Whenever the Utah Jazz close in on NBA opening night, a widely-aggregated notion spreads across local fans that their roster is “too good”, “too talented”, and “too well-coached” to hold the worst record in basketball.

Well, with a few weeks of NBA action officially in the rear-view mirror, one truth about this Utah Jazz team is painfully apparent: the tank is real, and it may be unstoppable.

Have you had the pleasure of checking the Western Conference standings recently? The season is still young, and the landscape of the league is still a jumbled, unintelligible mess. But for the trained eyes of Jazz fans, however, one digit pops out of the tangled heap: zero.

Yep. Zero. As in nothing, naddah, zilch, the undeniable absence of anything tangible.

Zero is the number of wins claimed by the 2024-25 Utah Jazz through 6 contests. For hardcore tanking fanatics, NBA subreddit users with a “Sickos” flare, and our very own James Hansen, this is a dream scenario.

What makes this number especially fascinating is that it places Utah in a category of its own. Though the potential of landing a talent like Cooper Flagg or Ace Bailey will be enough to have plenty of teams fumbling over each other—take Washington, Detroit, Brooklyn, and Portland for example—the Jazz are the only squad that remains winless.

The season is very young, and plenty can change from one week to another. Milwaukee, Philly, and Denver would all miss the playoffs if they started tomorrow, and Utah is on pace to finish 0-82.

I don’t expect any of that to be true by the season’s end.

Here’s the bottom line. In the arena of tanking gladiators, the Jazz are finally a frontrunner. Tanking is the game within the game for the bottom third of basketball. If the Western Conference competitors are sitting around the poker table, Utah is holding a hand of Pokemon cards—the draw won’t make a difference; they aren’t winning.

The worst record in the NBA will be guaranteed a top-5 pick in the upcoming NBA Draft, and in a loaded top 5, the last thing Utah wants is another 9-10th pick disaster as we saw in the last two drafts.

The Jazz have the best odds for the number one pick at this moment—an apex that this franchise has never obtained in its 50-year history. Perhaps this could be the year.

The early returns are promising.