The Utah Jazz made arguably the most puzzling move of the offseason when they sent Collin Sexton and a second-round pick to the Charlotte Hornets in exchange for Jusuf Nurkic. The former Portland Trail Blazers center has yet to play a game with his new NBA team, but things are somehow already off to a rocky start.
Nurkic was called out by his national coach for being "out of shape" and someone who "can barely run." That blunt assessment by his coach points out what those who follow the NBA already know: Nurkic's career trajectory is rapidly spiraling downward.
Jusuf Nurkic's stock continues to fall
Grant Hughes of Bleacher Report recently highlighted the biggest riser and faller for every NBA team heading into the 2025-26 season. To no surprise, Nurkic was listed as Utah's biggest faller.
"Nurkić has had offseason glow-ups in the past, but everyone knows it only gets harder to snap back into condition as you age. The veteran center is now 31 and might not see much reason to attack his fitness with a season of tanking ahead in Utah," Hughes wrote.
Nurkic is an aging center who doesn't fit Utah's rebuilding timeline at 31 years old. The Jazz have to pay him $19 million for the 2025-26 season, with the silver lining being that he's on an expiring deal. Then again, so is Sexton, which makes this trade even more head-scratching. It would be one thing if attaching draft capital to acquire a clearly worse player in Nurkic allowed Utah more financial flexibility. Instead, the motivation behind this deal was to clear up the path for young backcourt pieces -- Walter Clayton Jr., Keyonte George, and Isaiah Collier -- while adding a reliable veteran center in the process.
But Utah's backcourt is largely unproven, and Sexton could be the best player in that group. Making Sexton a trade candidate is understandable, but packaging him and a pick for a declining Nurkic makes this perhaps the worst move of the entire summer.
To his credit, Nurkic is coming off a 25-point game for the Bosnia and Herzegovina national team, leading them to a 90-74 win over Belgium in a friendly match. However, those instances have been few and far between at this point in his career.
Hopefully, Nurkic will continue these 25-point Eurobasket performances and improve his conditioning heading into next season. But that seems unlikely, as he's far from the player he was in those seven seasons with the Blazers.