The top team in the Western Conference meets the bottom team Wednesday when the Oklahoma City Thunder host the Utah Jazz.
The Thunder have won 20 of their last 22 games and haven’t lost at home since Nov. 17. Oklahoma City is 19-2 at home this season, the second-best home winning percentage in the NBA behind only Cleveland.
The Jazz have lost three consecutive games and 11 of their last 14. Utah is coming off a 123-119 overtime loss at New Orleans on Monday.
Wednesday’s game is the second of four meetings between the teams this season. The Thunder beat the Jazz 133-106 on Dec. 3 in Oklahoma City. In that game, Isaiah Joe had a then-season-high 19 points for the Thunder.
Joe has surged of late. He is coming off a 24-point performance in Sunday’s 127-101 win over Brooklyn, when he was 8 of 10 from beyond the arc.
Over the last six games, he’s averaging 15.2 points and shooting 55.9 percent from the field, including 54.5 percent from beyond the arc. During that span, only Jalen Green of the Rockets is shooting a better percentage on 3-pointers while attempting 7.1 or more.
Prior to the last six games, Joe had struggled a bit on 3-pointers, shooting 35.2 percent after back-to-back seasons of shooting better than 40 percent from distance.
But the Thunder have worked with Joe to be more than just a spot-up shooter.
“We’re willing to take a step backward to take two steps forward,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “To this point, he has been a stationary shooter, with Shai (Gilgeous-Alexander) specifically is really powerful with the gravity, Shai has just to throw it to him in the quad and have him fire. But we think there’s more there because of his speed and his motor and his shooting gravity so we’ve put him on the move more, run more stuff through him.
” … It takes a little to calibrate. It is different, so he went through a little bit of growing pains there, (but he) has since caught a good rhythm.”
Also in that Dec. 3 game, Oklahoma City scored 45 points off a season-high 29 Jazz turnovers.
Utah’s Isaiah Collier turned the ball over four times and had just three points in that matchup.
Over the last four games, the rookie guard is averaging 15.5 points and 9.8 assists in nearly 34 minutes per game after averaging just 3.4 points and 4.1 assists in his first 29 career games.
And while there’s been a rise in his average turnovers, Collier’s minutes have increased at a greater percentage than his turnover numbers.
“That has been great for me,” Collier said of limiting his turnovers of late. “Watching a lot of film every single day, building on it every single (day), that’s the biggest thing for me. That’s what I’m most proud of — the turnovers going down.”
That figures to be a key Wednesday, as the Jazz have an NBA-worst 17.6 turnover percentage while the Thunder’s defense leads the league with 18.5 turnovers forced per game.
Oklahoma City also leads the NBA by a significant margin in defensive rating — points allowed per 100 possessions — at 103.2. The Jazz rank second-to-last at 117.8.
–Field Level Media
