The NBA regular season moves pretty fast and it’s easy for games to get lost in the shuffle. Nobody would blame you if that were the case for some Nuggets fans on Monday night when the Nuggets traveled to Utah to face a Jazz team that currently sits in 14th place in the Western Conference.
The Nuggets blew the game open in the third quarter and coasted to a 134-123 victory in Salt Lake City. The game was notable because both Nikola Jokic and Russell Westbrook recorded triple-doubles in the blowout victory.
The game was mostly innocuous otherwise, or so it would seem at first glance. A relatively routine regular season victory for a playoff team over a lottery-bound team on a random Monday night in December.
Nuggets go 2-0 in Utah for first time in franchise history
Only, that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, with the victory, the Nuggets made franchise history and accomplished a feat they had never achieved before. That would be sweeping both regular season games in Utah in any regular season.
By the way, that was the first time the Nuggets have won both road games in Utah in FRANCHISE HISTORY.
— Ryan Blackburn (@NBABlackburn) December 31, 2024
This seems almost impossible to believe, as the teams play just twice in Utah each season and have been facing off against each other since the Jazz moved to Salt Lake City from New Orleans in 1979. But somehow, the Nuggets have never swept the Utah matchups until now.
In a way it makes sense. The Jazz had a playoff team every from 1984-2004 and have been a solid team for most of the years since then. On top of that, much like in Denver, the Jazz play their home games at a very high altitude (the second-highest in the league by far) which has created an excellent home-court advantage in SLC.
Jazz team in the midst of full rebuild
But the Jazz have fallen on tough times in recent years and have completely blown up the team they had for most of the last decade. They traded Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert for a boatload of draft picks and have been attempting to bottom out ever since.
They landed the 9th overall pick in 2023 and the 10th pick in 2024 but they have even loftier ambitions this season as they are one of the teams vying for the top overall pick in the 2025 NBA draft.
It’s probably the right move for a small market franchise that hasn’t had a top-5 pick since 2014. They need a new face-of-the-franchise type of star and they may well score one in this year’s draft. But it has certainly watered down the Nuggets/Jazz rivalry in the meantime.
These two mountain-dwelling teams usually play even, hard-fought battles, as evidenced by this amazing stat. But this year, the Jazz weren’t up to it and as a result, the Nuggets were able to do something they’ve never been able to do before.