The Utah Jazz are trending to finish THIRD IN THE WEST?

What a time to be a Utah Jazz fan! After a fun-filled All-Star weekend that included Donovan Mitchell bringing home the first (of many) hardware in his career, we now have a few days off to prepare for the rest of the season.

I’ll start off with an outlook on the remainder of the season. The Utah Jazz sit at 30-28 and are on an 11 game winning streak. They may be 10th in the west but they are only 2.5 games from the fifth seed. Every game matters as we push through the remaining 22 games (EDIT 24 games. Because I’m dumb.).

Crazy. As of right now FiveThirtyEight projects the following at season’s end:

1. Rockets 62-20
2. Warriors 61-21
3. Timberwolves 48-34
4. Thunder 47-35
5. Spurs 47-35
6. Jazz 46-36
7. Trail Blazers 46-36
8. Nuggets 45-37
9. Clippers 44-38
10. Pelicans 44-38

This should make for a fun couple months that hopefully ends in another playoff appearance for this Jazz team.

The future of this Utah Jazz is so bright. There has been a lot of well-deserved Donovan Mitchell news lately. So much, in fact, that I’m sure you and I missed some articles and tweets here and there. I’ll try and help you out by adding few here in beat #2.

We’ve got ourselves another star to go along with Rudy Gobert!

We’ve only got one Fan Post this week, but that’s fine because there has been a TON of Jazz content lately.

JazzHands2017 would love to see LeBron James sign with the Utah Jazz:

OK I know how far fetched this and probably less than a 1% chance of happening. But let’s day dream shall we? More and more players are making their big decisions based purely on finding a good fit and to win. “Basketball reason”. KD went to the warriors because with him they are one of the most talented teams ever assembled. Let’s just look at what the Jazz have to offer.

As Mychal wrote so well a few days ago, Donovan Mitchell is bringing a lot of attention to the Utah Jazz and will create bandwagon. Spida has truly been a hero. But I wanted to take a second to remind everyone just how good Rudy Gobert is. A fellow SLC Dunker, Bepob, said so well on twitter that Donovan makes our offense go but Rudy makes the team win. There’s a lot of truth to this.

It’s no coincidence that the Jazz are 12-2 since Rudy came back finally healthy in mid-January. According to NBA.com the Jazz have an offensive rating of 110.9 since his return, which would be good for 4th in the league over the season. Their defensive rating of 100.2 would be best in the league over the season.

Donovan Mitchell has earned the respect and praise he is getting. I’m just here to say that Rudy Gobert is somehow still underrated. With those 2, the future of the Utah Jazz is brighter than it has been in a long time.

A Utah Jazz legend had a birthday recently. And yes, I personally consider Andrei Kirilenko a Jazz legend.

Statistically he is up there with a lot of the Jazz greats. Here’s a good highlight video to remind you just how special AK47 was.

Hope you had a good one AK!