Jazz chose new route to the bottom of the standings

On second thought, here’s what I think Austin Ainge meant when he said the Jazz were done with tanking: They will no longer intentionally lose games, but they are going to field a team so bad they’ll lose anyway.

Or something like that.

This is the only explanation after Ainge made another roster dump, following the lead of his father, Danny, who has made an art-form the last three years of purging rosters and losing games to collect draft picks.

Five weeks ago Austin Ainge was hired to replace (work alongside of) his dad. At his introductory press conference, Ainge2 was asked about tanking.

“You won’t see that this year,” he said.

Uh-huh. Well, during the weeks that followed he shipped John Collins to the Clippers for Kevin Love, Kyle Anderson and a 2027 second-round draft pick. This follows two other moves — Ainge sent Collin Sexton to the Hornets for center Jusuf Nurkic and bought out Jordan Clarkson’s contract. Collins, Clarkson and Sexton averaged a combined 53.5 points per game last season.

So, tanking is alive and well, in whatever form it takes.

In the alternate universe of tanking, here’s how fans should view the Collins trade, according to ESPN’s Tim MacMahon: “The problem with John Collins in Utah is that he was too damn productive last season. I don’t even remember all the injuries they came up with to make sure he didn’t play.

“But seriously, they limited him to 40 games last year. He played less than half the schedule. He played in 70-plus percent of their wins. They didn’t win a lot, but they won too often with John Collins in the lineup, and he was a reason (they won). They had to get rid of him. They couldn’t have him on the roster.”

To put all this in perspective, the Jazz’s tanking process began when they traded away their five best players — including All-Stars Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell — at the end of the 2022 season in exchange for 11 first-round draft picks.

The losing began and continued until midway through the 2023-24 season, when the Jazz found themselves competing for a playoff spot with a 26-26 record, winning 12 of 14 games during one stretch.

That was too much winning for a proper tank, so the Jazz traded away three more players in exchange for two more first-round picks.

Now they have done it again, casting off Collins, Sexton and Clarkson, heading into Year 4 of the Tank.

To recap, the Jazz have fallen from a league-leading 52 wins in 2020-21 to 49 wins a year later, then 37 wins, 31 wins, and a league-worst 17 wins. In five years, they went from having the best record in the league to the worst.

This latest move doesn’t do anything except clear out playing time and cap space for younger players. The Clippers tied for the third-best record in the Western Conference, so their second-round draft pick isn’t worth much in the trade. Love’s contract will be bought out and he’ll become a free agent, so he’ll never play for Utah.

Tanking isn’t paying off anytime soon, and that’s exactly the way the NBA wants it. The NBA’s lottery system gives the league’s three worst teams only 14% odds of securing the first overall pick in the draft, and the fourth-worst team comes in at 12.5%.

The idea was to prevent tanking by no longer automatically rewarding the last-place team with the first overall pick. It has not prevented tanking but it certainly has ruined the reward for the last-place team.

Since the lottery system was adopted in 1985, the team with the worst regular-season record has won the lottery only six times, the last time occurring in 2018, the year before the league flattened the odds from 25% to 14%.

The Jazz’s NBA-worst 65 losses last season netted them only the fifth overall pick.

But, as these latest moves indicate, the Jazz are staying the course and playing the long game. It’s stating the obvious to note that if they wanted to win immediately, they wouldn’t have traded away Collins, Sexton and Clarkson. The headline in the Deseret News this week: “After trading John Collins, the Utah Jazz are now the front-runners to be the worst team in the NBA — again.”

This might be a good time to ask yourself if all this tanking is worth it for fans. Imagine any business announcing that for the foreseeable future they are going to sell an inferior product, but please keep buying our product. So far, fans are riding it out.

The Jazz’s summer league games filled the lower bowl of the Huntsman Center. The Jazz had the 15th highest attendance in the NBA last season. They were one of 12 teams who sold out every game last season, despite all the losing.

That looks like a vote of confidence for the Ainges.