I have been cursed by a witch to repeatedly travel back through time to relive every NBA draft. Fortunately, her spell sends me directly to the Utah Jazz war room on draft night and all the executives magically know I’m from the future and will do whatever I say. Unfortunately, the curse prevents me from seeing how my advice altered the future, as I am sent back to the previous year as soon as draft night ends.
June 27, 2017 – Barclays Center, New York
Previous season:
The Jazz were coming off a fairly successful 2016-17 season. They won 51 games and reached the second round of the playoffs, where they were swept by eventual champion Golden State Warriors. Gordon Hayward had made the All-Star game and Rudy Gobert was named to the All-NBA Second Team and All-Defensive First Team. Surrounding those two was a promising core of young players — Alec Burks, Dante Exum, Derrick Favors, Rodney Hood and Joe Ingles — flanked by a couple of savvy veterans — Boris Diaw, George Hill and Joe Johnson. But there were suspicions that both Hayward and Hill (the starting point guard) would leave in free agency.
The draft:
Dennis Lindsey decided to beef up the backcourt by moving up in the draft. He traded Trey Lyles and Utah’s first round pick (No. 24) to Denver for the 13th pick, which he used to draft Donovan Mitchell. The Nuggets used the 24th pick on Tyler Lydon.
Utah also owned the 30th pick thanks to a 2013 trade with Golden State involving Andre Iguodala, and the 42nd pick from a 2015 trade with Detroit involving Enes Kanter. But instead of using these picks, Lindsey traded them to the Lakers for the 28th pick, which he used to draft Tony Bradley. The Lakers used their new picks on Josh Hart and Thomas Bryant.
And last, and certainly least, the Jazz finally decided to use their own second round pick (No. 55) on Nigel Williams-Goss.
Analysis:
The trade for Donovan Mitchell was one of the best in Jazz history. Trey Lyles was a disappointment of a lottery pick. He started 33 games as a rookie in 2015-16 and averaged 6.1 points per game. But in his second season, he only started 4 games and saw his field goal percentage drop from 43.8% to 36.2%. And in the ensuing years, he has failed to develop into a solid player or find a long-term home in the NBA. After spending a couple of seasons in Denver, Lyles has bounced around from San Antonio to Detroit and Sacramento. And the Jazz didn’t miss out on Tyler Lydon, either. He played a total of 26 games for the Nuggets before falling out the league. He did compete in The Basketball Tournament in 2021, after which he retired from basketball.
Mitchell was unquestionably better than those players. And he was hands-down the best player available at the 13th pick. All-Stars Bam Adebayo and Jarrett Allen were picked after Mitchell, but neither of them are as impressive, or would have made as big a difference for the Jazz as Mitchell.
When he was drafted, Mitchell was expected to be a defensive force off the bench for the Jazz. But Hayward and Hill left, and Utah was suddenly without an offensive leader. Hood and Burks were too injury-prone and inconsistent to fill that role. So Mitchell inexplicably took over, setting scoring records Utah hadn’t seen since Karl Malone. He was named to the All-Rookie First Team and made three All-Star appearances during his five-year tenure with the Jazz. Unfortunately, he stopped playing defense and he never figured out how to play with Gobert and everything sort of collapsed. So Utah decided to clean house, but were quite lucky to receive a king’s ransom for Mitchell. Cleveland gave up Lauri Markkanen, Collin Sexton, Ochai Agbaji, three first round picks and two pick swaps. Time will tell if that trade was worth it, but so far, that’s a pretty impressive-looking haul.
So we’re keeping the first pick the same. But what about the other two? Well, the Tony Bradley trade turned out to be a mistake. He lasted three years with the Jazz, but only played in 70 games during that timeframe. He’s since bounced around between Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Chicago, never making much of an impact anywhere. Josh Hart is a much better player than Bradley. True, he’s not the big man Dennis Lindsey was looking for, but he is a surprisingly solid rebounder for a guy who’s just under 6’5”. And if Lindsey just kept that 42nd pick, he could have drafted Thomas Bryant, who’s just as big as Bradley and seems to be an upgrade over him in every way.
Or I could just tell Lindsey to forget about drafting for size and simply pick the best player in the second round — Dillon Brooks. He pretty quickly became a starter for a decent Memphis team and lit up the Jazz in the 2021 playoffs. I don’t know how well he would have developed backing up Joe Ingles, or how well Quin Snyder would have liked him — he did lead the league in fouls two years in a row. There’s also a little concern about redundancy if I tell the Jazz to draft both Hart and Brooks. But at the end of the day, I believe you have to take the best players available and figure out the rest later. Maybe Snyder could have enjoyed some versatility in his lineups with Hart and Brooks. Or, worst case scenario, they become decent assets to trade for someone even better.
And last and least, Nigel Williams-Goss. He was kind of a weird case for the Jazz. They drafted him, but then let him go overseas for a bit, then brought him back, but only to play 10 games. Eleven if you count the playoffs. I think we can do a little better than that. Since I denied Lindsey his big man in Tony Bradley, I’ll present him Chris Boucher, who went undrafted, but worked his way onto the Toronto Raptors roster. He’s not as big as Bradley or Bryant, but he can block shots and shoot the 3. I think there’s a decent chance he would have made a positive impact on the Jazz.
My advice:
1. Trade Trey Lyles and the 24th pick to Denver for the 13th pick. Draft Donovan Mitchell.
2. Keep the 30th pick. Draft Josh Hart.*
3. Keep the 42nd pick. Draft Dillon Brooks.
4. Draft Chris Boucher with the 55th pick.
*Note: My efforts at changing reality will undoubtedly have unforeseen consequences. If the Lakers didn’t trade away the 28th pick, there is a good chance they could have drafted Hart in that spot. But there’s no way to tell for sure. So what I’m presenting is Plan A. Plan B would have been to bump up Brooks and Boucher to those higher slots and use No. 55 on somebody like Naz Mitrou-Long (who did end up playing 15 games for the Jazz as an undrafted free agent).
In real life, the 2017 draft was a huge success for the Jazz. They landed a franchise player without having to give up anything. But in my altered reality, Tony Bradley and Nigel Williams-Goss are replaced with Josh Hart, Dillon Brooks and Chris Boucher. I think those three players would have added a significant amount of versatility to the Jazz, enabling Snyder to build some interesting big and small lineups around Mitchell and Gobert.
But how did it turn out? I’ll never know. Because as soon as my work was done, the witch’s curse sent me back to June 23, 2016, and I have to do this all over again.
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