league considering the potentials of these young players. Or maybe like a Keyonte/Peterson/Lauri/Flagg/Kessler or Keyonte/shooting guard/Flagg/Boozer/Kessler type of thing. They had the best odds at drafting 1 both times

They did, its the method if you want to build a great roster, the only teams that win without tanking heavy are teams like Denver who got Jokic from pick 41. Even then they didn’t achieve a whole lot other than that 1 year and their future looks bleak.

Though some teams are just naturally bad, the Houston teams in those years were simply dogshit as someone who watched most of those games, it wasn’t shameless tanking. It’s unfortunate how the top 4 picks aligned in these years (no nr.1 picks, Jalen Green is a bum, 3rd most obvious option Jabari is a role player and no other obvious choices after 3, and the top 3 happens in the Risacher draft), if things worked out differently, could have ended up with like Cade and Chet instead and then those 2 would make it so Rockets draft from like 10+ after 22.

I mean, the Utah Jazz President is a nepo baby with no real executive experience who’s dad is the CEO that has been riding a 20 year old championship harder than Doc Rivers, and the owners are some dude who recently acquired obscene amounts of money through survey software and Dwyane Wade.

It’s not a serious franchise.

The jazz havnt been good since I was like 9 wtf are you talking about