Cavs drop 3rd of last 5.

The Cavs aren't playing very good basketball right now.
The reality of basketball in Cleveland is that the new look Cavs are almost as dependent on Ilgauskas as they are on James. All the guys brought in were to help compliment Lebron and Z.

I know a lot of people consider this Cavs team to be deeper with the recently acquired players, but thats' only true from a numbers perspective. Basically Z is what makes Ben Wallace (potentially) a decent NBA player again.

I firmly believe that the only reason the Cavs won the Portland game was because of some back spasms sidelining Ben Wallace for the second half. Having only Joe Smith and Varejao to work with Mike Brown actually slid Lebron down to the power forward spot for parts of the second half. It worked pretty well. Lebron even did a respectable job on Lamarcus Aldridge at times.

Now it's relatively pointless to advocate playing Lebron at the PF spot more since it's been done a thousand times now by everyone from Charles Barkley to myself, and because it's my impression that Lebron simply doesn't want to play anything other than a wing position. This is where the coach is supposed to come in. Now it's not a good idea for Mike Brown to tell Lebron "tough, you're playing the 4 until Z's back," and I'm not sure there's a single NBA coach that it would be a good idea for.

So why not put in a four guard set? The offense isn't sacrificed like it is now with the now famed Ben Wallace / Anderson Varejao frontcourt. Defensively any of the Smith / Wallace / Varejao's paired with James can rebound at a high enough rate to keep it from becoming a liability. The rebounding is further eased with Devin Brown and Delonte West on the floor, who both rebound very well for smaller players.

Actually, that Delonte West guy might remember a thing or two about an offense like this. He was on that St. Joe's team that did pretty well running one. Unfortunately it's something that I think has to be integrated to survive this stretch without Ilgauskas. It might not be a bad idea to start working on it for life after Z too.

My final point: If someone who has never seen an NBA game saw Lebron James and Amare Stoudemire standing next to eachother, how would they tell which one was the top flight power forward and which one was the top flight point-forward-shooting-guard thing?

Put some money on Denver tonight

Knee's are jerking for NBA fans everywhere today. The Suns beat the Spurs. In the regular season.

It's easy to write this off as just another fluky NBA game. The Spurs weren't very sharp. This is game three of a four games in five nights stretch for them, so the loss could be pinned on fatigue and whatnot. It wouldn't be shocking to see San Antonio drop their third straight tonight against Denver.

For some reason San Antonio is favored by 7 points tonight against Denver. I don't feel confident enough to take the Nuggets winning outright. Especially considering their road record (12-18) against the Spurs home record (26-5), but Denver just scores too many points to get beat handily tonight. I would really have no interest in this game if it were Spurs -3.5, but -7 seems like quite a reach for a team that looked tired last night.

I didn't want to just write about gambling and tonights lines, but I see another one now that I can't pass up. Houston and New Jersey. The over on 192 seems extremely favorable. Houston's been putting up about 110 a game since Yao got hurt.


I wanted to write about the Suns and the Spurs, but I'll get to that tomorrow. Gambling is more important today.

Looking at the Mavericks -- Again.

I've been dedicating a lot of space to this Jason Kidd thing and made it clear that I wasn't a huge fan of the trade for Dallas. So far Dallas has lost to teams it probably should have lost to, and beat teams it probably should have beat. So it looks like a lateral move so far. I wanted to take a look at what's been hurting Dallas since the trade.

So here's a look at what opposing guards have done against Dallas since the trade.

Chris Paul - 31 pts (11-20), 5 reb, 11 ast
Mike Conley / Javaris Crittenton /Kyle Lowry - 33 pts (12-30), 7 reb, 7 ast
Rashad Mccants - 17 pts (8-15), nothing else worth mentioning.
Ben Gordon - 25 pts (9-20), 2 reb, 4 ast
Manu Ginobli /Tony Parker - 27 (11-33), 10 reb, 9 ast
Beno Udrih - 25 pts (10-16), 5 reb, 5 ast
Kobe Bryant - 52 pts (15-27), 11 reb, 4 asst
Deron Williams - 17 pts (7-17), 5 reb, 20 ast

That's 227 points on ~47% shooting. Over 28 points a game. Compare this against Dallas having held opponents to 44.84% shooting on the season and it becomes clear why they're struggling against elite competition. Since Kidd's arrived Dallas has kept up it's overall defense keeping opponents at 44.48% shooting. So it looks like the interior defense has held up after losing Diop, which is somewhat surprising.

I'm clearly no John Hollinger, but you get the point.

Of course it's not fair to pin the recent outbursts from opposition guards solely on Jason Kidd. If you look at this list of players who (mostly) excelled against Dallas you see the majority of these guys are quicker guards who would have been covered by Harris on the defensive end.

There's some truly elite players in there, but for every Kobe on that list there's a Beno. It's not exactly uncommon for NBA teams, but Dallas now looks helpless against guard penetration. It's going to be difficult to find an answer for this problem between now and the playoffs with Jason Terry as probably the quickest guy on the roster, but also a guy who's best described as "kind of okay" defensively.

Then again Dallas offense has looked majestic for stretches since Kidd arrived, so they may be able to overcome their defensive shortcomings.

Also worth noting, Erick Dampier is playing like a guy who's worth almost two thirds of his contract now.