2/11 Utah vs. Boston
8:00 pm MT – Root Sports/League Pass
Opponent record: 32-18
Season series: Celtics lead 1-0
The Jazz battled hard the first time that they faced the Boston Celtics this season, but unfortunately a bad second quarter doomed them from the onset and Isaiah Thomas and Co. turned out to be far too much to handle as Utah fell 115-104.
Despite converting on a solid 42.3 percent (11-of-26) of their three-point attempts, the Jazz were unable to win the three-point battle as the red-hot Celtics simply couldn’t miss. They ended up finishing the game with 17 made threes on an incredible 54.8 percent shooting clip.
And the Celtics have been playing phenomenally of late as they’ve now won seven straight and find themselves within two games of the top seed in the East. Isaiah Thomas has obviously been an enormous part of that as he has been nearly unstoppable in recent contests.
He’s averaging 29.9 points per game this season, but over the course of their recent seven-game winning streak, he’s putting up a ridiculous 35.3 points and 7.4 assists per game while shooting 50 percent from the field and 40.5 percent from deep.
Isaiah Thomas's last 4 games have been insanely good pic.twitter.com/qEeElGCQRq
— JERSEY CLUTCH (@ClutchClosetCo) February 5, 2017
Thomas has been especially effective in the fourth quarter meaning that the Jazz can’t simply hope to cruise through the first three quarters of play then step it up in the final period. While that’s been their tendency on multiple occasions this season and it has actually worked quite well, Thomas has been even more clutch than the Jazz so it’s quite likely that such will not be a recipe for success for them.
To be honest, this is the game I’m most nervous about this week for apparent reasons. The Celtics are a great team that have already defeated the Jazz once and boast one of the league’s most prolific scorers in Isaiah Thomas.
Nevertheless, while this match-up could certainly go either way, I’m feeling good about Utah’s chances as they’ll be relatively well-rested, have the benefit of playing in front of their home crowd and will be taking on a Boston team that will be in their third game of a tough four-game road slate.
Therefore, while these two teams are quite similar in their make-ups and philosophies and although the Celtics have a better record than the Jazz, I’m going to go ahead and project that the Jazz will come out fired up and ready for this one and be able to pull out what will likely be their most impressive victory of the week.
My Prediction: Jazz Win
Final Score: Utah 102, Boston 94
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So while Week 15 was a relatively light two-game stint which saw the Jazz go undefeated, they’ll face a much tougher challenge this time around with four games in seven days in which they’ll start out with three road contests.
Although I predicted Utah to go 3-1 this week, I could truly see any of these games going either way depending on which Utah Jazz team shows up each night. Yet all of them are quite beatable opponents, so particularly as Utah hopes to maintain hold of fourth place in the West, these are exactly the kinds of games that they have to prove capable of winning.
All stats courtesy of NBA.com