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Tonight the Utah Jazz play their first game of their longest home stand of the season, a whopping five games with plenty of time between them. We went over the rest of the season earlier, including looking at these next five games -- but it's good to look at the home stand on its' own.
Full breakdown can be found here.
The New York Knicks are a mess. The Houston Rockets are trying to win every game possible. The Detroit Pistons and Charlotte Hornets are both out of the East playoff hunt, which shows you how bad they must be. And the Washington Wizards are always dangerous when John Wall is playing. We figure that the Pistons have a schedule loss lined up, but beyond that we can't really predict the actions of our Utah Jazz team. (They've beaten teams they shouldn't have, and lost to teams they really should have destroyed.)
So let's look at Jazz history to see if there's a pattern there. I looked at every home stand of at least four games in length, from the 2008-2009 season till today. It worked out there there were 12 of them, including this one we're going to start today.
The team has gone 34-15 in this period, winning 69.4% of their games at home. Also, it will be 50 games over 116 nights, and that's only 0.43 games per day at home. That's plenty of time for rest. Time for practice. And time for family.
The schedule is in the Jazz' favor, there are no travel days. They are all at home, and for the most part everyone is healthy, save for Alec Burks. Four of the five games are where the other team is flying into Utah for the second game of a back to back. And these teams are not really killing it right now. Injuries seem to be, though. The following guys our either out right now, or otherwise injured in some way: Carmelo Anthony, Jose Calderon, Quincy, Acy, Lou Amundson, Tim Hardaway Jr; Kostas Papanikolaou, Dwight Howard, Terrence Jones, Patrick Beverley; Brandon Jennings, Joel Anthony; Cody Zeller, Kemba Walker; and Kris Humphries.
It's also time to take out the trash. Utah had a great reputation for being nearly unbeatable at home. Let's see that rep return, guys.