The bad news first: The Cleveland Cavaliers loss to the Indiana Pacers ends their win streak at 12, one game short of tying the franchise record for most consecutive wins. More bad news: The Cavs lost to an inferior team behind a weak performance from Kevin Love. He shot the ball eight times and put it through the hoop twice. He scored five points and added eight rebounds. You could forgive David Blatt for not realizing Love is a "max" player. More bad news: The refs maybe aren't cut out for this. They missed call after call and when they did use the whistle it was to call a foul on a flailing Kyrie Irving who was being absorbed into Roy Hibbert's midsection. I've watched the play repeatedly and cannot see the error on Irving's part. Hibbert set a moving pick and Hill threw up a prayer. He hit the shot and then the refs added in the bailout. The Good News: Cleveland bounced back with a Cruisin' win against the Los Angeles Lakers. Gooder news: Kevin Love finally looked like a max player. He dropped 32 points on 11 of 18 shooting and tossed in 10 boards. Goodest news: New win streak is at one. Next game is Miami at home. I wonder if the crowd will boo the visitors? LeBron James is Keyser Soze, Se7en and Frank Underwood news: Deadspin wrote a piece on James addressing a "cryptic" tweet he wrote telling folks to (I'm paraphrasing) "Fit-in; don't fit-out." Worth noting because in the preseason, Love said: "I had a talk with the guys on the plane ride over and also at different practices off the floor and they told me to fit out. Just be myself." James then said people tend to read his quotes like the Da Vinci Code, trying too hard to decipher the secret meaning. Prompting Deadspin to point out: To illustrate his Da Vinci Code write-off, he gave this example: "I lost the Finals in 2007, 2011 and 2014 and that was the same day [7-11-14] I came back to Cleveland." To which we say:holy shit, how did we not see it at the time! But James went on to claim—possibly to throw us off the scent—that the date of his Cleveland return was mere "coincidence." We have previously written about the possibility that James is every evil Kevin Spacey character ever. I'm still not ruling it out. But this at least points to him being a mastermind of some sort. I'm just hoping that whatever he's planning includes a Cavaliers championship and not, say, the destruction of Dan Gilbert. | The |
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There really isn't much to say on this one. The Cavs came out, guns-ablazing, and completely stomped out the Clippers. The two most encouraging aspects of this game were Love and the team defense.
The Clippers came into this game leading the league in scoring and Cleveland proceeded to hold them to 61 points through the 2nd quarter. We won't talk about the 4th, simply because Kyrie, Love, LBJ, and Moz did not play. There was absolutely no need for them to be out there. To hold a team like that to 20 points a quarter is astonishing, especially given that defense has been the weakest point for this team and a major storyline this entire year. Love was phenomenal as well last night, providing a major spark to the offense early on and essentially allowing Kyrie to have a night off (he only put up 10 points the entire night, 3 of which were before half). Even more, he seemed to be able to work very well with Mozgov to hold DeAndre Jordan and Blake Griffin in check for the early portion of the game, before it had become a blowout. Love actually had the second best defensive rating of all the Cavs starters last night (Right behind JR Smith?!). Bravo Kevin. Bravo Now, since the game was more or less an absolute slaughter, I wanted to highlight one mind-blowing stat: LeBron James put up a 90.5% AST% in the 28 minutes he was in the game, leading to 9 assists. Essentially, what this means is that of all assisted baskets while LeBron was on the floor, 90.5% of them were attributed to James. For context, Rajon Rondo's highest for the season has been 66% and Chris Paul's is 80%. In otherwords, LeBron is the best point guard in the NBA! |