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 |