Lauri Markkanen is once again playing the Jazz out of the tank race and setting up an impossible decision

We can skip the pretense where the Utah Jazz are concerned. They've spent the past few years tanking. That's less a (consensus) opinion and more an overt accusation on the NBA's part. The Jazz were fined $100,000 in 2024 for violating the league's player participation policy because they sat Lauri Markkanen out of a March 5 game against the Washington Wizards. That was far from the only game Markkanen missed.

New president of basketball operations Austin Ainge made it clear in the offseason that the Jazz had no intention of playing such games with availability any longer. "You won't see that this year," he declared at his introductory press conference. So the Jazz pivoted into their other favorite form of tanking: trading away veterans. The kneecapped themselves at both the 2023 and 2024 deadlines and, last offseason, they bought out Jordan Clarkson, puzzlingly gave away a second-round pick to turn productive guard Collin Sexton into the seemingly washed Jusuf Nurkić, and dealt starting big man John Collins for a second-round pick and a couple of veterans in their 30s whose best basketball was seemingly behind them. The plan, presumably, was to tank without tanking. You don't need to rest good players to lose if your good players all suddenly play for other teams, especially when you're in a loaded Western Conference.

One way or another, losing was essential. The Jazz still owe the Oklahoma City Thunder a top-eight protected first-round pick that expires after the 2026 Draft. They need to hold out one more season, not just to keep their own pick but to keep a high-value asset away from the Thunder, specifically. Utah, presumably, eventually plans to compete with Oklahoma City in the Western Conference, after all. They'd rather do so without having given the Thunder another valuable first-round pick.

Well... if the season ended today.... the Jazz would give the Thunder the No. 10 overall pick. The season fortunately does not end today. One would presume that teams like the Clippers (who also owe their pick to the Thunder!), Grizzlies and Mavericks have meaningful room to improve. The Jazz may be able to maintain their current trajectory and wind up in the No. 6 or No. 7 slot just by watching competitors get their acts together. But we live in the era of flattened lottery odds. The Jazz would probably prefer not to leave the fate of their pick to chance. Every win takes them further away from the true dregs of the league. They have five at the moment. It might take Washington and Brooklyn six weeks to get there. Eventually, a team banks too many wins to safely protect their draft position.

Which brings us to the why of all of this: Lauri Markkanen is awesome. He's averaging more than 30 points per game and flirting with 50-40-90 shooting splits through 13 games. That's a tiny sample. It's also more points than Dirk Nowitzki, his frequent, aspirational comparision, ever averaged in a season. He has scored more points in Utah's five wins (173) than every one of his Jazz teammates except Keyonte George has scored over the course of the entire season, losses included. Two of those five wins have come in overtime and a third came by two points on a buzzer-beating tip in, all games Utah likely loses comfortably without its star. Utah, to date, has a -1.1 net rating with him on the floor and a -14 net rating with him off of it. Markkanen is singlehandedly derailing what was supposed to be the NBA's simplest tank.

There aren't obvious levers to pull here. The Jazz no longer have veterans to trade to feed the tanking beast. Their second-, third-, fourth-, sixth-, seventh- and eighth-leading scorers on a per game basis are all on rookie contracts. They can't and shouldn't fire Will Hardy for being too good at coaching. The only other player on the team regarded as a proven, starter-level asset before the season was Walker Kessler, who's already out for the year due to a shoulder injury. Getting Markkanen off of the floor in some fashion is really all that's left to be done here. This forces the Jazz into a very uncomfortable fork (trident?) in the road:

• They can keep Markkanen and risk giving the Thunder a top pick to use against them for the next decade.
• They can trade Markkanen now, with no clear future All-Star on the roster and no guarantee that they draft one with their 2026 pick.
• They find reasons to sit Markkanen out of games despite Ainge stating plainly that they had no intention of doing so, risking further fines from the league in the process.

You're going to hear fake trades until either a real one happens or the Jazz get good enough to end the noise. For now, a trade still feels fairly unlikely. Rumors from previous transaction cycles suggested that the Jazz set a preposterously high price even years ago, before Markkanen ascended to this level. Now? It's just hard to imagine anyone meeting whatever the current cost would be, as tempting as hypothetical trade partners like Detroit or Portland might be.

That means we're probably headed for some combination of path No. 1 and path No. 3, with the latter slowly replacing the former as the season progresses. That is very often how tanks are managed: they get more egregious the later we get into a season even if the wins banked in October and November count all the same.

If Utah can just sneak through the 2025-26 season without losing their pick, it stands to reason that they'd probably be ready to move past the tanking phase of their roster-build. The young players they've drafted over the past few seasons are starting to find themselves. They'd have Ace Bailey, Keyonte George and a 2026 pick as their major high-upside plays, they'd no longer fear sending a great pick to the Thunder, and the 2027 Draft is regarded as weak enough at this point that an aggressive tank probably wouldn't be worth it anyway. The Jazz have so much accumulated draft capital that they could pretty easily keep Markkanen and the young guys, trade a couple of picks for a veteran or two, get Kessler back and be in the playoff mix next season.

But boy is 2026 shaping up to be uncomfortable as they try to get there. They'd never admit it, but the Jazz clearly thought they'd Markkanen-proofed their team. Evidently, they were wrong. As nice as it usually is to watch your best player take the leap from All-Star to potential All-NBA pick, the Jazz would've surely preferred it happen a year from now, because right now, that jump is derailing what was otherwise a straightforward plan to maximize the 2025-26 season.