Preview - Indiana Pacers @ Utah Jazz

How appropriate that on the night when the Jazz break out the green and yellow retros that they face the team from the John Deer capital of the world (I can't back that up).  The same state where Sloan heads to drive those tractors in the off-season. 

The last time the Jazz faced the Pacers at the ESA, they probably should have lost if you look at the box score. The Pacers shot 50% from the floor including 13 of 22 from downtown.  They had 34 assists and evened the rebound battle.

But they didn't count on the Turk.

Memo went off for 43 points  that surprisingly included only three three-pointers.  He lived at the line putting down 14 of his 15 attempts while also going 13 of 19 from the field.  Money had to step up as a result of injuries.  Check out the starters:

Deron, Price, Memo, AK, and Ronnie B.  Nobody on the bench hardly played at all.

This year's Pacers aren't the best offensive team, in fact they're near the bottom.  The only reason why they have a relatively high PPG total is that they play at a higher pace than most of the league. 

Their defense is solid but because of that high pace, they'll give up a lot of points to other teams.  With the Jazz rolling on offense like they are now, we should see a pretty high-scoring game.

The Pacers are led of course by Danny Granger, someone who's capable of dropping 50 on you any given night and especially against the Jazz.  He's their biggest three-point threat right now.  In fact, he's shooting an almost better percentage from the arc (37.3%) than he is in FG% (41%) overall.  Now that we'll have CJ back, hopefully we can slow him down a bit with Matthews, CJ, AK, and Brewer.

The Pacers come into this game struggling having lost 5 of their last 6 and are at the tail end of a 4-game road trip.  Hopefully the Jazz stick it to the Pacers early and take care of things.  I'm hoping that the layoff hasn't impacted their chemistry too much.

• Indy Cornrows for the Pacers side of things.
• TBJ
• Game Thread @ 6:30