4 NBA veterans doing too much for their rebuilding teams

1. Mike Conley — Utah Jazz

The Jazz have not been able to count on their starting point guard for a few games of late. Conley has missed all games played from Nov. 19 on when he got injured against Portland before even reaching the 10-minutes-played mark.

Utah might actually be happy about that to some extent considering their surprising start to the season was highly unsustainable. The Jazz started the year 10-3 and went on to get as many as 12 wins by the game in which Conley went down, sporting a 12-6 record after that win at the PDX. Utah is 0-5 without Conley through Monday.

Conley is the only remnant from the Jazz Mid Three of years past featuring the now-departed Mitchell and Gobert. He hasn’t regressed in the slightest way amid their absences, though.

Conley is scoring on lower figures (10.2 points per game compared to his career average of 14.8) but he’s also dishing out a career-high 7.9 assists per game, something he’s never been even remotely close to (prior-high: 6.5 on back-to-back seasons when playing in Memphis at the start of the 2010s decade).

The impact of Conley in Utah’s early-season run of positive results is more than clear given the five-game losing streak the Jazz carried into Wednesday’s game. If you want a clear sign of Conley’s value while already into his deep 30s, here you have it: he’s logging the 11th-highest AST% (35.4 percent) among players with at least 100 minutes played this year and he’s averaging the eighth-most assists per game (7.9) through Monday games.