The Utah Jazz are trading Walker Kessler to the Los Angeles Lakers, who will sign him to a four-year, $130 million deal, taking one of the top talents in this summer’s restricted free agency class — and one of the best big men available overall — off the market in 2026 NBA free agency. In return, the Jazz will get unprotected first-round picks in 2031 and 2033 and first-round swaps in 2028 and 2030, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania.
Kessler, who turns 25 in late July, has averaged 9.5 points, 9.3 rebounds, 2.4 blocks and 1.2 assists in 25.3 minutes per game in his career. He has shot 68.1% from the field, feasting on a steady diet of alley-oop dunks, high-low lobs, cuts from the dunker spot and putbacks on the offensive glass, as one of the NBA’s top interior finishers.
Finding a starting center to play next to Luka Doncic had been tops on the Lakers’ offseason list of priorities.
Selected out of Auburn with the 22nd pick in the 2022 NBA Draft — a pick, by the way, that the Utah Jazz originally sent to Memphis in 2019 in the deal that brought them Mike Conley, and wound up making its way back to them in the deal that sent Rudy Gobert to Minnesota — the 7-foot-2, 250-pound Kessler has developed into one of the league’s premier per-minute rim-runners, rebounders, shot-blockers and interior deterrents. He finished third in Rookie of the Year voting in 2022-23, led the NBA in offensive rebounds per game in 2024-25 (and finished fifth in rebounding overall), has posted top-five finishes in blocks per game three times in four seasons (and he missed nearly all of his fourth season following surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder), and has the sixth-highest effective field goal percentage of anybody who’s played at least 100 games since entering the league.