Regular season games don’t get much more important than this, folks. If the Utah Jazz manage a win over the Los Angeles Lakers in this afternoon’s showdown, they’ll clinch a playoff berth. If they win out in their final three games of the season, they’ll clinch the third seed in the West.
However, fail to do either of those and go winless in the final three games, and the Jazz could find themselves out of playoff qualification entirely. If that doesn’t perfectly describe how tightly contested the Western Conference playoff race has been this season, I don’t know what will.