Are fans too worried about Utah’s 2026 1st?
[Jazz faithful react to a pick during the 2024 draft party. (Bethany Baker, The Salt Lake Tribune) " data-image-caption="
Jazz faithful react to a pick during the 2024 draft party. (Bethany Baker, The Salt Lake Tribune)
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Jazz faithful react to a pick during the 2024 draft party. (Bethany Baker, The Salt Lake Tribune)
The Utah Jazz have a varied portfolio of solid assets they can work with this summer: at least a dozen picks in the next eight drafts, interesting young players, tradeable vets, and a decent amount of financial flexibility. Yet in almost any conversation about the team’s near-term direction, concern about one of those assets seems to have an overriding hold on Jazz fans’ collective psyche.
The Jazz owe their 2026 1st to Oklahoma City, but only if it sits outside the top eight after next May’s lottery. As a result, any discussion about potential roster moves, trade options, vet acquisitions, etc. is quickly met with the query: “But what will this mean for the 2026 pick?” The logic seems to be that the Jazz must protect that one asset at the cost of all else… and that’s not necessarily true.
The starting point for this line of thinking makes sense. The Jazz either get a top eight pick in what is thought to be a promising draft, with potential stars like AJ Dybantsa, Cameron Boozer and Darryn Peterson — or they get nothing. You don’t have to be a genius asset manager to know that “potential blue chip asset” is preferrable to “zippo.” The Jazz, like all smart front offices, have a running ranking of the expected value of all of their draft goodies. It’s a fluid list that shifts along with their projections and draft assessments. At various points in the rebuild, that 2026 pick has ranked near the top of the asset cache on the club’s internal ranking.
But at this point, some folks’ obsession to protect it might have gone overboard. At a certain point, if you’re willing to degrade all other assets just to protect this one, then the net effect might negative.
The value of this pick at the highest end could be significant, even franchise-changing, but the Jazz don’t directly control that. So don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
For example, it’s been suggested frequently that the Jazz should trade 2023 All-Star Lauri Markkanen for less than what he’s worth because doing so will increase the odds of keeping that one asset active. That’s silly. The whole reason teams covet high picks is because they represent an X% chance to access a player at Markkanen’s level — or higher, but that’s even less of a guarantee. You could make a cogent case for selling off Markkanen at $.60 on the dollar if you were certain it would result in the Jazz employing Dybantsa, Boozer or Peterson; but as the club knows all too well after the recent lottery slide, they’re just as likely to pick outside the top four even if they go 0-82. So if in the meantime you’ve downgraded the Markkanen asset to chase a singular outcome and then the ping pong balls bounce differently, then you’re in a significantly worse overall asset position by your own choosing.
Reasonable people can disagree about what Markkanen is at his ceiling, and that’s mostly something we’ll leave for its own column. Broadly speaking, he was 17th in All-NBA voting the one year the Jazz were trying to be competitive. Since then, they have limited his on-court participation and experimented wildly with his role and shot diet when he has played, because they were pursuing something other than the fully optimized version of their roster from a win-loss standpoint. Based on that, it is not unreasonable to think that Markkanen might still be capable of performing like a top 20ish player when the ecosystem around him is built for competitiveness. Others think that in his proper role on a contender, he’s closer to top-50 level than to the borderline all-league tier, and that could be accurate too.
Either way, that’s too valuable a player to give away for a pittance. The Jazz reportedly maintain a rightfully high price for the Finnish star. They’ll only move him for a return that makes sense on its own merits, independent of how it could impact the 2026 pick.
That should be the approach for all of their assets, even against the context of that looming 2026 pick debt. It makes no sense to simply throw John Collins or Collin Sexton to the wind, either. It’s safe to assume that the Jazz will hear good offers for their players this summer, and if an offer package meets their threshold, then any of these guys could be moved, up to and including Markkanen, Walker Kessler, or any of the young guys. But all of those athletes are assets in their own right, and it doesn’t make sense to devalue multiple assets because you’re putting all of your eggs in one single basket.
The goal is to optimize all of the assets in a way that results in a title window opening, rather than focusing so much on that single piece of the portfolio that other stuff doesn’t get maximized.
Reunited, at a cost (a.k.a. how the Jazz got here)
Derrick Favors is an important part of Jazz history. He’s eighth in Jazz games played, seventh for career win shares, fourth in rebounding. He was a good and well-liked player, especially when he was at his most athletic and spry.
By the 2020-21 season, he was more physically limited, but still fit some of what the Jazz needed. They were coming off a season in which the Ed Davis and Jeff Green experiments had failed despite being lauded as ideal fits, and that had left them to rely on Tony Bradley for extended bench big minutes over the latter part of the season. By that summer, it was clear they needed an upgrade.
Favors was willing to come back for a second Jazz stint, but he wanted the Mid-Level Exception, which that year came in just above $9 million. It’s unclear who the Jazz were bidding against at that figure, but it turned out to be a really useful acquisition in basketball terms. With Favors back in the fold, Utah was able to to construct a rotation with wave after wave of winning lineups. The primary bench group, which featured Favors, had a net rating of +10.6, complementing the starting five (+10.8) and another hybrid bench unit (+15.0). The balanced roster and smart rotation made Utah a regular season win machine, to the tune of the league’s best record.
But it turns out that the full MLE was a lot to pay the Jazz’s ninth man in both minutes and scoring. So when another playoff disappointment necessitated more roster creativity, Utah’s only way forward was to move off of Favors’ money. The Thunder absorbed his now $10.2 million salary at the cost of a first-rounder with cascading protections, and that opened up flexibility for Utah to pursue Rudy Gay — another veteran acquisition that made perfect sense on paper but just didn’t work out for the Jazz.
That’s a painful sequence with the benefit of hindsight, but at the moment each of those bets made perfect on-paper sense. And out of all those attempts to address the backup big situation, the Favors signing is the one that worked out best in terms of the net impact to winning… it’s just that they paid him a lot and ultimately needed a first to move him.
The debt was conditional on the pick being outside of the top 10 in 2024 and 2025, and therefore has not conveyed. It will be top-8 protected next year, and if it hasn’t conveyed by then, the Jazz’s debt will be extinguished and they’ll only need to surrender $890,000 in cash to close the book on that transaction. With those protections, this is an asset that is certainly more valuable to the Jazz than it is to the Thunder. In fact, the Thunder surely recognize the possibility that they won’t ever see this pick at all.
Projecting the pick
At this point, the most likely scenario is that Utah keeps its own pick, even if the front office decides to “turn it up” as has been suggested.
It’s hard to climb in the brutal Western Conference. Even if the Jazz added some veteran help, rested the stars less, and had enough internal development to double their win total, 34 wins in the just-completed season would’ve led to (wait for it) the eighth best lottery odds.
To wind up conveying that pick, the Jazz would have to jumped by some 20-plus wins from last season to the next. That type of overnight improvement just doesn’t happen all that often without a major star-level addition. For Utah to increase it’s win total that dramatically, something will have had to happen that lifts the asset value of Utah’s other pieces. Either Markkanen will have returned to All-Star form, or some of the young guys will have leapt forward in their development, or some other acquisition has transformed the Jazz’s reality. In other words, if this one asset slips through Utah’s fingers, then almost by definition it will mean something else is going very right from an overall asset standpoint.
But honestly, that scenario is unlikely enough that fans probably don’t need to lose sleep over it. A 17-win team usually has to build way more gradually than that. Even if the Jazz make some roster improvements and see some modest internal growth, there are 14 other western teams aiming for competence. It’s far more likely that the Jazz don’t make a 20-win jump than that they do.
The Thunder likely know that too. So the natural next question is: how much more valuable is this pick for Utah than it is for OKC, and is there a way to negotiate out of the debt altogether?
Backsies?
From OKC’s vantage point, the best-case scenario is that they wind up with the ninth pick. The worst-case outcome is more likely in which they get nothing at all. (OK, cash is not nothing, but $890K isn’t even enough to pay a rookie minimum salary.) So if Sam Presti recognizes that he may not come away with a pick at all, would he accept something else now to wipe away the debt altogether? And does it make sense for the Jazz to offer that when this debt might vanish on its own?
It’s been suggested on the interwebs that Utah could trade the 21st pick to OKC in exchange for getting the 2026 pick back. The Jazz might balk at giving away a solid pick when they’re 11 months away from potentially not owing OKC anything, an outcome they can at least theoretically influence. Someone else suggested a package of seconds, but that doesn’t really change OKC’s world since they’re already swimming in picks. A hybrid version that’s at least interesting came from X user Oliver, who suggested that OKC could move up from 24 to 21 in next week’s draft and receive one or more additional seconds in exchange for the 2026 pick being completely freed up.
But OKC doesn’t really need more raw “stuff.” At some point Presti is going to have a hard time rostering all of players he selects with their picks. The Thunder already have 13 players under guaranteed contracts for next season, plus two team options, two first-round picks, and a second. Not even counting the Jazz pick, they have three more 1sts in 2026, and one or more in every subsequent year. At some point, they’re going to have to start consolidating assets rather than adding them.
So OKC’s primary goal is likely protecting their best-case outcome, not just piling up minor assets. Maybe it’s as simple as turning that protected pick into a protected swap. OKC already owns the two best of their, Houston’s (5-30) and LAC’s picks next year. Maybe the Jazz could give them something small now in exchange for altering the language so that OKC has the right to swap the best (or even second best) of those picks if Utah’s is outside the top 8. That way OKC still has the same upside in play: if Utah lands 9th, OKC still comes away with that pick. Utah could still wind up surrendering a late lotto pick, but pays a small price to insure themselves against the outcome of having no firsts at all. They also maintain the right to keep the pick if it’s top-8, so nobody in that scenario sacrifices the highest-upside outcome.
(If the Jazz’s pick was subject to such a swap, they could no longer exercise their own swap rights with Cleveland or Minnesota, but that’s no huge loss. As it stands now, that swap is only in play in the unlikely scenario that the Wolves/Cavs wind up with a higher pick than the Jazz’s own top-8 selection.)
It might be a non-starter. OKC hoped four years ago that Utah might be bad-but-not-abysmal in one of those three years, and that’s certainly still in play. So maybe they’d prefer to ride it out.
Regardless, the broader point is that this pick in question is one item in Utah’s asset arsenal. Don’t get so obsessed with protecting this one thing that you’re willing to devalue everything else the Jazz are working with. The goal is to maximize as many assets as possible so that a competitive roster takes shape, not just to maximize that one tool at the expense of all others.
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