How roster building in the NBA has changed

In 2019 the NBA implemented new lottery rules that flattened the lottery odds to de-incentive tanking.  The results are there, the Dallas Mavericks and Atlanta Hawks both played in the Play-In Tournament the last 2 years and both proceeded to win the lottery.  However, teams are still tanking.  Teams like the Utah Jazz, Washington Wizards and Brooklyn Nets have gone into rebuilds in recent seasons.  Could and should ‘blowing it up’  become a thing of the past in the NBA?

A few months ago, I was listening to a podcast and they were debating if the Grizzlies should blow up their roster.  The argument for no was that the flattened lottery odds make it harder to find superstars by tanking and that trading Morant and Jackson for draft picks that might not be that good would be risky and the Utah Jazz were the example used.  That trading your best players off of a good team is not good business right now.  The Utah example is a good one, after a first round exit in 2022, the Jazz traded Donovan Mitchell to the Cavaliers and Rudy Gobert to the Timberwolves.  They got 7 first round picks in the deals, the notable players from those left on the roster are Walker Kessler and Lauri Markkanen.  Danny Ainge was the man who began the Utah teardown, he had success with this type of trade when he was with the Boston Celtics.  The difference was that Celtics core was on its last legs.  Ray Allen had signed with the Miami Heat, Rajon Rondo had torn his ACL, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce were old and Boston had just finished 7th in the Eastern Conference and been knocked out by the Knicks in round 1.  As a result, Ainge traded Pierce and Garnett to the Brooklyn Nets for a bunch of players that didn’t matter, 3 first round picks and a pick swap.  One of those picks and the pick swap turned into Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum.  Those guys just led Boston to the championship and had been in the Finals when Utah made those trades.  Thus, Ainge knew the formula could work.  Yet, it is fair to ask if Utah made a mistake?

This isn’t meant to be a Jazz hit piece, this rebuild has a solid chance to work out for them.  They clearly thought their championship window had closed and they very well may have been right.  Rebuilds can take a long time and while the first 3 years have been rough, this could work out for the Jazz.  The Thunder blew up their team after the 2018-19 season and just won the title.  The last 2 championship teams were built off of these types of trades.  Boston landed Tatum and Brown with Brooklyn’s draft picks and the Thunder got Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in the Paul George trade and Jalen Williams with one of the draft picks from said deal.  If Ace Bailey turns into the player many think he can be, the Jazz will be in a much better spot.  Maybe Donovan Mitchell was going to request a trade soon anyways and they were never going to get that much for Gobert had they hung on to him.  However, that Jazz team was good, they had the best record in the NBA just a year before trading Mitchell and Gobert for a reason.  Mitchell has gone on to become one of the best players in the league and Utah feels years away from competing for anything real.  It doesn’t feel like the picks they got will net them anything too high either. The Cavaliers and Timberwolves are both really good and likely aren’t going to be bad anytime soon.  Those two teams are run much better than the Nets were back in the day, who decided a year after the deal that they no longer wanted to spend into the luxury tax.  Consequently, Utah has to rely on their own picks and it hasn’t worked out for them yet.  The flattened lottery odds are a big piece of that.  The Jazz just had the worst record in the NBA and picked 5th in the draft.  To me, putting your faith into lottery luck just isn’t a thing that teams should be doing anymore.

Of course there are teams forced into these situations, like the Nets when Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant both requested trades.  Brooklyn then tried to compete for a year and a half with Mikal Bridges as their center piece.  It didn’t work out for them so the Nets decided it was time to start over.  As a result, Brooklyn decided to trade Bridges to the Knicks and re-acquire their own picks that they sent out for James Harden.  They entered a rebuild as they look to get back to championship contenders.  The Wizards have also recently entered a rebuild but that rebuild was started by getting off of the Bradley Beal contract, they didn’t have anything that they were ‘blowing up’ anyways.

These types of rebuilds can work but a lot of times you need to get lucky.  If a team is trading their future draft picks to you that likely means that the guy that is being traded is good and the acquiring team is already good.  They are betting that the picks they are trading will be bad.  However, these deals typically have worked out for the team getting the picks, the past 2 champions made these exact types of trades.  Yet, these flattened lottery odds are going to have teams holding on to their cores for longer than they might have in previous seasons.  One example of this is the previously mentioned Grizzlies, who traded Desmond Bane to retool around Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr., not enter a rebuild. It probably won’t work because of how loaded the Western Conference is and their roster having too many issues but you can see why they would want to hold on for as long as possible.  These flattened lottery odds have made ‘blowing up’ rosters and rebuilding a lot less worth a team’s while. These new lottery odds, along with the 2nd apron, forces teams to be better on the margins when building their teams than they ever have had to before and I don't think that is a bad thing.