Patrick Kinahan: Inane NBA lottery system crushes Jazz

SALT LAKE CITY — Name one aspect of the NBA that does not demand some kind of overhaul — go ahead, we'll wait.

Here are a few of the problems:

Regular season: broken due to load management, an embarrassment to the legions of former players upon whose shoulders the league is built.

All-Star Game: a disgraceful display of competition that makes a mockery of professional basketball.

Strategy: a Ph.D. is not required to understand three equals more than two. But simple arithmetic also shows two is better than zero. The point is, the number of missed 3-point shots has become mind-numbing. Watching the best athletes in all sports run to the 3-point line on a would-be fastbreak only to brick another shot from distance tends to grow stale. Showtime, this ain't.

Tanking: get this, teams want to lose as much as possible for the sake of landing a higher draft position. Pay full price months in advance for a ticket to see the stars play — sorry, the team needs to lose, so the best players are relaxing in street clothes. And get this, they get paid millions to sit in front-row the seats.

Lottery: what a novel concept it was, designed to limit the number of teams valuing draft positioning over winning. Sounds good in theory, except it does not work. In many cases, the lottery system exacerbates the miserable regular season while others (we're looking at you, San Antonio) continue to get lucky seemingly every time they are in the lottery.

Yes, all this moaning directly correlates to the horrendous Monday night for the Utah Jazz, which intentionally stumbled through the worst season (17-65) in franchise history for the chance to pick first in next month's draft. Sure enough, the dream of drafting franchise changer Cooper Flagg was nothing more than a fantasy.

Finishing with the worst record only guaranteed the Jazz could not fall lower than fifth in the draft order. The fifth spot is exactly where they landed.

Concocting reasons for sitting out Lauri Markkanen for nearly half the season doesn't seem worth it now. But on the bright side, at least he'll be rested for the Finnish national team this summer.

And how pointless was it now to "rest" Walker Kessler? As if the extended offseason isn't enough time off for a 23-year-old.

Don't take this as a gripe against the Jazz. Once the new billionaire owner signed off on the decision to ship off two All-Stars in the prime of their respective basketball lives, the dump was on.

For all of Ryan Smith's belief that the Jazz no longer play in an unattractive small market, the likelihood of difference-makers flocking to sign with his team remains a longshot.

Team executives insisted Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell were buddies on the court, an assertion only fools believed, so the best option seemed to ship off both players and reload.

The draft, sprinkled in with a few shrewd acquisitions, remains the best route toward building another championship contender. Six draft picks over the last two seasons started the rebuild, but the team desperately needed a top-three pick this year.

To their credit, Jazz officials will take a workmanlike approach despite the bitter disappointment. The task of selecting a good player remains unchanged.

"The rebuild is on track," general manager Justin Zanik said during a Zoom availability after the lottery. "It always has been."

Good for him, the team is trying to negotiate the system. The problem is the rules stink.

Since the NBA flattened the lottery odds in 2019, the system no longer has rewarded the worst teams. The Dallas Mavericks had a mere 1.8% chance to win the lottery but jumped 10 spots to land the top pick, marking the biggest move by any team in lottery history.

Allowing Dallas to get the first pick practically forces the Jazz to tank again next season. But all is not lost for Utah fans — the newly christened Mammoth start their second NHL season in five months.

Related topics