The Utah Jazz start a mini three-game road trip tonight in Atlanta against Trae Young and the Atlanta Hawks. Just kidding, literally as I typed this Trae Young has been ruled out.

Young is dealing with a right calf contusion that will sideline him for tonight’s game against the Jazz. On one hand, that makes this a much more winnable game for the Jazz (on paper of course), but it’s also a bummer because Trae Young is a pretty fun player to watch. This game just turned into a sneaky little trap game if you ask me.

Game Info

When: Thursday, February 4th • 5:30 PM MT

Where: State Farm Arena, Atlanta, GA

TV: AT&T SportsNet - Rocky Mountain

Radio: 97.5 FM | 1280 AM The Zone

What to watch for

Trae Young-less Hawks offense

Without Trae Young, the Hawks instantly lose a huge chunk of their offense. They lose 27 points directly, and even more if you take into account the points scored off his 9 assists per game. Someone else will need to go off, and odds are they probably will since they are playing the Jazz. Who steps up in Trae Young’s absence? John Collins is their next leading scorer who is having another really good season. DeAndre Hunter can also get hot and score points by the bunches. We will most likely see the Hawks offense ran by Rajon Rondo at point guard, which is a lot different than Trae Young.

Capela vs. Gobert

Since it seemed like the Jazz and Rockets played in the playoffs every single year there for a little while, Rudy Gobert and Clint Capela became very familiar with each other. Because the Rockets were just a better overall team than the Jazz each of those years, these matchups never really turned out great for Rudy. It’s not often that we see Rudy get blatantly outplayed by a single player, but it definitely happened in the playoffs a few years ago.

I remember watching this game and thinking how crazy it was that Capela was going the things he was going. It definitely helps when you have some Hall of Fame guards on your team to get you the ball, but still - it was crazy. Gobert and Capela are both talented young bigs, and tonight’s matchup between them will be fun to watch.

Courtside Karen?

In case you live under a rock, a Hawks fan became famous overnight earlier this week when she got into a little altercation with LeBron James during the Hawks-Lakers game.

This sent the internet into a whirlwind of discussion, jokes, and pretty good memes. Will courtside Karen be in attendance tonight? While adding this to the preview, it got me thinking; if one of the Jazz players was to get into with a courtside fan, who would it be? Joe Ingles is probably the most obvious choice, but George Niang is my darkhorse.