Are the Utah Jazz done tanking? The team’s new basketball boss says yes.

Ryan Smith said he “woke up frustrated,” went for a run and “audibly screamed” the morning after catastrophe struck his Utah Jazz in the NBA draft lottery.

After a year spent losing a franchise-worst 65 games, Utah still couldn’t grab the top overall pick and the right to draft Duke star Cooper Flagg. The Jazz fell to fifth, the worst-possible outcome in the association’s game of odds.

The misfortune shook plenty of Jazz fans, including Smith, who vented his frustrations on X the next day.

But in the same post, Smith also expressed resolve.

“Goal doesn’t change,” he wrote.

The path to that goal, though, just might.

Can Smith and the rest of the Jazz braintrust stomach another year of tanking, of trying to lose, for a top pick that may never come? Or will they see the lottery’s outcome as a sign to change course and pivot out of a rebuild?

Jazz fans got their answer this week when the team’s new president of basketball operations, Austin Ainge, was asked about his approach to tanking or about manipulating minutes, as the team so clearly did last season.

“We won’t see that this year,” Ainge said.

He let the silence hang in the room for a while, as an era of intentionally losing games apparently came to an end.

It’s a strategy the team has chased to varying degrees over the course of the last three seasons. As Danny Ainge, Austin’s father and the team’s CEO, traded Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert away in the summer of 2022. The teams in the subsequent two years won too many games for the team’s liking, so they traded away veteran talent at the deadline of both seasons. Then, there was last year’s 17-win slog, which featured tanking so defined that the NBA actually fined them $100,000 for it.

The rewards for all of this: Taylor Hendricks with the No. 9 pick in 2023, Cody Williams with the No. 10 pick in 2024, and worst and most jarring of all, the lottery letdown suffered in May, pushing the team down to No. 5 in this month’s draft.

Did it shake Smith’s confidence in the tanking plan?

“I think Austin kind of answered that,” Smith said, when asked specifically if the lottery changed his thinking on the rebuild. “We’ve got smart people around the table, and they’ll look at all the optionalities that are in front of us.”

What was then expected to be another rebuilding offseason now gets potentially more interesting.

The Jazz could still lose plenty, of course. No. 1 among those “optionalities” is to stay with the rebuild: Pick the best players available with the four draft picks they have, and trade all of the team’s veterans. Instead of “tanking,” the Jazz could just be among the worst teams in the league organically, earning a shot at the 2026 draft’s vaunted top three prospects, including incoming BYU star AJ Dybantsa.

That approach would force the Jazz to be more aggressive in trading their veterans than they have been so far. John Collins, Collin Sexton, Jordan Clarkson, and yes, even Lauri Markkanen were all asked to sit out games when healthy last year. Keeping them on the roster and sticking to Ainge’s no-tanking policy would mean lower odds at the draft’s best.

That remains the Jazz’s most logical model, the one that Oklahoma City followed on its path to become the Western Conference’s best team. A team source said that’s still a potential path forward.

What the Jazz do not have is free agency room. They have 15 roster spots currently locked up. While four of those are non-guaranteed, they also have four draft picks at the moment ready to fill those slots. They also do not have space under the salary cap, unless Collins were to opt out of his player option.

But they do have the ability to make trades. Smith hinted at the possibility of action with one of his team’s most valuable trade assets: this year’s No. 5 pick. “We’re going to get a great player if we draft at five,” Smith said.

It’s easy enough, then, to imagine the Jazz going for it: trading the No. 5 pick for either a better selection in this year’s draft, or an established NBA player looking for a new home.

There’s no shortage of those players on the open trade market, per reports around the NBA. Kevin Durant, Ja Morant, Trae Young, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Zion Williamson, Paul George, Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porzingis, Karl-Anthony Towns, and others have all been mentioned in trade rumors.

Could the Ainges make their big-game hunting dreams come true, pair a star with Markkanen, and actually try to make the playoffs next season? Or could they try to trade up in this year’s draft, getting a player with higher star potential than what is on offer at No. 5?

“If you look at the playoffs and look at all the best players in the NBA, and how many of them went No. 1, it’s better to have the No. 1 pick. But there’s a lot of other stars that came from all over the draft, and certainly the Jazz have a long history of second-rounders that become All-Stars,” Austin Ainge pointed out. “So [getting the No. 1 pick] is not the only way to do it.”

In general, neither Ainge nor Smith was unequivocal about their plans for the offseason — nor should they be, with an uncertain landscape in front of them.

“I really believe it’s just stacking good decisions, one on top of the other,” Ainge finished. “A lot of times people see the big trade or that big free agent signing as the end. But it really requires lots of diligent management to build up to that point. So it’s just about stacking good decisions together, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

But it’s clear that the thinking from the top of the organization has changed from just one month ago. Utah will have three more weeks to decide what it wants to do with the fifth pick in the draft. After that, it will have an offseason to contemplate its future.

Plenty of time for more long runs to mull things over.