SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 The Utah Jazz are keeping things in the family \u2014 literally.<\/p>\n
The Jazz have named Austin Ainge as the team’s president of basketball operations, the team announced on Monday.<\/p>\n
Ainge follows his father, Danny Ainge, to Utah after 17 years with the Boston Celtics organization, where he was most recently the team’s assistant general manager.<\/p>\n
“Austin is one of the brightest minds in the NBA,” team owner Ryan Smith said in a statement. “His 17 years with the Celtics have given him incredible insight into every part of an organization. I’ve known Austin for 15 years, and I’ve watched him grow into an accomplished, innovative, and strategic basketball executive who’s ready to lead this organization.”<\/p>\n
Danny Ainge will remain as the team’s CEO of basketball and Justin Zanik will stay on as the team’s general manager. Austin Aiinge worked under his father for over a decade in Boston, and they have now reunited with the Jazz.<\/p>\n
“Austin is one of the most respected executives in the NBA because of his basketball prowess, experience, and work ethic and I am excited to partner with him on our shared goal of success for the Utah Jazz,” Zanik said. “Once again, Ryan and Ashley illustrate their commitment to Utah as they strive to build the best franchise in the NBA.”<\/p>\n
Austin Ainge had been with the Celtics since 2008, first serving as a scout. The next year, he was hired to be the coach of Boston’s G League affiliate before moving into a front office role two years later.<\/p>\n
He has spent 14 seasons in the Boston front office, serving as the team’s assistant general manager for the last six seasons. Boston went to six Eastern Conference Finals and won a title during his run with the team.<\/p>\n
He’ll inherit quite a different situation in Utah.<\/p>\n
The Jazz won a franchise-worst 17 games in 2024-25, and then fell to No. 5 in the NBA Draft Lottery. Utah has Lauri Markkanen under contract for four years with a host of young prospects and future draft picks.<\/p>\n
“This is an incredible opportunity to lead Utah Jazz basketball operations,” Austin Ainge said. “I couldn’t be more excited about the bright future of this organization. I look forward to partnering with Ryan and Ashley Smith and our other leaders within the Utah Jazz and will utilize my experience over the last 17 years building a championship-caliber organization.”<\/p>\n
Ainge, who played at BYU from 2002-07, said he’s hopeful he can help the Jazz start climbing up the standings again.<\/p>\n
“I have lived this my whole life, constantly studying teams, talent, chemistry and the selflessness necessary to win. I look forward to bringing that to Utah and am excited to give Jazz fans a lot to cheer about as we build our program back up.”<\/p>\n
\n 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.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 The Utah Jazz are keeping things in the family \u2014 literally. The Jazz have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3785],"tags":[7,3025,2655,2654,2657,423,2656,71,6,67,1217,2659,66,2658,2652,422,427,3972,2653],"class_list":{"0":"post-75865","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-utah-jazz","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-cars","11":"tag-classifieds","12":"tag-homes","13":"tag-jazz","14":"tag-jobs","15":"tag-local","16":"tag-nba","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-radio","19":"tag-salt-lake","20":"tag-sports","21":"tag-television","22":"tag-traffic","23":"tag-utah","24":"tag-utah-jazz","25":"tag-utahjazz","26":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114624300599406668","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75865","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=75865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}