Trends indicate Utah Jazz suffer increasingly less attrition on road against Sacramento Kings

Tonight the Utah Jazz (45-29) go out on the road to face the Sacramento Kings (29-45). Utah is fighting for a potential home court advantage in the NBA Playoffs, and according to Tankathon.com, Sacramento would own the #7 pick in the draft, and the #9 pick from the New Orleans Pelicans. Objectively these two teams are going in different directions going into this game. That said, the Kings have won two in a row and the teams they just took out are the playoff bound Los Angeles Clippers and likely playoff bound Memphis Grizzlies. Are they going to go for three wins in a row as head hunters? It could happen.

Because the fear is real, even if the reverse jinx may not be, I had to look up how Utah plays in Sacramento. So here’s the breakdown of New Orleans / Utah Jazz @ Rochester / Cincinnati Royals and/or Kansas City / Sacramento Kings history. (Sidenote: being a small market team means you end up moving now and then.)

• All-time regular season and playoffs: 38 - 60 (*data from Basketball-Reference.com)
• All-time regular season: 36 - 55 (* data from NBA.com)
• Last 20 games: 9 - 11
• Last 10 games: 5 - 5
• Last 5 games: 3-2

First of all, hooray for increasingly smaller and smaller sample sizes! (The Jazz are on a 2-0 streak in their gym!) Second, here are the details from the individuals games:

Basketball-Reference.com, AllThatAmar

And here’s a trend line of Jazz win percentage over those five data points:

Basketball-Reference.com, AllThatAmar

Does this mean the Jazz will win tonight? Not exactly. Not even the ‘Vegas line’ is always right, but they have it at Jazz -7.0 right now. This only shows who should win based upon the past wins and losses. Who COULD win tonight is always up in the air. As the Jazz have actually lost games where the other team looked like (on paper at least) that they could not win.

Tonight COULD be one of those nights as well. The Kings have some things going on right now:

• PG: Ty Lawson (Questionable), scored 19 in the last two games between these two teams
• SG: Arron Afflalo (Not with team, personal reasons), Malachi Richardson (Shut down for rest of season)
• SF: Rudy Gay (OUT, injury rehab), Tyreke Evans (missed last game for rest)
• PF:
• C: Kosta Koufos (scheduled for rest tonight)

This will be the third game in four nights for the Kings, who are in tankmode - even if they won the last two games. The battle appears to be between ping pong balls and playoff teams under-estimating them. (That’s how I’m going to file away beating LAC and MEM in back-to-back games; something UTA can’t seem to do even at home.)

Utah SHOULD win this game. And Sacramento has very little chance that they COULD win this game. So obviously, the Jazz will lose tonight.