As someone who has written a glowing article about Elijah Harkless<\/a> it\u2019ll be disappointing to see him not get any minutes (again, assuming he\u2019s brought back) but I can\u2019t say that it would be the wrong decision.<\/p>\nI said before that it hasn\u2019t been made clear what the Wizards will do with the No. 1 pick in this year\u2019s draft, so in the rare chance the he isn\u2019t selected by Washington, it would make sense for the Jazz to select the BYU product. The story writes itself, and while he isn\u2019t a \u201chome town kid,\u201d it would be nice to see him continue his basketball career in Utah.<\/p>\n
His selection by the Jazz is a tad more complicated than a Peterson selection. Dybantsa can play multiple positions, but the positions that he plays the majority of the time are\u2026 a bit full at the moment. Markkanen is slated to be our starting small forward, recently acquired Jaren Jackson Jr. is slated to be our starting power forward, and while we didn\u2019t see Dybantsa play a ton of minutes at the center spot, that position is also locked up assuming that we can re-sign Walker Kessler.<\/p>\n
Could he play the shooting guard role and have the rest of the rotation work out like we discussed with Peterson? Sure, I guess? He isn\u2019t exactly a natural fit, though. Standing at 6\u20199\u201d, he isn\u2019t exactly shooting guard shaped. He also, to this point in his career, doesn\u2019t space the floor incredibly well as he shot just 33% from three last year at BYU. If anything he would be like a DeMar DeRozan shooting guard, and unless it\u2019s suddenly the early 2010\u2019s again, I just don\u2019t see that leading to winning basketball.<\/p>\n
It also wouldn\u2019t make any sense to have Dybantsa be selected as the No. 2 pick and be put on the bench behind Markkanen or Jackson Jr. I also don\u2019t think that it would make sense to put either of them on the bench in favor of Dybantsa. If we were to select Dybantsa it would more than likely cause a series of trades, namely a Lauri Markkanen trade. He\u2019s been in the rumor mill recently, and he\u2019s been connected to the Detroit Pistons. Although the Pistons have future draft capital to trade, they are in the business of winning which would make their picks mostly useless, and they don\u2019t own the rights to any juicy picks in the future. The trade would most likely consist of a sign-and-trade for Tobias Harris plus salary filler, and multiple first round picks. To be honest, I wouldn\u2019t hate it. It opens up the space for Dybantsa to play immediately, it doesn\u2019t relegate Ace Bailey to the bench, it would keep the bench piece\u2019s minutes at a manageable level, but (respectfully) the drop-off from Lauri Markkanen to Tobias Harris is pretty steep for a team that\u2019s trying to make their way back to the playoffs.<\/p>\n
The Jazz have been known to slow-roll their players before; Bailey came off the bench for the first 10 games or so last year, and had the Jazz had anything close to a healthy season, maybe that first start for him would have come in February instead of November. I think that doing that with Dybantsa would be very complicated, but I can\u2019t deny how excited I would be to see a bench unit led by him. If he were to be a bench player this upcoming year, we could very well get a repeat of 2005 when Ben Gordon won the 6th Man of the Year award while being a rookie. Is it likely? No. Is it complicated? Yes. Am I glad that I\u2019m not the one making these decisions? Yes, but I wouldn\u2019t mind the paycheck.<\/p>\n
The postseason is wrapping up quickly which means that the offseason fun is upon us. We\u2019ve got a lot of great stuff in the works here at SLC Dunk so be on the lookout for that! Who do you think we should draft? Who do you have winning the NBA Finals and how long do you think it\u2019ll be until we hoist the trophy? Sound off in the comments!<\/p>\n
Be kind. Tell somebody you love them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With all the excitement after the NBA Draft Lottery, and leading up to the NBA Draft, it\u2019s very…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":748956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3785],"tags":[7,423,43914,37332,6,422,427,3972],"class_list":["post-748955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-utah-jazz","tag-basketball","tag-jazz","tag-jazz-draft","tag-jazz-roster","tag-nba","tag-utah","tag-utah-jazz","tag-utahjazz"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116670297760965282","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}