Utah Jazz ride recent success into showdown with Trail Blazers

The Utah Jazz look to keep climbing the standings in the Western Conference against their Northwest division rivals from Portland.

If you’ve paid any attention to the Utah Jazz schedule since the beginning of the NBA season, you were likely looking forward to the beginning of January. That’s when the team’s road-heavy schedule finally relents, when Utah would finally string together some games against sub-.500 competition and hopefully look like the team everyone imagined over the summer.

Well, it’s a bit past the halfway point of January, and the Jazz seem like they were just as excited to get to 2019 as we schedule-watchers were. Winners of six straight, and 8-2 since the calendar flipped, the Jazz have begun to look like they have the potential to be the powerhouse we hoped for after all.

The revitalized Jazz will face their toughest test of the last few weeks when the Damian Lillard and the Portland Trail Blazers come to town on Monday night. This will be the first time that these two teams have played since their Christmas Day match-up, and looking back on that game gives us an idea of what the Jazz can do to put themselves in position to get the same result.

As it so often is, a lot of the focus should be on the defensive end in this game. On Christmas, the Jazz held the Blazers to their fourth lowest shooting game of the season (39.3 percent from the field in the game) and Rudy Gobert had seven blocked shots, one shy of equaling his career high.

If Utah can come close to repeating that same type of defensive performance, they should be in a strong position to win this game.

One of the big differences this time around is that the Jazz will be without their top three-point guards due to various injuries. The star backcourt of the Blazers, Lillard and CJ McCollum, struggled (by their lofty standards) on Christmas Day. Bottling them up again will be priority No. 1 for the Jazz defense, and without two very good wing defenders in Ricky Rubio and Dante Exum, it will need to be a concerted group effort to slow the Blazer guards down.

Donovan Mitchell has been rapidly improving in the lead guard spot to help his squad withstand the injuries, but asking him to carry most of the offensive load and tasking him with guarding Lillard all night could wear him down as the game moves along.

Coach Quin Snyder has done a great job of not overworking Mitchell recently, having wing Joe Ingles and occasionally Jae Crowder or even Royce O’Neale help to initiate the offense and taking some pressure off of Mitchell.

Having versatile options at both ends, and Mitchell’s jump in productivity has helped the Jazz get into a groove without a healthy “traditional” point guard on the roster.

Snyder will need to continue to manufacture positive lineups moving into this matchup with Portland, including when Mitchell is on the bench. The past few games he has thrown out rookie Grayson Allen, and mix of versatile wings with Derrick Favors or Gobert. Allen has had an up and down season so far, but he is starting to look more comfortable. His shooting hasn’t come just yet, but he has shown flashes and isn’t afraid to shoot when he’s open.

When Mitchell sits, the Jazz need to continue to produce on offense and that will depend largely on Ingles running the show and ideally, some timely three-point shooting.

I believe that the Jazz have turned a corner, and the team seems to be locked in and following an outstanding game-plan from the coaching staff. I expect that to continue on Monday night, although I’d bet it’s closer that the Christmas Day game. The Blazers have been rolling, and may want to exact some revenge for the nationally televised blowout from December.

In the end, the Jazz will win a close one, and it may come down to some heroics from Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert.

Prediction: Utah Jazz 107, Trail Blazers 103.