NBA Trade Rumors: 5 likely sellers heading into the trade deadline

Utah Jazz

Next, we travel out west to a city with a team in a similar position as the Chicago Bulls (NBA purgatory), the Utah Jazz.

The Jazz was the story of the NBA to start the season.

After trading away their two franchise cornerstones over the past half-decade in Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert this past off-season, most experts and fans expected the Jazz to be near the bottom of the standings the entire season.

To the shock of everyone, the Jazz started the season 12-6 and sat atop the Western Conference standings.

A team full of journeymen and afterthoughts bought into what first-year head coach Will Hardy was preaching and turned out to be a very fun, competitive ball club.

Lauri Markkanen may have earned himself a starting bid into the all-star game with how impressive he has played this season.

Jordan Clarkson has evolved into more than just a scoring spark plug off the bench. He’s become a consistent 20+ point scorer, a legitimate playmaker, and a guy a team can trust with the ball in his hands in clutch situations.

Despite how fun the Jazz have been all season and how good Markkanen and Clarkson have played, that fun hasn’t resulted in much winning lately. Since their 12-6 start, the Jazz has gone 11-18 and are 4-8 since Christmas.

They have dropped all the way down in the standings to eighth in the west. A game and a half separate them from the 13th-seeded Los Angeles Lakers.

Having said that, Utah is just two and a half games back of the fourth-seeded Sacramento Kings, so a winning streak could put the Jazz right back in the thick of things in the West.

The Jazz does own three first-round picks in the 2023 draft, behind just the New York Knicks for the most in the league. With those picks and the plethora of trade assets they have on their roster, Utah may opt to just play out the season with their current roster and see how things turn out.

With how things are trending for Utah lately, they might still end up in the lottery. And if they do, they could use their rich draft capital and tradable assets to get a higher pick in this year’s draft.

The thing is though, with a generational talent in Wembanyama on the board and a player in Henderson that would easily be a top pick in any other draft, teams that get a top-three pick most likely won’t give away even for as rich of an offer the Jazz could make.

Props to the Jazz for proving everyone wrong and being so much more competitive than anybody thought heading into the season, but it’s about time the Jazz start valuing the future of their franchise rather than their playoff prospects this season.