Things could get bumpy for the Utah Jazz during the upcoming NBA season.
While the Utah Jazz didn’t make any drastic adjustments to their roster for the 2024-25 NBA season, projections around the league seem to indicate this team taking a step back for their looming campaign.
The latest predictions for the coming NBA year come from ESPN, who released their latest predictions for the Western Conference standings across next season. It’s a group that expects to be highly competitive throughout the entire 82-game stretch and has several contenders that could end up on top.
However, to nobody’s surprise, the Jazz were not a part of those top-tier contenders. If anything, they were quite the opposite.
When stacked up against the West for the 2024-25 campaign, the Jazz found themselves near the bottom of the pack in a group dubbed “the bottom five” as the 14th-ranked team in the conference, projected to end the year with a record of 26-56.
As for the top of the conference, the Oklahoma City Thunder ended up with the number one spot, projected to go 57-25.
The Portland Trail Blazers were the only team to place lower than Utah with a 22-60 record. Sitting above the Jazz in the “bottom five” end up being the San Antonio Spurs, as well as the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers narrowly missing out on the Play-In Tournament action.
It’s a bleak outlook for the Jazz next season, but it’s hard to see such a lowly record being out of the realm of imagination. Utah seems more invested in prioritizing the youth movement for the coming season, which could hopefully push the needle forward for this rebuild entirely. Regular season wins may not be coming immediately as a result, yet the more these young players play, the better the long-term view is moving forward.
Lauri Markkanen is still ready to lead the charge for the third season in a row, which should prevent the Jazz from strictly bottoming out in the standings, but beyond that, Utah’s roster is a bit far away compared to the top competitors in the Western Conference. Even when it comes to Play-In worthy teams such as the Houston Rockets and Memphis Grizzlies, this team is likely a few steps away from being on similar levels.
Of course, the Jazz have the potential to start the season hot and emerge as an early surprise in the West standings like they’ve done the previous two years, but with two mediocre lottery results to show for it, Utah may be better off going in a different direction for 2024-25.
Even if the win-loss looks shaky for Utah this next season, expect the Jazz to trend up heading into next summer with a chance to have a good place in the lottery for a loaded draft class.
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