Utah Jazz: Top 3 hardest stretches on the 2019-20 schedule

The road-heavy January

The good news is that from here on out, it was hard to find many stretches that are hard enough to complain about. Yes, there’s some three-game road trips as well as the four-gamer I mentioned in the opening (though half of those games are against sure-fire lottery teams so it seems less daunting), but every NBA schedule has circumstances like that, so it’s not too much to worry about.

But one month that did stand out to some degree was January, given the fact that the Jazz will play nine games on the road compared to just six at home. They’ll face two separate three-game road trips, as well as a challenging road back-to-back on January 29th and 30th in San Antonio then Denver.

Of course, as Utah’s luck would have it, the second game of the back-to-back is nationally televised in the daunting confines of the Mile High City’s Pepsi Center. That’s a far from optimal situation and not a game I’d put too much faith in the Jazz coming out on top in.

Nevertheless, the good news about the January slate is that while there are a lot of road games, many of them are against less than daunting foes such as the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards. Then of the six home games, only two are against likely playoff foes – the Indiana Pacers and Houston Rockets.

The Jazz will definitely be tested in January as they’ll spend a great deal of time on the road, and the concluding back-to-back against Denver and San Antonio will probably produce at least one loss if not two. For those reasons, January will assuredly be one of the toughest slates of the season.

That, however, should actually be seen as good news. Because even a road-heavy January doesn’t seem too overwhelming for what figures to be an impressive 2019-20 Utah Jazz squad.