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We remember years ago when Kobe Bryant 's people scared the New Jersey Nets so much that they ended up passing on him to take Kerry Kittles -- in order to facilitate a trade between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Charlotte Hornets that was already in place. Or, at least we remember the legends of that Vlade Divac draft night trade, and the idea that it was an agent coup.
It may be unlikely that anything of that sort will a) ever happen again; and b) ever happen in favor of the Utah Jazz. But we can dream, though. In order to identify if this dream can ever be a reality let's look at the top players who have declared for the draft and hired an agent, and let us see if any of them have any history with the Jazz franchise (recent, current, or former).
| Jazz | Jazz | 2014 Draft Entrant | |||||||||||
| Agent | Players | Examples | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||||||
| 1 | Bill Duffy | 1 | Andris Biedrins | Andrew Wiggins | 1.55 | Zach LaVine | 19.26 | Deonte Burton | 39.08 | Alec Brown | 75.00 | ||
| 2 | Arn Tellem | 3 | DeShawn Stevenson, Diante Garrett | Jabari Parker | 2.15 | Joel Embiid | 2.65 | ||||||
| 3 | Rob Pelinka | 2 | Carlos Boozer, Derek Fisher | Dante Exum | 4.50 | Shabazz Napier | 25.00 | ||||||
| 4 | Jeff Schwartz | 4 | Deron Williams, Al Jefferson | Noah Vonleh | 7.40 | ||||||||
| 5 | Mark Bartelstein | 7 | Gordon Hayward, Jeremy Evans | Doug McDermott | 12.20 | Nik Stauskas | 14.95 | Adreian Payne | 17.53 | Mitch McGary | 32.92 | Joe Harris | 59.33 |
| 6 | Ty Sullivan | 1 | Kevin Murphy | T.J. Warren | 19.16 | ||||||||
| 7 | B.J. Armstrong | 1 | Diante Garrett | Jerami Grant | 19.74 | Jahii Carson | 42.50 | Roy Devin Marble | 52.13 | Billy Baron | |||
| 8 | Bouna Ndiaye | 1 | Rudy Gobert | Clint Capela | 21.44 | Louis Labeyrie | 151.00 | Josh Davis | 151.00 | Axel Toupane | 151.00 | ||
| 9 | Wallace Prather | 1 | Derrick Favors | Jordan Adams | 31.89 | ||||||||
| 10 | Mike Higgins | 1 | Ronnie Price | Russ Smith | 41.90 | ||||||||
| 11 | Andrew Vye | 1 | Eric Maynor | Markel Brown | 47.00 | Scottie Welbekin | 77.50 | ||||||
| 12 | Jim Tanner | 1 | Marvin Williams | Patric Young | 49.00 | James Michael McAdoo | 49.82 | ||||||
| 13 | Reggie Brown | 2 | Mo Williams, Brandon Rush | Sean Kilpatrick | 75.67 | ||||||||
| 14 | Marc Fleisher | 2 | Andrei Kirilenko, Mehmet Okur | Viktor Gaddefors | 78.00 | Mateusz Ponitka | 79.00 | ||||||
| 15 | Bernie Lee | 1 | John Lucas III | Geron Johnson | 85.00 | ||||||||
| 16 | Rade Filipovich | 1 | Andris Biedrins | Dmitry Kulagin | 92.00 | ||||||||
| 17 | Brad Ames | 1 | Gordon Hayward | Philipp Neumann | 151.00 | Taylor Braun | 151.00 | ||||||
| 18 | Herb Rudoy | 1 | Raja Bell | Brandon Young | 151.00 | Guillem Vives | 151.00 | Marko Ramljak | 151.00 | Matias Bortolin | 151.00 | Moussa Diagne | 151.00 |
| Shayne Whittington | 151.00 | Travis McKie | 151.00 | ||||||||||
N.B. Ratings based on consensus draft 5.0; ratings of 151.0 = not in my big board right now.
Before we go too far, let's remember that Beans "earned" $9.0 million this year, so he is a FANTASTIC agent. Some players are repped by more than one agent per agency, so there's some overlap here. If anything this investigation has led me to believe that agents are involved MORE than we had previously believed. Guys who are traded for are sometimes repped by the same agent, like D-Will and Devin Harris were. Other people who join the team seem to be players who have agents who are good with the Jazz -- like the fact that Bart had seven Jazzmen in the last few seasons. I am surprised that Rob Pelinka didn't get any of the UofM guys on his squad (as he was a teammate of the Fab 5 from those days), I am really surprised that Bart got almost all of the UofM and MSU people. Dude owns the state of Michigan for this draft class missing out on only a few players (and all of the people from Oakland, and other Michigan schools, okay, so maybe he doesn't own the state.)
Can the Jazz make some sort of move due to good relationships? Perhaps. Can we expect a Kobe like move? No. What can we expect? Perhaps we'll take Mitch McGary even though he failed a drug test, as a favor? I don't know.
This was still a worthwhile investigation. For the full list of our players and their agents visit here.