The Utah Jazz are trading Walker Kessler to the Los Angeles Lakers, who will sign him to a four-year, $130 million deal, taking one of the top talents in this summer’s restricted free agency class — and one of the best big men available overall — off the market in 2026 NBA free agency. In return, the Jazz will get unprotected first-round picks in 2031 and 2033 and first-round swaps in 2028 and 2030, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania.
Kessler, who turns 25 in late July, has averaged 9.5 points, 9.3 rebounds, 2.4 blocks and 1.2 assists in 25.3 minutes per game in his career. He has shot 68.1% from the field, feasting on a steady diet of alley-oop dunks, high-low lobs, cuts from the dunker spot and putbacks on the offensive glass, as one of the NBA’s top interior finishers.
Selected out of Auburn with the 22nd pick in the 2022 NBA Draft — a pick, by the way, that the Utah Jazz originally sent to Memphis in 2019 in the deal that brought them Mike Conley, and wound up making its way back to them in the deal that sent Rudy Gobert to Minnesota — the 7-foot-2, 250-pound Kessler has developed into one of the league’s premier per-minute rim-runners, rebounders, shot-blockers and interior deterrents. He finished third in Rookie of the Year voting in 2022-23, led the NBA in offensive rebounds per game in 2024-25 (and finished fifth in rebounding overall), has posted top-five finishes in blocks per game three times in four seasons (and he missed nearly all of his fourth season following surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder), and has the sixth-highest effective field goal percentage of anybody who’s played at least 100 games since entering the league.
That player type — a low-usage, high-efficiency extra-possession generator on offense; a huge, physical paint protector whose sheer presence limits opponents’ shot attempts at the rim (and reduces their conversion rate on the up-close shots they do take) — has value around the league. Multiple teams, including the Los Angeles Lakers, Indiana Pacers and Washington Wizards, all reportedly showed interest in trying to snare him before last February’s trade deadline.
Just how much value, though, became something of a point of contention between Kessler and a Jazz team that was in the midst of … well, let’s be charitable and call it a “multi-year deep rebuild that occasionally drew six figures worth of ire from the league office.” (As Tony Jones of The Athletic put it last season, “One of the only things that truly muted [Kessler’s] performance has been a lack of playing time.”)
The two sides couldn’t come to an agreement on an extension of Kessler’s rookie-scale contract before the 2025-26 season, ticketing him for restricted free agency. After he missed all but five games of that would-be contract year, they came back to the negotiating table this summer, but reportedly remained far apart in their contract proposals.
According to ESPN’s Tim MacMahon, the Jazz offered Kessler a deal in the neighborhood of $140 million over five years — an average annual value that would’ve slotted in just outside the top 10 centers in the league, a few million below Cleveland’s Jarrett Allen and a bit above Milwaukee’s Myles Turner. Kessler declined that offer, preferring to enter the market in search of a richer offer sheet — even as the Jazz continued signaling their interest in using their right-of-first-refusal to match any such proposal in favor of retaining Kessler in what profiled as an exciting (and huge) front line with incumbent All-Star wing Lauri Markkanen and trade-deadline acquisition Jaren Jackson Jr.
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