Well, college hoop season is finally over with and we ended it the right way with a winner on both the side and total in the NCAA Championship Game.  So we’ll turn our attention to NBA betting as pro hoops finishes up the regular season.  We’ll have the NBA and NHL playoffs on deck, baseball just getting underway and either this weekend or next we’ll start to make some sense of the hellspawn of the Arena Football League.

So our NBA play for the day takes us to Salt Lake City where the Utah Jazz will host the Oklahoma City Thunder.  As the LA Lakers are sitting in the catbird’s seat surveying the carnage that is the rest of the Western Conference, pretty much every other team is fighting for playoff position.  At this point in time we’ve got four–count them–four teams tied for second place.  Utah, Phoenix, Denver and Dallas are all 5 games behind the Lakers.  In the Northwest Division where both the Jazz and the Thunder play (they used to be in Seattle, remember) Denver and Utah are tied for first place with the Nuggets holding the tiebreaker.  OKC is 1 1/2 games behind and Portland is 3 games out of first.  So this game has all sorts of potential playoff implications:

UTAH JAZZ VS. OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER:

Thunder aren’t a bad road team at 23-15 SU but the Jazz are a dominant home team with a 31-8 SU record.  The Jazz have improved their road play, but they know that if they want to have a chance at a long playoff run they need to finish as high as possible to get home court advantage for as much of the playoffs as possible.  They aren’t going to catch the Lakers, but a #2 seed would go a long way toward a nice postseason run.  The Jazz are also a very good pointspread team at home–they’ve covered 8 of their L9 home games.  They’ve been off since their embarrassing loss to the Lakers on Friday, while the Thunder have played twice in that stretch.  Jazz have only two home games remaining including this one–they’ll play three winnable road games at New Orleans, Houston and Golden State and end their season at the Energy Solutions Arena against Phoenix which could also have all sorts of playoff implications.  We look for the Jazz to take care of business here, and have something of a revenge motive with the Thunder beating them at OKC a week or so back.  Jazz win and cover.

PLAY UTAH -5 OVER OKLAHOMA CITY