Jazz agrees with Mike Conley on new 3-year contract

SALT LAKE CITY – The Utah Jazz keep their All-Star trio together.

The team signed a three-year, $ 68 million contract with veteran point guard Mike Conley, Athleticism first reported. While there are doubts about the final numbers (ESPN reported the deal was worth $ 72.5 million), it’s clear: Conley will be returning to Utah and that should keep the Jazz near the top of the rankings. .

Utah had made it clear that Conley was their top priority in free agency, and he wasted no time in making a deal, agreeing to the All-Star point guard’s terms in the opening moments of free agency on Monday.

Conley, 33, averaged 16.2 points and six assists per game in his second season in Utah, helping the team set a league-best 52-20 record. Conley shot 44.4 percent from the field, a career-high 41.2 percent from 3 points, and was Utah’s top backcourt defenseman.

For the second season in a row, however, Conley was plagued with hamstring issues. Those injuries cost him 21 games in the regular season and then five more in the playoffs. Conley missed the first five games of Utah’s second-round loss to the Los Angeles Clippers after increasing his hamstring strain. He returned in Game 6 but clearly wasn’t 100%.

Despite the injury issues, re-signing Conley was a decision the Jazz had to make. Not only was Conley one of the best pointers in the league last season, he was truly the only major option in Free Agency Jazz.

With new extensions from fellow All-Stars Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert this season, Jazz had already passed the salary cap before negotiations began on Monday. The Jazz can exceed the cap to keep their own free agents (although this comes with a high luxury tax cost), but can only use two exceptions – the mid-level taxpayer exception (around 5.9 million dollars) and the minimum wage exception – to sign new players

If the Jazz had lost Conley, they wouldn’t even have been able to sue Kyle Lowry, Chris Paul or one of the other top free agent keepers to replace him. With the options available to the team, Conley’s production would have been downright impossible to replace, so Monday’s news was a win for the franchise. He might not be someone new, but he’s a signing that should help keep the Jazz Championship window open.

That made it an easy decision for Jazz, and probably just as easy for Conley. The Jazz was his best option to be a competitor while still getting his market value. The Dallas Mavericks and New York Knicks both had overhead space and were likely interested in Conley, but the Jazz are better than those two teams. To have a better competitor, Conley would have had to take a pretty big pay cut. So, in the end, it made sense for the two sides to stick together. And that made for a quick deal.

Now the Jazz are pivoting to join a team that finished with the best record in the league with a pretty good sales pitch in hand: Come play with three All-Stars.

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