I, like many others, was absolutely perplexed by what happened on Thursday. However, given time to cool off and after watching the game the other night, I have come to terms with the moves that were made.
First, the players that were traded:
Simone – I love Simone and I personally think that he could have been part of the future of this team. After waiving Knox it became clear that this trade was literally Simo for an early SRP.
Ochai – This one hurt the most for me, personally, because I thought Ochai’s ceiling was much higher than what we saw even last year, but I see the argument that he was having a really tough year.
Kelly – this one hurts the team more than the others because he was arguably one of the better players on the team. His facilitating and shooting will be poorly missed. But while Kelly was playing, Taylor was not and I think the FO really wanted to get him some solid minutes.
Ultimately, did the Jazz get better? Of course not. But can they stay good enough to be in the play-in hunt by the end of the season? I think so. I think what you’re getting defensively from Taylor counteracts the offense that you’re losing from Kelly (remember [his block on KD](https://youtube.com/shorts/o_TLGxA6BUQ?si=Rmp5a-hVp-iPUD7t) the other night?) Simone had really tapered off after his hot start and Ochai was struggling all around, though I’d argue that’s due to the rotation he was a part of. And who knows, maybe Otto Porter comes in and resurrects his career too.
I also think running a 9 man rotation rather than a 10 man is going to benefit the team as a whole.
I don’t think I would have made the moves that were made, but I’m also not a professional GM, so… there’s probably a reason for that.
Interested to hear your guys’ thoughts.
by _snapcrackle_
7 Comments
My hope is we get the young talent enough minutes to help them develop while still staying outside the top ten to convey our pick to OCK. Losing KO will be a negative but ochai and Simone were not as impactful, I think we can still be competitive down the stretch
I agree with all your points. Some fans are upset, but the reality is we now have even more assets that will yield players who are better than Simone, Ochai, and Kelly. Simone was good, but replaceable. Ochai was shooting like 35% from the field and 20% from 3 over the last 20 games, while also doing nothing else statistics wise. Kelly was never part of the long term plan, despite his skill set.
Keyonte, Lauri, Walker, and Hendricks (and maybe Sexton?) are the future core and they’ll be peaking in a couple years, and we have plenty of interesting picks and players to fill in the gaps and make a legitimate run for a championship.
Patience Jazz fans, our future is bright!
I think the Jazz FO made value trades. The 2 trades definitely weaken us for the rest of this season. However, i don’t think it was a blatant tank job to the degree of last season’s deadline “gift” to the Lakers. It’s hard to know if the Jazz FO actually made a decent offer for Mikal Bridges, D.Murray, B.Brown & the likes. None of those bigger names got dealt so i’m guessing the price tag for those players was too high for other teams as well.
My guess is that the front office is eyeballing someone in the mid teens/low 20s in next year’s draft and they were willing to trade Ochai and Simone for the pieces needed to move up to get him.
I don’t understand why Toronto would give up a first for a few months of Kelly, and resigning him this summer doesn’t make any sense to me either. Toronto must just really like Ochai I guess, and I hope he really blossoms there in a way that he didn’t here. Seems like a super dude.
Like any trade, I think their will always be huge overreactions from the fan base. Out of all the players we lost, KO was easily the most unique, dynamic, and impactful player. There is 100 other players out there that have Ochai and Simone’s bag of tricks.
With that being said, these moves will let our younger core get more minutes which is exactly what everyone has been complaining about all season. Could we have gotten more from the Ochai and KO trade? I think so, but there’s no world where we keep all those players and give Hendricks and the other young guns meaningful minutes.
This trade deadline helped show their plan
The Jazz future plan is not: Continue to collect good role players and incrementally improve. They are not interested in topping out as a 4-6 West team.
The Jazz plan is currently: Collect as many dice and roll the dice often. Hope to get lucky on snagging a star. But keep what role players you can when another star comes along.
The team is going to be less competitive and it’s clear the goal is to prevent our draft pick from conveying. Without Kelly we don’t have the playmaking to support Markkanen at the 3 and we are going to be seeing a lot more of that the rest of the year.