Tearing down the Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert Jazz in 2022 was the right call. What Danny Ainge has done with the pile of picks it bought him is a disaster. Both of those can be true at once, and in Utah they are.
A team that keeps getting bounced early in the playoffs was going nowhere, and standing pat with that group would have meant years of treading water. Utah blew it up and collected a mountain of draft capital for two stars. On the day, that was smart. The problem is everything that came after.
Look at the two sides of the Gobert deal five years on. He won his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award in Minnesota, his first as a Timberwolf, and anchored a team that reached the Western Conference finals in back-to-back years, 2024 and 2025. Minnesota got a perennial defensive force and two deep playoff runs out of him. Utah got a 1-9 start, eight straight losses, and a franchise still hunting for a center.
How Utah got here was a choice. The tank was so blatant the league fined the Jazz $500,000 for conduct detrimental to the league over the way they held top players out of fourth quarters, including a game they actually won, all to protect a top-eight pick. The NBA responded with a sweeping "3-2-1" lottery overhaul that strips the worst teams of the best odds at the No. 1 pick and expands the event to 16 teams. Utah tanked so cynically it helped rewrite the rules for every losing team in the league, and got caught doing it.
The haul from all that losing has been thin. Ainge spent top-ten picks in back-to-back draft years, Taylor Hendricks ninth in 2023 and Cody Williams tenth in 2024, and neither has turned into the foundational two-way star the tanking was supposed to buy. The one clear hit was Walker Kessler, drafted 22nd in 2022 with Utah's own pick, a genuine rim protector who emerged from the post-Gobert era. Ainge acquired Jaren Jackson Jr. from Memphis, kept an injured Lauri Markkanen on the books, and then, when the two sides couldn't agree on an extension, traded Kessler to the Lakers in July 2026 for unprotected first-round picks in 2031 and 2033 and swaps in 2028 and 2030.
Five years after trading away an All-Star center, Utah's answer to a hole at center was to trade away the best center it had developed, for picks that land as far out as 2033. You don't repair a defense by shipping off your best defender for lottery tickets that won't convey until the current roster is long gone.
Ainge is on his second or third "core" without letting a single one breathe. There are glimpses worth keeping, Keyonte George chief among them, but a bright spot or two doesn't cover for a plan that keeps restarting itself. Asset accumulation was never going to guarantee anything on its own, and Utah is the proof: you can win every trade on paper and still have nothing to show for it when the picks keep going out the door instead of in.
Mitchell and Gobert had to go. Utah was right about that. What's happened to everything they fetched is Danny Ainge's mess, and he keeps making it worse.
