TAKING OUR TALENTS
TO THE MISTAKE
BY THE LAKE
TO THE MISTAKE
BY THE LAKE
-VS-
Game Time Start: 7:00 PM ET
Where: Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland, OH
Officials: G. Willard, R. Mott, J. Orr
Media Notes: Indiana Notes, Cleveland Notes
Local TV: FSI
Local Radio: WIBC 93.1 FM
NBA Feeds:
REMINDER: Per PD policy, please do not share a link to, describe how to search for, request a link to, or request a PM about streaming video of a NBA game that is not coming directly through the NBA. Not even in a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, know-what-I-mean" round-about sort of way. Thank you
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Pacers Darren Collison, sore groin, day-to-day Kyrylo Fesenko, getting into wacky hijinks in Point Place, WI, out Cavaliers Daniel Gibson, torn tendon-left foot/ankle, out Kyrie Irving, contused/sprained right shoulder, out Anderson Varejao, right wrist fracture, out |
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apologies to cdash's favorite city, but... |
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Eight Points, Nine Seconds |
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Jonathan Auping: Superstars Taken Down by Teams Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Dwyane Wade, Lebron James and Kobe Bryant combined for 134 points last night. They each also went to sleep with one more loss than they had when they woke up with yesterday morning. They all did their whole “superstar” thing, but it wasn’t enough. They ran into three teams likely to make the playoffs that, for what they may lack in superstars, make up for with all-around basketball. The Houston Rockets beat the Los Angeles Lakers 112-108 and had six players score in double figures. The Memphis Grizzlies easily beat the Miami Heat 97-82 with an even more impressive seven players score in double figures. And of course, the Indiana Pacers outplayed the Oklahoma City Thunder by accumulating more rebounds, more assists, more steals, fewer turnovers and, in case you didn’t know, more points on their way to a 103-98 win. I don’t want to generalize too much, but it is easy to see the similarities between the Pacers, Rockets and Grizzlies. They don’t rely on anyone; they rely on everyone. Last night, they all had young point guards who played very well against their championship contender foes. Mike Conley had 15 points, 4 assists and 3 steals while shooting 63%. Gordon Dragic had 26 points, 11 assists, 4 rebounds and 3 steals while shooting a respectable 42%. And Darren Collison had 11 points and 3 assists while shooting 43% and playing well down the stretch. When we hear about the current “Golden Era of Point Guards,” we never hear about these three guys. But all three of them are young and already doing what they need to do to help lead their team to wins. But even more than young point guards, all three teams thrived off of efficient play from their big men last night. Roy Hibbert set the tone for the entire game (despite what SportsCenter’s Top Ten may tell you) with his big time double-double of 21 points and 12 rebounds to go along with his 50% shooting. Thanks for coming out, Kendrick Perkins. You’re 6 points and 7 rebounds were pretty cute, I guess. The Pacers also got an efficient 14 points from David West. Or how about the Rockets’ Luis Scola dropping 25 points off 59% shooting on Pau Gasol (who only scored 14)? Pair that with his teammate, the ageless one, Marcus Camby, bringing home 12 points and 11 rebounds and you have a nightmare for opposing big men. Such a nightmare in fact, that Andrew Bynum went ahead and had himself thrown out of the game. Yet again. Nice work, Andrew...CONTINUE READING AT 8p9s |
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Your Stupid Town "Have you noticed how their stuff is s— and your s— is stuff?" –George Carlin I traveled to Portland a few years ago to spend a long weekend with a friend. Portland, if you’re unfamiliar, is like if NPR built a city, which is exactly as wonderful and horrifying as it sounds. We didn’t attend a Blazers game while we were there—I had just paid to fly 2,100 miles; NBA tickets weren’t happening—but Blazers paraphernalia is something you can’t miss in Portland. Or at least I couldn’t. As an NBA junkie, I’m sort of preconditioned to spot Blazers flags in bar windows, but I suppose you could miss such signage while spending hours in the city block-sized Powell’s Books, grabbing a food cart burrito downtown, or while resisting the urge to propose to a pretty twenty- something in a sundress. (You’re a very attractive city, Portland.) But one of the most interesting things about the city of Portland, at least to me, are the pockets of direly committed Blazers fans scattered across the city like so many snowy clumps of powdered sugar on a piece of artisan french toast. (You do breakfast correctly, Portland.) Being a fan of a sports team is an identity marker for a lot of people—note how many Facebook and Twitter profiles mention a person’s allegiance to a specific team—but in Portland, being a Blazers fan is an especially unique identity marker because A.) Portland isn’t a sports town in the vein of Boston, Cleveland or St. Louis and B.) Portland doesn’t have a professional baseball, football, or hockey team. (Here I note the existence and rabid fanbase of the Portland Timbers, but being an American soccer fan is an identity marker all its own.) Being a Blazers fan is, I think, being both a part of the city and apart from the city. It’s like being a fan of Z-Ro, but not Jay-Z. Sure, a lot of people like Z-Ro—they compose a not-insignificant portion of the rap nerd landscape —but it’s not like you could fill Madison Square Garden ten times over with Z-Ro fans. To be a Z-Ro or Blazers acolyte is to be part of a sizable subculture. Blazers fans are a proud subculture. They rep Portland as adamantly as anyone. Their identity is held in being both a minority within their city’s larger culture and an advocate of it. I’m speaking in broad strokes, and, of course, cities aren’t monoliths. In fact, their unmonolithicness is sort of the point of them, but for the purposes of not having to describe the idiosyncrasies of every person within their borders, we try to define them with a handful of descriptors. We peg towns with an identity. Think Pittsburgh and industry, Los Angeles and Hollywood, Miami and strip clubs. There are filmmakers in Pittsburgh, blue collar workers in Los Angeles, and strippers everywhere, but we assign certain traits to cities because it’s convenient shorthand and not altogether false. It’s not like Pittsburgh is Mecca for avant-garde visual artists, and we’ve just been lying about it for decades. I have lived in Chicago, a parochial city in its own right, for the past four years. Despite being a city with manifold cuisine, a theater district. a phenomenal downtown, myriad diverse neighborhoods—a rich cultural identity, is what I mean—some of its residents—natives, mostly; Chicago is kind of a midwestern LA in that it houses a lot of transplants—have a strange inferiority complex toward the coasts. They bristle at the mention of New York or Boston or Los Angeles. No city shall be as great as the one that invented the pickle-adornèd hot dog! It’s weird. Because Chicago’s an immense, sometimes beguiling city. I sometimes wonder why its residents —its advocates, really—can’t be satisfied with being a wonderful town in the middle of the country. Because there exists no objectively great city or town. Where you live is a matter of fit, and where you’re from is a matter of what city your mother was in when her water broke. It’s sort of an arranged marriage: it will affect you, but you don’t have to develop affection for it. I’m from a smallish city in upstate New York, and I kind of hate where I’m from. It’s too small for my liking (both in terms of population and worldview) and most of its citizens would build a giant metal dome over the town if they could. They deserve to suffocate beneath a physical manifestation of their own insularity. Most of them, anyway. I’m a Cleveland Cavaliers fan because of this town. There were no local sports teams, so I decided to root for my cousin’s favorite team. So here I am: a Cavs fan, but not a Clevelander. I’m trying to figure out whether or not this is important. Ostensibly, it’s not. I’m about as devoted to the Cavaliers as any fan of the team, and I’ve been to Cleveland a handful of times. If I had grown up on the shores of Lake Erie, I don’t think I would be extolling Cleveland’s virtues to non-residents at parties. I’m also just not wired that way. Some people like to define themselves by the groups they are a part of—fanbases, cities, country clubs—but I’m not one of them. One of my favorite things about living in a colossal city is the anonymity it affords me. I can go days without being recognized on the street by a friend or acquaintance. I can just a be a dude on the corner, waiting for the light to change; that recession into nothingness is comforting to me. But this strong city-team-self triangle—I’m from Cleveland, I love my hometown, and I’m a huge Cavaliers fan—is a crucial part of fanhood for some people. It’s not something that can be easily dismissed. I’m trying to understand it from the outside. Cities—though they’re really just a mass of flesh, concrete, and steel—breathe. They are frighteningly organism-like. And what better way to celebrate that almost-organism than by watching your favorite sports team— ambassadors of your favorite city—assert their dominance over...CONTINUE READING AT CAVS THE BLOG |
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