Monday is a really important day for the Utah Jazz. The NBA draft lottery will decide where, within the top five, the Jazz will pick during the June draft. One of the possibilities is the Jazz being awarded the No. 1 overall pick.
In that world, the Jazz would select Cooper Flagg out of Duke, a blue-chip prospect who has the potential to be a franchise-changing player.
The Jazz would, of course, still need to develop Flagg and then surround him with other promising or proven NBA players in order to have a roster that would be competitive in the Western Conference, but landing Flagg would be success and could be the beginning of something great.
In that world, it‘s possible Flagg turns out to be everything fans hope him to be. It‘s possible he is a catalyst to the Jazz once again being relevant to the broader NBA conversation. It‘s possible Flagg could someday lead the Jazz to an NBA title.
It‘s not hard to imagine, that in that world, Ryan Smith, Danny Ainge and Justin Zanik are applauded, praised, thanked and revered for the decision to tear down the Donovan Mitchell-Rudy Gobert Jazz team and rebuild by tanking for the sheer possibility of landing Cooper Flagg.
Frankly, if the Jazz land the No. 1 pick, it‘s not hard to imagine the praise getting heaped onto ownership and the front office immediately. They set out to do a job and got the job done. All they could do was ensure that the team finished with the worst record, giving them the best possible odds in the lottery. It was their best shot at landing one of the most highly touted prospects in recent memory and they did it.
But that‘s not the only possibility.
What if Flagg is not all he‘s cracked up to be? What if the Jazz get the No. 2 pick? What if they get the No. 5 pick? What if the Jazz get the second pick and take Rutgers’ Dylan Harper, and what if he turns out to be a 10-time All-Star? What if the top-5 pick the Jazz get this year is a total bust?
The path to all of these outcomes is the same.
The Jazz chose to tank. There‘s no reversing that. They did it because, like it or not, big-time free agents are not coming to Utah. Even some trades are made difficult because players don’t want to be in Utah. Still, trading and developing drafted prospects are the Jazz’s best chance at greatness.
Ultimately, an owner of an NBA team is judged on a willingness to spend money and the quality of people they employ, namely the team decision makers. In turn, the decision makers are judged by the success of the team and the moves that led to that success or lack thereof.
In this case, the exact same decisions that could lead to success for the Jazz are the same decisions that could lead to failure or mediocrity once again.
If the Jazz come out of these tanking years with a winning team, everyone will say it was all worth it. That the years of losses and manipulated injury reports and resting of healthy players was the pruning of the tree so that it could bear fruit. They’ll say that Ainge and Zanik stuck to their guns and came through for the fans.
If the Jazz come away from these tanking seasons with unfulfilled potential and leave the fanbase wishing they had waded in mediocrity rather than tearing it all down, then Ainge and Zanik could be forever hated by the fanbase and blamed for ruining what the fans once loved.
We don’t know if Flagg will become the Hall-of-Fame-type player he seems he could be. We don’t know who else will rise up to be a top-tier player out of this draft and we don’t know if any of them will play for the Utah Jazz.
We don’t know if tanking will turn out to be the right decision for the Jazz, and we don’t know if Danny Ainge and Justin Zanik will come out on the other side of all of this smelling like roses or like hot garbage on a summer day.
But we do know that the first step toward having all of our questions answered rests with four ping-pong balls on Monday night.
