SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Jazz will open training camp this week with plenty of questions.
The team is entering the fourth year of what has been a long teardown/rebuild project that has yet to bear significant fruit. Will that change this season?
Can Ace Bailey be the franchise star the Jazz have been searching for? Which of Utah’s many young prospects will stake a claim to the future? How much will the veterans actually play? And will Lauri Markkanen’s future in Salt Lake City become any clearer?
Here are storylines to watch as the Jazz begin training camp.
Ace Bailey’s rookie year
A long rebuild project — to put a multi-year tank job nicely — hasn’t yet yielded surefire results in the draft.
Will Ace Bailey change that?
The No. 5 pick in last June’s draft comes into his rookie year with a fan base’s hopes on his shoulders.
He is long, athletic, has a silky jumper, and is a tough shotmaker — all good things — but there are plenty of questions going into his first NBA season.
Is he a perimeter wing or more of a forward? Can he defend at the NBA level? How quickly will he be in the starting lineup? Will his rookie season production be reminiscent of Donovan Mitchell’s (a tough, tough ask, to be sure)? Will there be enough flashes to believe in him having superstar potential?
Some good early news: He does seem to be a quick learner. Bailey reportedly parted ways with manager Omar Cooper, whose refusal to allow pre-draft workouts with top-5 teams — including Utah — likely contributed to Bailey’s unexpected draft-day slide.
Are the pups still pups? How much will the new veterans play?
“Pups can’t raise pups” was a regularly used saying last season to explain why the team felt it was important to have veteran leadership on a roster mostly filled with recent draft picks.
Those veterans — Jordan Clarkson, John Collins and Collin Sexton — are no longer on the roster, but they’ve been replaced with a new crop, including Kyle Anderson, Kevin Love, Jusuf Nurkić and old friend Georges Niang.
Collins, Sexton and Clarkson (when they did play) all averaged well over 20 minutes per game last season. Even if the new vets play, it will likely be in more limited roles.
That means plenty of opportunity for the Jazz’s recent picks — a group that includes Bailey, Isaiah Collier, Keyonte George, Brice Sensabaugh, Cody Williams, Taylor Hendricks, Kyle Filipowski, and Walter Clayton Jr. — to prove they’re part of Utah’s long-term plans.
All have plenty of questions surrounding them.
Is Filipowski as good as his summer league showing suggested? Will Sensabaugh’s hot shooting hold up in a bigger role? Can Williams bounce back from a poor rookie year? How much will Hendricks look like himself after last season’s injury? Will George find more consistency? Can Collier find a reliable shot?
And how will the rookies look in their first real NBA minutes?
The answers to those — and not Utah’s record — will determine if this season is a success or not.
Will there be another tank?
The millstone that has hung around the franchise’s neck will be gone next summer.
The protected first-round pick that the Jazz owe Oklahoma City from the Derrick Favors salary dump trade back in 2021 will either be conveyed next draft (the pick is top 8 protected) or the obligation will be extinguished.
The last three seasons have been filled with strategic resting and trades to make sure the Jazz’s record is bad enough to keep that pick. So will there be more of the same in 2025-26?
Probably, but it should feel a little more ethical.
Instead of sitting out players to make sure the losses pile up — something Collins called a “sticky situation” — the Jazz won’t have as much proven talent on the roster.
Teams filled with young players lose a lot of games naturally. That should be enough to keep the Jazz near the bottom of the standings.
Team sources have said that the Jazz won’t be as purposely manipulative with the team’s record this season, and want Will Hardy to coach the team as he sees fit.
We’ll see if that changes if Utah goes on some surprise winning streaks.
Lauri Markkanen’s future
Markkanen took himself out of trade talks last season when he purposely signed an extension on a date that made him ineligible to be traded at the deadline.
But with the Jazz still looking years away from fielding a playoff competitive team, he’s already back in the rumor mill. Markkanen’s trade value has taken a hit due to the size of his contract as well as a bit of a down season in 2024-25. That was partially due to injuries and partially due to tanking reasons — but there’s reason to believe he’ll have a bounce-back campaign.
He was one of the best players in Eurobasket, leading Finland to the semifinals of the tournament earlier this month. The last time that happened? Just before his breakout season in Utah, when he became an All-Star and won Most Improved Player. Maybe history will repeat itself
“Those are the years I’ve always felt the best, physically and mentally, to be honest,” he said, “because you’re getting game reps right before the NBA season starts.”
Walker Kessler not extending
Out of all Utah’s young players, Walker Kessler is the one who has quickly solidified himself as an NBA starter. He was also extension-eligible this summer. So why didn’t the Jazz lock him up for years to come?
The answer: math.
Kessler will have a $14.9 million cap hold next season — a number significantly less than whatever his new contract will eventually end up being. So by pushing his new deal to next summer, the Jazz free up some cap space for the 2026 offseason.
And with Utah owning Kessler’s bird rights, the Jazz can then go over the cap to re-sign him.
Sure, the move carries some risks — i.e. Kessler makes another jump and commands more money than he would have this summer — but it also gives Utah some flexibility for an offseason where the team is expected to finally make a push towards improving the roster.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.