Five burning questions as the Utah Jazz head into training camp

The Utah Jazz are back in action this week with the team holding their annual media day on Monday and training camp kicking off on Tuesday.
While we know that the Jazz’s 2024-25 season will largely prioritize developing young players on the roster and that the Jazz’s chances of racking up enough wins to be in any sort of real contention are very slim, there are still a lot of unknowns for the Jazz as we head into the season.
So, today we’ll review five questions for the Jazz, some of which should be answered by the end of the preseason and some that might take some more time.
In order to even address any of the questions that come later, a baseline needs to be established for the young players on this roster.
The only exception here might be Keyonte George. He played a large role last season and there is enough of a sample size to understand his starting point heading into the 2024-25 NBA season. But the same can’t really be said for the rest of the youngsters.
Taylor Hendricks, Brice Sensabaugh, Cody Williams, Isaiah Collier and Kyle Filipowski (along with two-way players Jason Preston and Oscar Tshiebwe) are going to be battling during training camp and preseason. And, through their play in the preseason as well as early opportunities in the regular season, we’ll learn where they are in their development based on performances and information gathered from the coaching staff and Jazz front office.
All of that information early on is going to inform how this next question is answered.
Based on the Jazz’s company line of being completely dedicated and focused on developing players this season, there are likely going to be bigger opportunities in the regular rotation for the seven players on the roster that are under 23 years old. But who is going to start? Who is going to come off the bench? Who is going to see their role increased? Will any of the young players spend time in the G League?
There will be an opening day rotation that will be informed largely by the performances from training camp and the preseason, but there is going to be a lot of room for adjustment this season and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we saw some of the more veteran players come off the bench in order to make way for more meaningful minutes for the young players.
That being said, there are still going to be battles fought.
Success is not going to be determined by wins and losses for the Jazz this season. There will be moments when successful decision making or other successful actions will result in a win, but wins and losses won’t be the barometer for success.
Instead, once a baseline for players and a rotation has been established, there will be small areas to pay attention to that will help guide players to be successful. For example, success for Hendricks might be developing a knack for navigating around screens. Success for Williams might be finding ways to be assertive when he’s on the floor with Lauri Markkanen. Success for Collier might be getting his shooting efficiency to reach league averages.
I’m not saying that those are going to be the exact goals, but those are the kinds of small successes that are going to be really meaningful as we watch these young players (and in some cases literal teenagers) start to become legitimate NBA players.
But this season is not just about the young players that are on the Jazz roster.
An All-Star, the league’s Most Improved Player, a new highly lucrative longterm extension. Those are all things that Markkanen has already accomplished. Now, we need to find out what the next step is for the budding star.
We know that he has continued to work on his isolation game and being aggressive while also trying to step into more of a leadership role. Are those still the things that Markkanen is working toward? Or is there more that we should expect from his game?
Markkanen is going to be hugely instrumental in the development of the Jazz’s young players and he himself is still pretty young, but he also needs to find ways to continue to grow while being in an ecosystem that is going to prioritize development.
So far, I’ve been given no reason to believe that Jazz fans are going to waver when it comes to supporting their team. But, we are past the days of the Jazz even trying to pretend that they’re going to make it to the playoffs. They know that they have a young roster and that there is an incredibly talented 2025 draft class that will be enticing quite a few teams to play for better draft position.
Developing young players is not always pretty and it is often arduous and frustrating. For some people that’s an exciting part of the rebuild, but for other fans, they might be turned off by a season in which wins truly do not matter.