The Utah Jazz are living off two good draft picks they made in the mid-1980s. You would think they would have gotten a little help by now, but Karl Malone and John Stockton are still carrying the team. The next best scorer from a year ago, Donyell Marshall, signed with the Bulls in the offseason, and forward Andrei Kirilenko is the only other player on the roster who has anything approaching star potential.

Stockton, Malone and Kirilenko are a good nucleus, but the rest is strictly filler. The center and off-guard positions are major question marks. Furthermore, the underlying impression is that the Jazz can't evaluate talent anymore. Disturbing signs keep cropping up like when they thought signing John Amaechi last year was some kind of coup, or when Jerry Sloan actually let Quincy Lewis start a playoff game last year, or the draft-day trade of Ryan Humphrey for Curtis Borchardt, who immediately broke his foot, just as he had done multiple times in college.