When the Utah Jazz’s front-office decision-makers upgraded the team’s starting five, bringing in Mike Conley and Bojan Bogdanovic last summer, there was going to be a trade-off.
“We were very aware that the bench over the previous three years won us a lot of games,” says Dennis Lindsey, the team’s executive vice president of basketball operations. “The first bite of the apple to repopulate the bench to help us win games, especially during the regular season, was going to be a little bit more of a challenge.”
That challenge manifested themselves in different ways over the first 30 games of this NBA season.