Dante Exum’s new contract could be a steal for the Utah Jazz

There have certainly been several signings that carry more importance to the league’s championship picture, but no contract given out during the first three days of 2018 NBA free agency stands out for its sheer boldness more than the three-year, $33 million pact the Utah Jazz handed Dante Exum.

Exum is a soon-to-be 23-year-old guard who, due to various injuries, has played in just 162 games during his four years in the league. He has been effective largely only in fits and starts, and one would be hard-pressed to say that he has proven himself deserving of a contract that pays $11 million per year over three years.

He has yet to average more than 22 minutes per game and carries career averages of just 5.7 points, 1.8 rebounds, and 2.2 assists a night, while he’s made less than 40 percent of his shots from the floor.  In a league where players are often paid based on their past performance rather than what the acquiring team expects from them during the length of the deal, it is wildly interesting to see the Jazz make such a large bet on Exum developing into the kind of player who will eventually be worth what they paid him.

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Utah obviously has a lot of faith in Exum’s talent. It made him the No. 5 overall pick back in 2014, and it was as obvious then as it is now that he has the potential to be a high-level two-way player.

Exum stands 6-foot-6 and has a 6-foot-9 wingspan. He has incredibly light feet that allow him to slide along with ball-handlers and interrupt their path to the paint. His athleticism shines through more on the offensive end of the floor but it’s on defense where you see just how hard Exum works on a play-to-play basis. One only need watch his performance during the 2018 playoffs to see his upside on the less glamorous end of the floor: a perimeter defender capable of guarding any player at three positions — one who uses his length and agility to prevent forays into the lane and to delay or alter actions by disrupting passing lanes, while also providing the added benefit of shaving precious seconds off the shot clock with pressure on the ball. That type of player, even if he is a total zero offensively, carries value in today’s NBA.

Of course, Exum has the talent to be a whole lot more than a total zero offensively, and though he’s not gotten much of a chance to show improvement due to the way injuries have thrown off his development, Exum actually has gotten better on that end with each passing season.

As you can see, Exum has become a more efficient scorer with each successive season despite increasing his usage rate (an excellent sign for his scoring potential, considering an increase in usage typically comes with the tradeoff of decreased efficiency); while he’s also cut down on turnovers and, during the 14 games he played toward the end of last season, finally showcased the high-level court vision we’d always heard about but had rarely seen with any sort of regularity.

Of course, numbers are not everything, and one who watches Exum play would come away with the impression that he is not exactly your typical offensive player. I cannot exactly remember who said it but I heard Exum’s style of offense described on a podcast last season as “Bambi on cocaine,” and that feels entirely appropriate. Exum is all long limbs and long strides and he is always going full-speed. He runs himself headlong into tight spots with alarming regularity, essentially trusting that his combination of athleticism and vision will allow him to figure out the right play to make once he gets to wherever it he’s going — even if he doesn’t know where that spot is when he begins his venture. That he’s been able to achieve some degree of effectiveness despite often appearing as though he may not entirely be aware what is happening is a testament to his skill level and athleticism and arguably augurs well for his potential; but it does not necessarily mean that he will eventually figure things out.

It does not help that Exum is a complete non-factor as a scorer outside the immediate area of the rim. For his career, Exum has connected on 58.6 percent of his shots in the restricted area, per NBA.com, and only 30.4 percent of his shots outside the circle. He seems to have at least recognized his inability to shoot over the last two years and has taken to driving almost everything to the rim at every opportunity. Exum averaged just 7.0 drives per 36 minutes as a rookie, but in 2016-17 he increased that figure to 9.7 per 36. Last year, in his admittedly small sample of 14 games, he averaged a completely absurd 16.9 drives per 36 minutes. Only five regular rotation players in the league (Dennis Schroder, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Tony Parker, and DeMar DeRozan) averaged more. Even just on a per-game basis, he drove to the rim more often than guys like Andrew Wiggins, Stephen Curry, Eric Gordon, and more, despite the fact that they all played nearly twice as many minutes per game.

It’s a good sign that Exum appears able to get into the paint at will but teams will undoubtedly adjust to that style once they actually see Exum on the floor more often. Rare is the player who has no jumper whatsoever but who can still get to the rim whenever he wants. The list right basically consists of Westbrook and Giannis Antetokounmpo, and that’s it. How Exum adjusts to what defenses throw at him will go a long way toward determining how effective an offensive player he can become.

Luckily, he seems unlikely to ever be the primary focus of the defense, and that should help him find gaps on a fairly regular basis. Donovan Mitchell’s breakout rookie season may have been one of the best things to happen to Exum’s career, even if it removes some of the possibility that he’ll ever become their true backcourt star. Mitchell and Exum are similarly-sized and can each guard either backcourt position on a regular basis, and thus would make for a good defensive pairing. Mitchell’s ability to create for himself off the dribble combined with the floor vision he showed as a rookie should also help Exum ease into a role as a combo guard who shares ball-handling duties, utilizes his knack for smart cuts, and takes advantage of rotating defenses by slicing through the holes created when they bend toward the threats created by Mitchell. It’s very easy to see him finding success as a second-side ball-handler. Whether his lack of shooting creates an issue for Mitchell is another question, but we also saw Mitchell find success playing alongside Ricky Rubio who, while he showed great improvement in his deep shooting during his first season in Utah, still does not generally get the respect of defenses when it comes to sinking off him to prevent drives.

Speaking of Rubio, this Exum deal sure looks like a signal that he is not necessarily long for Utah. Rubio is headed into the final year of his contract and is due around $15 million for the 2018-19 season. He proved himself a solid fit alongside Mitchell at times last season but despite his prodigious gifts, the team’s offense was often better without him on the floor. And the Jazz didn’t just pay Exum $11 million per year to make him their backup point guard of the future. It’s difficult to see them committing double-digit million dollars per year to Rubio next summer as well, and that’s almost surely what it would take to keep him around.

There is, however, a way they could actually make it work; and that’s by offering Rubio only a two-year deal so his contract would expire at the same time as Exum’s—which not-so-coincidentally comes at the same time both Mitchell’s rookie contract and Rudy Gobert’s extension expire.

While the Exum price-tag may seem crazy for a team already locked into a long-term deal for Gobert and that still needs to pay Mitchell big money in the future, it is important to consider the context of Utah’s books. This is a team that has very little guaranteed money on its books over the long term. They didn’t get any outside free agents to join up this year but next season they’ll have a load of space again if they decide to move on from Rubio and Alec Burks, and can generate even more space by declining to guarantee Derrick Favors’ salary for the 2019-20 campaign.

The only players under guaranteed contract beyond the 2020 season are Exum, Gobert, and Joe Ingles. Mitchell doesn’t start his extension until 2021, which is the same time Gobert is up for another new deal. In other words, they have these next three seasons to figure out how the Exum-Mitchell pairing works before they ever have to worry about how expensive it is.

Paying your starting backcourt a combined $18 million (Rubio-Mitchell), $15 million (Exum-Mitchell), and $18 million (Exum-Mitchell) over three years is practically nothing in today’s NBA. And in the meantime, they will have plenty of cap space in each of the next two summers to fill out the team around them. It helps that they just drafted another combo guard who can likely play the 1 or the 2 but is also an excellent outside shooter. Grayson Allen should afford Exum and Mitchell space in which to operate offensively.

The Jazz showed throughout the 2018-19 season that they are a team on the rise. They are one of the few franchises in the league that has a locked-in superstar on offense (Mitchell) and defense (Gobert). They have a deep, versatile roster stocked with intriguing young talent. They still have some time to figure things out.

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As it stands now, the contract they handed Exum — one of the most intriguing young players in the Jazz’s band — looks like an overpay. But it may not necessarily look like one by the time the contract is up. And even if it does, there’s no real harm done. They still have plenty of room to improve their roster while he’s under contract and their stars aren’t up for new deals until Exum’s deal is expired. In the interim, it’s entirely possible they could use his mid-tier salary as an aggregation piece in a deal for another star. (You always need those to complete star swaps.) He’s tantalizing enough that one could easily see a team talking itself into him as a very nice chip in such a trade.

That’d be a nice haul for the Jazz, but even better would be Exum himself blossoming into the player they thought they were getting at the draft four years ago. Utah’s player development pipeline is an excellent one, and this contract is in many ways a bet that they can tap into what’s been lurking inside Exum all along.