The Utah Jazz (12-19) are hosting the Boston Celtics (19-12) at (The) Delta Center tonight. Utah has won two-straight, with wins against the Detroit Pistons and San Antonio Spurs. While these games were exciting to watch, if the season ended today, the Jazz would be living the worst case scenario: missing the Play-In while having a 79.7% chance of losing their pick to the OKC Thunder.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, the Jazz are not far away from improving their position in either direction. On the winning side, the Jazz are only 1.5 games away from leapfrogging the Portland Trail Blazers for the 10th seed. On the tanking side, the Jazz are only 2.5 games away from holding top-five lottery odds. Sooner than later, the Jazz will have to pick a lane.<\/p>\n
Turning our focus to tonight, the Celtics come to Salt Lake City having won seven of their last ten and in third position in the Eastern Conference. After a slow start to the season, the stellar play of Jaylen Brown has pushed the Celtics past meddling pre-season expectations. Brown has averaged 29.7 points, 6.3 rebounds, and 4.8 assists per game. Aggies will welcome home a familiar face tonight, with Boston\u2019s starting center Neemias Queta returning to Utah. The former defensive anchor for Utah State Men\u2019s Basketball was a core part of the Aggies\u2019 Mountain West Conference Championship and NCAA tournament runs, along with Cleveland Cavaliers guard Sam Merrill, in 2019 and 2020.<\/p>\n
The Celtics are traveling with a mostly healthy roster, with forward Chris Boucher the only player ruled out for the tonight (outside of Jayson Tatum, of course).<\/p>\n
Keyonte George is questionable for tonight\u2019s game with illness:<\/p>\n
Where: (The) Delta Center, Salt Lake City<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Utah Jazz (12-19) are hosting the Boston Celtics (19-12) at (The) Delta Center tonight. Utah has won…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3785],"tags":[7,423,52756,6,65057,422,427,8572,3972],"class_list":{"0":"post-509648","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-utah-jazz","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-jazz","10":"tag-jazz-game-preview","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-slc-dunk-contests","13":"tag-utah","14":"tag-utah-jazz","15":"tag-utah-jazz-game-coverage","16":"tag-utahjazz"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}