The biggest Friday of the season

Tonight the Jazz face off against Spurs on a night where every team from 5-10 in the West is playing. Last time seemingly all of the teams around Utah played on the same night, they all won (and the Jazz lost). Here’s a quick breakdown of the games Jazz fans should keep their eyes on outside of the Jazz/Spurs game.

Clippers @ Pacers

Nuggets @ Wizards

Timberwolves @ Knicks

Heat @ Thunder

Depending on how this day goes, it could solidify the Jazz in terms of making the playoffs or open up a window for the Clippers and/or Nuggets to catch back up after both of them slid. But tonight, in addition to cheering for Utah, we’ll all be Pacers/Wizards/Knicks/Heat fans.

Tim Cato of SB Nation is the latest to examine how good Rudy Gobert’s DPOY case is. In an article published this morning, he went through all of the most notable stats and trends and had some solid quotes from Quin Snyder. The first part is nothing new, but Cato dove into the numbers to see what they said about the shots Gobert prevents at the rim rather than those he send flying back.

“But in many instances, teams have stopped challenging Gobert altogether. His percentage is higher because many players driving to the rim won’t even bother attempting the difficult layups over him that they’d try and miss against anyone else.

The stats bear that out. Since Gobert’s last return, no team allows fewer field goals attempts in the restricted area than Utah. Only one team allows more field goals attempts in the non-restricted area portion of the paint, indicating how many opposing players pull up short of the rim.”

The Undefeated’s Marc J. Spears wrote a good piece on the relationship between Darrell Griffith and Donovan Mitchell. It starts out with a pretty cool story about Griffith and this year’s dunk contest and then goes on to talk about the mutual respect between the two. It’s a great article about two great players — the two best rookies in Utah Jazz history.

Rick Carlisle is on the Joe Ingles bandwagon, recently dealing out some praise for the Aussie sniper.

Joe Ingles is second in the league in 3-point field goal percentage at 44.3 behind only Darren Collison (Ingles has made 101 more 3-pointers than Collison).

Ingles’ shooting has been huge for the Jazz this year. Case in point, Ingles shot 4-16 in two games against the Kings and Hawks and the Jazz struggled in both games. In the rest of Utah’s games in March, he is 28-55 (50.9 percent) and the Jazz have won by at least seven points in all of those games.

Ending on a quick note, someone managed to get a pretty good photo of Joe Ingles and Donovan Mitchell posing for a funny picture.

Some pretty good photography there.