How keeping Lauri Markkanen is a bet on a plan the Jazz and Danny Ainge haven’t revealed yet

Let’s get this part out of the way quickly: re-signing Lauri Markkanen, in a vacuum, was a good move by the Utah Jazz. His new contract, worth $238 million over five years, will almost certainly represent surplus value compared to production. The Jazz will be using roughly $24.1 million in cap space to bump Markkanen’s 2024-25 salary up to its maximum of around $42.2 million, and in exchange, they can create savings elsewhere in the deal, when that money is likely to matter more.

Even at his max, Markkanen is probably a reasonable bet. He’s 27, shoots at an elite level from practically everywhere, and most importantly, actually seems to want to be in Utah. That matters! Generally speaking, Utah isn’t an especially desirable market for younger professional basketball players, especially when they have clear paths to more traditionally enticing cities. As a rule of thumb, teams tend to want to have young All-Stars who want to play for them. You can’t exactly fault the Jazz for wanting to have Markkanen on their team, at least for the moment.

It’s everything else that raises question marks here. Markkanen’s past two seasons in Utah have followed similar paths. The Jazz outperform expectations, at least early on, thanks largely to Markkanen’s play and stellar coaching from Will Hardy. In February, Danny Ainge pulls the plug by trading away veterans. Markkanen plays far less down the stretch. The Jazz wind up picking toward the end of the lottery. Rinse. Repeat. In a loaded Western Conference, it’s hard to imagine the Jazz doing much better than that with their current roster. With so many truly deplorable rosters populating the bottom of the Eastern Conference, it’s hard to imagine them doing much worse. As it stands right now, the Jazz appear primed to pick somewhere between, say, No. 7 and No. 12 in the loaded 2025 NBA Draft.

This is where the Markkanen trade rumors came from. Markkanen is an All-Star. He’s not an All-NBA player. He is, for now, probably not a top-20 player in the NBA. He is also certainly in the top 35. That is a very good and very valuable player that is made quite a bit better and quite a bit more valuable by being placed next to a top-20 player in the NBA. You need multiple stars to genuinely compete. Shocking, I know. The Jazz seemed to acknowledge this with quiet pursuits of Mikal Bridges and Jrue Holiday, but both swim in Markkanen’s end of the pool. Very effective supporting pieces. Not likely leaders of true contenders.

Getting such a player to Utah is no easy task because, again, not a lot of stars tend to want to move there. Signing one in free agency seems almost impossible. Trading for one would certainly be harder than it would be in the glamour markets. Drafting one is the likeliest path the Jazz have to getting such a player, and Markkanen makes doing so substantially harder. There’s a reason they’re jettisoning veterans every February, after all. It’s hard to lose too many games with him on your team, and it’s hard to win too many games without someone better. They’re in middle-lottery purgatory at the moment. That doesn’t mean they can’t escape it. They have plenty of leftover assets from the Cavaliers and Timberwolves acquired in previous deals, and sometimes you find Kawhi Leonard or Giannis Antetokounmpo at No. 15. But exploring Markkanen trades was the cleanest path the Jazz had to maximizing their odds at drafting a star. That’s why they considered it in the first place.

It’s not fair to say whether or not they should have pulled the trigger without knowing what the full offers were. It is fair to wonder if Brandin Podziemski was a reasonable sticking point if the Warriors were willing to put control of all or most of their first-round picks on the table. Imagine a world in which the Jazz are among the NBA’s worst teams in the years preceding very strong 2025 and 2026 draft classes… and then having nearly infinite draft capital from the Cavaliers, Timberwolves and Warriors to trade with afterward. That’s about as asset-rich as any team can possibly be, depending on how those 2025 and 2026 picks pan out. This was, at least, a viable path for the Jazz, one that was almost certainly on the table and would not have required another February fake out. In short, it would have been a declaration of intent. We’d know what their plan is if they’d pulled the trigger.

Just because we don’t currently know what their plan is doesn’t mean they don’t have one. Danny Ainge’s track record buys him credibility other front offices lack. He’s earned enough trust to operate with a bit more opacity than, say, the Bulls or the Lakers, and the decision to retain Markkanen does largely align with his history of opportunism.

The 2007 Celtics tanked for Greg Oden and Kevin Durant and the 2008 Celtics won a championship because when that approach failed he saw a chance to pivot toward Ray Allen and eventually Kevin Garnett so he took it. Ainge’s roster-building philosophy has largely emphasized making the best move in the moment rather than sticking to a defined philosophy or outline. Trading for Isaiah Thomas in the middle of a rebuild followed that same approach. So have most of the infamous “almost Ainge” trades that didn’t materialize. When Ainge makes a move, really any move, he usually makes it more because the move is a major win in terms of isolated value rather than serving as a smaller step toward a larger goal. He’s far more known for the blockbusters he hasn’t made… but it’s worth acknowledging that the ones he has have more or less all been monster hits.

That circles us back to where we started. Re-signing Markkanen, in and of itself, was a good move, but it was the one Ainge made likely because he didn’t see a great one on the board. If he could have traded Markkanen for what he perceived as a great return he likely would have, or if he could have traded his stores of surplus picks for a worthy running mate for Markkanen he probably would have done that too. Instead, he kicked the can down the road, and well, that wasn’t a crazy decision.

The Jazz can’t trade Markkanen for a year due to the league’s extension rules. That doesn’t mean they can’t check back in on his market next summer if nothing better materializes. His value probably won’t go down much on his new deal, though matching an $18 million salary is considerably easier than matching one closer to the max. Perhaps something great breaks their way in the interim. The Hawks just won the lottery despite participating in the Play-In Tournament. Maybe the ping pong balls favor the Jazz in the same way next spring. Maybe one of the incumbent young guys pop. Maybe the Jazz trade their other veterans and force Markkanen to lead a stripped down group of youngsters as a path to the bottom that doesn’t require moving him.

That’s a lot of maybes. Every team-building path comes with a lot of maybes unless you’re, say, signing LeBron James and Chris Bosh in their primes. The all-out tank comes with just as many questions. It also comes with quite a bit more control. You can’t force another team to trade you a star and you can’t force your mid-first-round picks to become one. But you can control where your pick lands, at least to a point. There’s value in that certainty. That doesn’t make it the objectively correct or incorrect approach. There is no objectively correct or incorrect approach.

Based on the information available to us at this moment, Utah’s likeliest outcome this season is another mid-lottery finish. That’s not an especially appealing outcome. It’s by no means a dagger to the team’s long-term hopes either. It’s just a bet that Ainge can navigate that messy middle ground and create something better than an all-out tank would have. Given his history, it’s not an unreasonable bet, especially when it’s a decision the Jazz can walk back by revisiting the trade market later. There’s plenty of reason for long-term optimism in Utah. We just don’t quite know exactly why yet.