Utah Jazz Land in Depths of NBA Offseason Power Rankings

The Utah Jazz will be leaning in on their development and young talent heading into this next NBA season, which bodes well for their long-term rebuild, but might not be the best for putting up wins on the board for the year ahead.

Especially in a Western Conference stacked with star talent and competitive rosters, this new Jazz roster would need a lot to go right in order to make a big jump in the standings from where they finished last season. It's not impossible, but initial expectations hint Utah's likely headed toward another high lottery pick come next summer.

So it comes as no surprise that in NBA.com's West offseason power rankings from John Schuhmann, the Jazz fall to dead last at the 15th spot, the next highest being the New Orleans Pelicans.

Along with the Jazz's lowly standing amongst the West, Schuhmann also had a few intriguing stats to note from Utah last season, two of which that tell us a bit of the story on why they reside as low as they do.

"The Jazz committed 5.4 more turnovers than their opponents, the worst differential for any team in the 48 seasons in which turnovers have been counted by a wide margin. (Next worst is 4.3 more per game.) They ranked last in turnover rate (17.0 per 100 possessions), opponent turnover rate (11.6 per 100) and deflections per game (13.3)."

"They allowed 29.7 transition points per game, 2.5 more than any other team in the 21 seasons of Synergy tracking data."

Simply, the Jazz had turnover and ball security issues throughout the season, and didn't have the defensive prowess, especially in transition, to pull the pieces together defensively. Thus, Utah faltered, many of those losses coming from a strong offensive performance on the end.

And looking ahead to this season, as the Jazz remain young and inexperienced relative to the rest of the Western Conference, those issues in the turnover margin could persist, bleeding into their defensive consistency once again

However, in the midst of those underwhelming numbers, Schuhmann also dove into one positive stat revolving around one young Jazz player: Brice Sensabaugh, who took some big steps forward in his shooting efficiency during his second year pro.

"Brice Sensabaugh had an effective field goal percentage of 59%, up from 46.8% in 2023-24 (his rookie season). That was the biggest jump among 254 players with at least 200 field goal attempts in each of the last two seasons. Sensabaugh was one of four players to shoot better than 50% on at least 100 corner 3-point attempts."