The Utah Jazz have become a strangely reliable answer whenever the Los Angeles Lakers have needed help patching a hole.
That pattern has now shown up more than once, and the most recent example is the Walker Kessler trade. But this thing didn’t start there.
It goes back to 2023, when the Lakers finally had to face the obvious: the Russell Westbrook trade had blown up. Westbrook wasn’t a fit, and the pieces around him in Los Angeles weren’t enough to cover for it.
Utah stepped in, taking Westbrook off the Lakers’ hands and sending back Malik Beasley and Jarred Vanderbilt, two players who at least looked like they could help on paper.
In hindsight, it’s easy to laugh at how that worked out. Even so, the Lakers used that move to steady themselves and get back to the Western Conference Finals that season. As far as the LeBron James era goes, that was about as close as they got again.
Then came another Lakers crisis, and Utah was in the middle of that one too. Two years later, the Jazz helped make the infamous Luka Doncic trade happen.
Once it became clear that LeBron James and Anthony Davis were no longer enough to keep the Lakers in the top tier of the Western Conference, Los Angeles needed another path. Somehow, Doncic became available, but the Lakers and Mavericks needed a third team to get the deal across the finish line.
That team was the Jazz.
Utah wasn’t exactly running the show there. If anything, it sounds like they were the ones getting pulled into the machinery. Still, the deal does not happen without the Jazz agreeing to be that third team, even if that may not have been their original intent.
And now there’s Kessler. The Lakers needed a two-way center, and the Jazz were willing to move him for the right price. That leaves the Lakers with fewer questions than they had at the start of the offseason, even if plenty still remain.
The funny part is that these Jazz favors have not exactly come free for the Lakers. Moving Westbrook cost them a first-round pick, and Utah ended up with it.
Three years later, that domino effect helped the Jazz land Jaren Jackson Jr. The Luka deal didn’t bring Utah the same kind of payoff, though Dallas’ refusal to take back more picks, tied to its faith in Anthony Davis, helped create the path for the Lakers to send much of their remaining draft capital to Utah for Kessler.
So yes, the Jazz have repeatedly shown up to help the Lakers solve problems. But Utah has made sure to get something out of the arrangement each time.
For now, the Lakers may be better off because of it. The Jazz, for their part, have little reason to complain.
In Other News...
Jazz Found An Unexpected Reminder Of The Donovan Mitchell Trade
The Jazz have spent years living with the ripple effects of the Donovan Mitchell deal, and the latest reminder came in the form of a roster move that traces back through a chain of trades. Utahs current mix has been shaped by a series of transactions that brought in Russell Westbrook, Jaren Jackson Jr., and, indirectly, Jusuf Nurkic through the Collin Sexton path, giving the front office a very different look than the one it had when Mitchell was still in town.
Nurkics return to Utah adds another layer to that ledger, because he is not just a name on the roster but a contributor the Jazz can use. It is the kind of circular NBA story that shows how one blockbuster move can keep paying off, or lingering, in unexpected ways, with the full shape of the trade tree still very much part of the conversation in Salt Lake City. [Read more 🡒]