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Oakland, Calif.

The Jazz will play in May. The calendar validates what they accomplished in April, advancing to the NBA's Western Conference semifinals vs. Golden State.

The question to be answered over the next week or so is whether meeting the Warriors is a reward or punishment for their Game 7 victory over the Los Angeles Clippers. Some degree of risk is involved in the next round as the Jazz learn how close — or far away — they are to competing with the Warriors in the West.

Jazz fans deserved another series after witnessing two home losses to the Clippers. The Jazz remarkably produced three road wins in Los Angeles, but life will be tougher at Oracle Arena in Oakland starting Tuesday night.

The last time the franchise won a Game 7, in Houston in 2007, the Jazz also faced Golden State. But the comparison is laughable 10 years later. The '07 Warriors had upset No. 1 seed Dallas before the Jazz handled them in five games. The current Warriors went 67-15 in the regular season.

The Jazz will find out more about themselves by playing Golden State. As with everything in this postseason, the discoveries will relate to Gordon Hayward and the Jazz's future. The series with the Clippers further drove home a couple of points about Hayward and his team:

• Hayward is valuable to the Jazz. He responded well with more demanded of him offensively in Rudy Gobert's absence for most of four games. Subtracting his statistics in Game 4 when he tried to play with a case of food poisoning, he averaged 27.1 points — outscoring the Clippers' Chris Paul — and shot 47 percent from the field by persevering through some difficult stretches.

Hayward asserted himself in the second half of Game 7 after a poor shooting start that partly resulted from his teammates giving him the ball late in the shot clock.

• The Jazz have impressed Hayward — or certainly should have done so. He knows his teammates won Game 4 without him and he recognizes how they battled through tough moments of the series. The veterans who were acquired to complement him all surfaced in Game 7, and the victory became a franchise breakthrough that's a credit to the work of management and coach Quin Snyder.

By winning a playoff series for the first time in seven years, the Jazz have done everything that's logically necessary to make Hayward believe that staying in Utah is worthwhile.

Unless everything crumbles against the Warriors. That's where the risk comes into play. The Jazz are better equipped than Portland, Golden State's first-round victim, to play the Warriors. But what if the Warriors win another four games in a row by an average of 18 points? That would illustrate the gap between the teams and might make Hayward wonder if it could be closed significantly in the coming years.

And then what if Boston reaches the NBA Finals and competes more favorably against Golden State? The Celtics could become more attractive to him.

Jazz vs. Warriors is the series I wanted to watch last spring, hoping the Jazz would work their way into the No. 8 slot in the West. They barely missed the playoffs. So here come the Warriors, a year later, when the Jazz should be much more competitive.

Before Game 7 in Los Angeles, Snyder labeled the season a success because the Jazz had won a playoff game for the first time in seven years. Then they completed an achievement that far exceeded any modest standard.

One victory in this series would represent another breakthrough and should be sufficient to make Hayward stay. A sweep by the Warriors wouldn't undo what the Jazz did in April, but it would spoil their May — and maybe their whole summer.

Twitter: @tribkurt