If the NBA season ended today — to be fair, a ridiculous hypothetical, given that it’s only a week old — five of the top six Western Conference teams wouldn’t look totally out of place. The sixth is the Utah Jazz, which entered the season as the supposed worst team in the league.
It’s early, but Utah is 2-1, and it has another winnable game on the docket tonight in a 9 p.m. ET clash against the 2-2 Portland Trail Blazers. The game will be played at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, which has historically provided the Jazz with a fairly formidable home court advantage because of its steep bleachers, passionate fan base, and altitude.
The Trail Blazers are 2.5-point favorites at DraftKings Sportsbook (-148 on the Moneyline), and the point total is set to 235.5. Utah, meanwhile, is +124 on the Moneyline. Below, I’ll break down this clash and offer a prediction.
Portland Trail Blazers at Utah Jazz preview, prediction
Portland has had a difficult start to the schedule, playing a quartet of 2024-25 playoff teams, and it has more than held its own, coming away with wins over the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Lakers and falling by single-digit margins to Minnesota Timberwolves and LA Clippers. In fact, the Trail Blazers are 2-1 under the tutelage of interim head coach Tiago Splitter, although it’s worth noting that the Lakers team they beat was extremely short-handed. Still, there are plenty of positive signs: Jerami Grant is averaging 22.5 points per game off the bench, and Deni Avdija has continued the star turn he made towards the end of last season.
The Jazz opened the season by blowing out the Clippers, which arguably still stands as the most surprising result of the young season. They then followed it up by losing by one point to the Sacramento Kings and an overtime victory over the Phoenix Suns, a game in which Lauri Markkanen dropped the first Utah 50-piece since Karl Malone did so in 1998. Markkanen is the Jazz’s big draw, but Keyonte George has averaged 20.0 points and 9.7 assists per game in relief of injured starter Isaiah Collier and Walker Kessler has been dominant on defense while posting a league-leading 92.5% effective field goal percentage. It’s obviously early, but if all the pieces fall in line for Utah, this team might have enough talent that its braintrust won’t choose to tank and go all out for BYU’s A.J. Dybantsa after all.
Trail Blazers at Jazz pick, best bet
Tonight could be a battle of strength versus strength: the Jazz have the league’s fifth-best offensive rating so far, while Portland has the league’s fifth-best defense, although both teams are also above-average on the other side of the ball. Both teams’ respective strengths actually make sense: Markkanen, George, and Kyle Filipowski are all offense-oriented players who bring above-average size and athleticism to their roles, while the Trail Blazers have recent All-Defense honorees in Jrue Holiday and Toumani Camara, as well as a defensive anchor in second-year pro Donovan Clingan. Utah’s head coach, Will Hardy, helped usher the team to a top-10 offense in 2022-23 despite finishing just 37-45, and Splitter was a key cog in the 2013-14 San Antonio Spurs’ dominant defense before helping coach the Houston Rockets to a top 10 defense in 2023-24.
Utah still struggles in some of the areas that it did last season. It committed the most turnovers and nabbed the fewest steals in 2024-25, and it ranks eighth-to-last and 15th-to-last, respectively, so far in 2025-26. The Jazz also finished just 22nd in both shooting percentage and three-point percentage last season, and they’re just 18th and 17th in those categories this season. The biggest change has come in terms of playmaking: after dishing out the 11th-fewest assists in 2024-25, Utah is second in assists per game so far while also dominating on the glass to an even greater extent than it did in 2024-25. That might be somewhat sustainable; the Jazz are playing at a much slower pace and averaging nearly 30 more passes per game, hunting for higher-quality looks. So far, they’re getting those looks: 21.4% of their shots are wide-open threes, an uptick from 18.4% last season.
Portland hasn’t shot the ball efficiently this season, converting at the league’s sixth-lowest rate from the field and the 11th-lowest clip from deep. Camara and Shaedon Sharpe have been the biggest liabilities from deep so far, draining just 27.8% and 16.7% of their threes, respectively, but they’ve been getting high-quality shots that simply haven’t fallen, so I expect that to change eventually. Camara is four-for-15 (26.7%) on wide-open threes after hitting such shots at a 38.2% clip last season, and Sharpe’s accuracy has dropped from 33.2% to 7.7% even though both players have produced such shots more frequently. Sharpe has only made 42.9% of his restricted-area tries so far this season after converting at a 71.1% clip in 2024-25. Sharpe will need to get back to his elite finishing ways against a Utah team that has allowed the fewest made restricted-area shots while taking advantage of the fact that the Jazz have allowed the third-most wide-open threes.
Meanwhile, Utah will need to fight hard on the glass against a team that has conceded the third-lowest field goal percentage in the restricted area, and it’ll also need to be effective from the midrange, where the Trail Blazers have been among the league’s most gettable both this season and in their hot finish to the 2024-25 campaign. So far, the Jazz haven’t been that, shooting the second-lowest percentage on two-point jumpers. Portland has also been vulnerable from the corner in part because it’s allowed the second-highest accuracy on wide open threes this season, and Utah has drained 50% of its corner tries.
At some point, shooting luck will need to swing back in the Trail Blazers’ direction. I’m a little bit wary of that happening in Salt Lake City, where opponents shot 2.3 percentage points worse from deep last season, but that didn’t stop Portland from scoring 240 points across two games at the Delta Center last season. I don’t think the Jazz are as bad as they were last season, but plenty of good fortune has gone into their 2-1 start, and the Trail Blazers are a better team than their 2-2 record suggests.
