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SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Jazz made a deal Thursday, 1 of 9 completed on the NBA's trade deadline day, but it may not have been as substantive as observers expected.
In the end, the Jazz were part of a three-team deal between Chicago and Atlanta that sent Shelvin Mack to the Utah Jazz. The Bulls traded Kirk Hinrich to the Hawks for Justin Holiday, and the Jazz sent Denver's 2018 second-round pick previously acquired in a 2013 deal to the Bulls.
Mack definitely makes sense for the Jazz to acquire: "Clearly, we had some room under the cap and a roster spot," Jazz GM Dennis Lindsey explained.
With seven second-round picks owned by the team in the next two drafts, giving up one of them simply wasn't a worry. There's no way the Jazz will be able to use that many players, or even be able to acquire useful draft rights with that many picks.
As for Mack, the Jazz knew good things about him. Utah head coach Quin Snyder worked with Mack in his best season as a professional when he played over 20 minutes per game as Atlanta's backup point guard after making the roster out of training camp. But since the Hawks drafted Dennis Schroder, Mack found himself mostly out of the rotation.
Mack gives the Jazz a few facets in his play that they don't currently have from their point-guard rotation. Mack's career assist percentage at 28.8 percent would be the highest on the Jazz by a mile. He's also the Jazz's biggest point guard: he measures at about an inch taller than Raul Neto and Trey Burke, his wingspan is about 2 inches longer and he weighs about 20 pounds more.
As Lindsey put it, "The team fits each other; there's not overlapping talent."
That's not to say Mack is guaranteed to play major minutes in a Jazz uniform. Burke has shown that he's a far better mid-range shooter this season than Neto or Mack, and Neto's 3-point shot has been surprisingly effective. The Jazz's starting lineup, which features Neto, has outscored teams by over 10 points per 100 possessions. Snyder won't want to mess with that too much.
In the end, Lindsey diverts the issue of playing time to his head coach, saying, "Quin's going to have to make some decisions, but that's what the head coach is paid to do."
The issue is an interesting one, especially because of reports that Burke was already unhappy with his current role before the Jazz added another point guard to the mix. Clearly, Burke's parents were, as they tweeted about his playing time. And while that sort of thing might normally be sent to the "overbearing sports parents" bin of consciousness next to Little League dads everywhere, in this case, Burke's father Benji also partially represents Burke as his agent.
Son Trey, though, to his infinite credit, has maintained huge amounts of professionalism about his situation while he finds himself coming off the bench. We'll see if that maintains through 30 games of NBA play between now and the Jazz's next opportunity to move him. I suspect it will.
The Jazz looked at many trades involving Burke. The big rumored deal that would have sent Burke to Houston and Ty Lawson to the Jazz was probably overblown: I'm told the Jazz only had casual conversations with the Rockets about such a deal and nearly no talk in the middle of this week.
The Mack deal, however, was always a possibility for at least the last month. According to multiple sources, the Jazz and Hawks had multiple conversations over that timeframe on what a Mack deal would look like, depending on what exactly happened to starting point guard Jeff Teague. The price, a good second-round pick, was decided on far before Thursday's deadline. Whether or not the deal happened hinged upon whether or not either team could find anything involving their lead guards.
That's where both teams found out about the value of their players. The Hawks were always asking too much for Teague. The Jazz would have been interested at the right price, but they didn't want to give up Alec Burks in such a deal. And the Jazz found that the league wasn't willing to give up much in return for Burke, a cheap and effective scoring point guard under cost control for both this season and next.
As Lindsey put it, "The market spoke about what we had in a lot of different levels." That's why the Jazz "agreed that we wanted to err toward continuity and chemistry," according to Lindsey.
Lindsey acknowledged that he may be erring toward valuing his players too highly.
"Maybe there's too much pride in ownership, but we'll find out," he said. But the Jazz's strong play since the return of Derrick Favors and Rudy Gobert said a lot to the Jazz, and led Lindsey to choose this path.
"Our team is moving in the right direction," he said.
