It's a tough life, being a Utah Jazz fan. The past four or five years have been particularly miserable, from Rudy Gobert's contraction of coronavirus shutting down the NBA to the outright implosion of our roster (resulting in the trades of Gobert to Minnesota and Donovan Mitchell to Cleveland). The Jazz have dwelt in the absolute basement of the NBA standings for some time now, with Utah's CEO Danny Ainge thinking that the best path forward is to trade away our best players and amass a truly insane amount of second round draft picks. Needless to say, watching the Jazz get continually pummeled by 30 points and lost almost every night has not been fun. In fact, for all intents and purposes, I've stopped watching.
Stopped watching, I say, to the extent that my four-year-old firstborn son (named Stockton) has occasionally thought that the Utah Jazz were a hockey team.
Well, the Jazz finally did it this year. We finally came out on top... or bottom, as it were - winners of the ludicrous "tank-a-thon" race to the worst record in the league. Allegedly, this earned the Jazz the highest odds to get the number one pick in the upcoming 2025 draft. The odds, they said, were a 14% chance that the Jazz would get the best pick. But I had to wonder... isn't that just a nice way of saying that there was an 86% chance that we wouldn't get the number one pick? I mean, look at what happened to the Detroit Pistons last year: they were almost historically bad, then fell all the way to the fifth pick. The worst-case scenario for the Jazz before tonight's lottery would also have resulted in sliding all the way down to five, so, naturally, that's where I assumed that Utah would land. I tried to convince myself that I was just being a pessimist... but only time would tell.
I'll cut to the chase. We fell to five. Worst-case scenario. I KNEW IT.
(Also, side note - please, someone, explain this to me: how on earth does it make sense that the Jazz had a 47% chance of getting the fifth pick in the first place? Like, just flip a coin and we'll see if we're #5? That makes zero sense to me. Shouldn't those odds basically be inverted, almost? Of course we got the fifth pick! So dumb.)
Now, another one of the many things that are so stupid about this is that the three teams who ended up in the top three had no business being there.
- Philadelphia is a perennial Eastern Conference playoff contender that had an unusually bad year. They had less than an 11% chance of getting the third pick. Who are we to doubt "The Process" that resulted in drafting Joel Embiid at number 3 in 2014, Jahlil Okafor (lol) with the third pick in 2015, and Ben Simmons (lol) with the number one pick in 2016? Haven't they been rewarded enough??
- San Antonio, who just won the lottery two years ago and has already been the center of some NBA conspiracy theories (like getting the number one pick to select Tim Duncan after their hall of fame center David Robinson got hurt), had a 6% chance of getting the second pick this year. Perhaps, this was one final gift to the franchise, after their long-tenured coach Gregg Popovich announced his retirement a few days ago.
- And Dallas, who made the play-in tournament and barely missed the actual playoffs this season, had a 1.8% chance of getting the number one pick.
What makes this even worse and much more suspicious is that Dallas just made one of the worst trades in the history of professional sports three months ago, when they dealt likely future hall of famer Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for the absurdly injury-prone center Anthony Davis (who promptly injured himself several times after becoming a Maverick). Unsurprisingly, social media and basketball fans at large mocked Dallas for the transaction, and Mavericks fans serenaded their home team with chants of "Fire Nico" (Harrison, the Dallas general manager) chants just four seconds into the first game of their post-Doncic era.
Could this be the most recent instance of the NBA rewarding a team and fan base that notoriously lost a megastar? LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers with his infamous "Decision" press conference in 2010, then Cleveland got the number one pick three out of the next four years. (Honestly, I forgot how egregious that was. Insane!)
Another eyebrow-raising draft lottery was in 2019, when the New Orleans Pelicans got the top pick after the aforementioned Anthony Davis publicly demanded a trade (and was ultimately traded to Los Angeles, where he played until being traded for Doncic). The Pelicans would go on to select the draft's prospect, Zion Williamson, that summer.
Of course, the most popular theory that points to the draft lottery being rigged is the 1985 NBA draft, which brought Georgetown center Patrick Ewing to the New York Knicks, one of the biggest media markets in the league. Similarly, one could argue that Dallas sending Luka to Los Angeles (another of the league's hottest destinations) then being rewarded with the top pick in the subsequent draft could have been a conspiracy.
But another layer to this whole fiasco that hurts for Jazz fans is that Utah facilitated the trade that allowed the Luka-AD trade to happen in the first place! And, on top of that, Danny Ainge claims that he wasn't even aware that he was helping the Lakers! DANNY! WHAT WERE YOU DOING??
If nothing else, tonight's draft lottery disaster should prove that tanking doesn't work. Here was an interesting stat tweeted out by ESPN's Field Yates:
I have never been a proponent of teams losing on purpose, nor do I think that teams should be rewarded for (intentionally) playing badly... but that's just how the NBA is set up. Tanking is incentivized, unlike any other professional sport, and I absolutely hate it. But, if those are the ground rules, if that's the way this world works, and if the Jazz really went to all that effort to claim the worst record, why couldn't it have just worked ONE TIME??
Unfortunately (and extremely predictably), the Jazz were as unlucky as possible tonight, and it will almost certainly result in another "rebuilding" (AKA "tanking") season in 2025. We're really going to try to do this all over again next year. I feel so bad for the Jazz players. It can't be fun to be a part of this process, and it seems as though there is no end in sight. Ugh.
I, for one, have no interest in that at all.
Go Utah Hockey Club Mammoth!
*****
If you've got nothing else going on right now and feel like reading about some of my other most painful sports memories, consider checking out these old posts:
- Utah Jazz, 2021 - The Bitter Pill 4: Another Playoff Choke
- Utah Utes and New Orleans Saints, 2019 - The Bitter Pill 3: The Pass Interference Special
- Utah Jazz, 2016 - Another Bitter Pill: Kobe drops 60 against the Jazz
- Texas Rangers, 2012-13, 2015; Chicago Cubs, 2003; New Orleans Saints, 2010; Utah Utes, 2010; Utah Jazz, 1996-98; WCW Bash at the Beach, 1996 - The Bitter Pill: My worst sports memories
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