NBA Standings and Draft Lottery review for the Utah Jazz: March 17th, 2015

I know, I know . . . "If the Utah Jazz were in the Eastern Conference . . . ", but they are not. They are in the West, were Men are made. There were a bunch of interesting games in the association last night. Let's figure out what happened while you were sleeping in the Western Conference and the NBA Draft lotto races.

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What Happened Last Night?

There were no "upsets" last night unless you count the Heat beating the Cavaliers, and the Jazz over the Bobcats, er, Hornets. Horncats. Also, comparatively, Jazz defense is for real.

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Western Conference Standings:

The big news here is that, like most nights, every team behind the Jazz lost, and every team (for the most part) ahead of them won. Wait, I didn't mean news because that happens almost every single night so far. Golden State is in the playoffs now, if they were REALLY confident they would lose the rest of their games to prove a point.

There are still 5.0 games between the #2 and #7 seeds, and there's an average of 15.5 games left to play. Lots of movement is expected. Last night Dallas moved from #7 to #5, for example.

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The Race to the Bottom:

N.B. Yellow things in the draft picks section are trades that would go through today, if this was the season's end

I've also changed it from four sets of five (which makes sense to me) to five sets of four, as a result the groupings are less pleasing to the eye, but more indicative of the relative distances between each grouping. Right now Orlando is closer to Denver than they are to New York. This new grouping shows that. Also, the new grouping seems to track well with the Top 3 probabilities. You have the first group that's 30 plus percent, then 10% - 30% for the next group, and then under 10% for the rest.

There's that section from Brooklyn to Indiana that's separated by 2.5 games, spread out over six different teams. That's where most of the movement is happening right now. Last night Charlotte went down from #13 to #10 in one night, while Utah, Boston, and Miami all went up one spot.I would really like a tournament or something to help sort out these teams for lotto spot. So many of them are bunched up around 30 wins and 36 losses right now.

If you look at the general trend, almost every team "ahead" of Utah in this is on some sort of losing streak. The bad teams are not trying to get better right now on the court.

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What Games are happening tonight?

None of these games really have any meaning for the Jazz.

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Utah won last night, and that's all that matters. They are now 4.0 games behind the Suns -- and these two teams play one another next month. It can happen!