Bright spots from a rebuilding season for the Utah Jazz

After trading away their star players, Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, a few seasons ago, the Utah Jazz are in a rebuilding stage trying to find the players that can be their new stars and lead them to the success they want in the future.

Unfortunately, part of this process is losing games—a lot of games. With less than 20 games in the season, the Jazz have a record of 15-47, the third-worst record in the league. It’s not the most exciting year for fans, but there has been plenty that we’ve seen this year that should excite and give them reason to have hope going into next season.

The quickest and most crucial step in this rebuild will be to draft a superstar in what’s supposed to be a stacked draft class. However, we won’t know until we start to see them play whether they got the star they need, so who are the players already on the roster that will help the Jazz contend? This team has plenty of players who have shown the potential to do just that.

Kyle Filipowski, Isaiah Collier, and Keyonte George are the three most intriguing young players. Filipowski, a 2024 second round draft pick, has already outperformed what you can reasonably expect from a rookie on a non-guaranteed contract. Filipowski has shown the ability to play efficiently within an offense and has even managed to shoot 38% from deep, meaning he could be a stretch big down the road.

Collier is another rookie picked just three spots sooner than teammate Filipowski. Collier looks like he has star potential, and this is backed up by him winning the Western Conference Rookie of the Month in February. He averaged nearly 12 points and 9.5 assists per game during that span. Only two players in the NBA average more assists per game in that stretch: Trae Young and Nikola Jokic. It’s difficult for rookies to accumulate that many assists on a nightly basis; even Utah legend John Stockton only averaged 5.1 assists per game as a rookie.

George is a second-year player who has been everything the Jazz could hope for so far early in his career. This season he’s averaging nearly 17 points, four rebounds, and six assists a night.

He’s improved in almost every category from his rookie year, including points, assists, field goal percentage, and 3-point percentage. George has been so good that he has made a case for being the best player on the Jazz this season. Keyonte looks like the most surefire building block for this franchise, and it’s likely that he’s only going to get better.

The Jazz will need more than just those three players to make the playoffs and contend for titles. Luckily, they have more good players, including John Collins and Lauri Markkanen. They also have plenty of draft picks to continue to try to find that number one guy. Without that center piece, the Jazz will continue rebuilding, but with promising young pieces and more on the way, Utah has likely hit the lowest point of the rebuilding process.