Check Out Ray’s NBA Plays Today!<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nIf they make the playoffs (no sure thing given the current strength of the Western Conference), they will certainly wind up as meat on a hook for the Thunder, Spurs . . . or perhaps the Clippers, who the Jazz face tonight in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n
LA comes in with 15 victories in a row, but the Jazz could be live home dogs tonight because they have a few things going their way:<\/p>\n
***Los Angeles is coming off a big national-TV home victory Thursday night over the Celtics and for only the second time this season is playing the back end of a back-to-back set on the road.<\/p>\n
***Utah ended an 8-day road stretch and has had a day to rest up after taking on Golden State at home on Wednesday night. (None of the Jazz played big minutes in that game.)<\/p>\n
***In their only other meeting this season, also in Utah, the Jazz dominated for three periods before fading at the end. Utah actually had a 14-point lead late in the third period, and lost it only when the defense made some uncharacteristic mistakes in the final few minutes.[ad-6571516]<\/p>\n
So the opportunity is there for the Jazz, who hope to catch the Clippers napping as LA continues to rack up victory after victory and enjoys its new-found status as top dog at Staples Center and No. 1 in many national power rankings.<\/p>\n
The Clippers have been a solid (9-3) road team, with all three of the defeats (Oklahoma City, Brooklyn and Atlanta) coming in a four-day span in late November. The Clips expended a lot of energy in an OT loss to the Thunder, so the subsequent defeats to the Nets (ugh) and Hawks were understandable.<\/p>\n
Assuming the Clippers get past the Jazz tonight and defeat Utah again (at home) on Sunday, they will be able to look back on a 17-0 December in which they elbowed their way to the top of the league and served notice that the playoffs will be more interesting that we all thought.<\/p>\n
Free NBA PICK<\/h3>\n
Heavy (68 percent) early money is down on the Clippers at -3, and who can blame the public after that 106-77 victory over the befuddled Celtics on Thursday night? Blake Griffin and Chris Paul barely broke sweats (neither played 30 minutes) and they scored only 23 points between them.<\/p>\n
But the Clips haven\u2019t been pushed since an early-December game against the lowly Bobcats. If you like hunches, grab the points here and figure on another close game that goes to the wire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Clippers vs Jazz NBA Handicapping What you\u2019ve seen of the Utah Jazz this season is pretty much what you\u2019re going to get. They are basically a .500 team that can hang with good teams, especially at home, and steal a game they shouldn\u2019t every now and then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":32821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[57561,57562,4218,22387,4045,57559,57560,23074,57184,3942],"class_list":["post-58794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nba","tag-clippers-jazz-free-prediction","tag-clippers-jazz-picks","tag-clippers-vs-jazz","tag-free-nba-hoops-prediction","tag-free-nba-picks","tag-l-a-clippers-vs-utah-jazz","tag-l-a-clippers-vs-utah-jazz-odds","tag-nba-betting-picks","tag-nba-betting-prediction","tag-nba-handicapping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58794"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58920,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58794\/revisions\/58920"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}