You think Cleveland will beat Boston in the playoffs?

Excellent post, I just sent a similar mailbag question/statement to Langlois for the mailbag...

Let's wait and see how it's dismissed...

As I mentioned before, my wife and I made it to this game and we had a great time, even though the Pistons lost. We were six rows behind the Detroit bench, so that we were part of the normal in-game broadcast on ESPN. When we got home we FF'd through the broadcast and you could actually see us (her, mostly) at one point in the 3rd quarter when Devin Brown was called for an offensive foul for clearing out with his forearm. The camera switched to a Cavs fan reacting to the call and we are the fans in Pistons shirts behind him and to the left.

Just some quick observations from the game, without looking to the box score:

-IMO from the body language of both teams this was just a regular season game, nothing more.

-The Pistons started out strong, and were right around 50 fg% with just a couple minutes to go in the 2nd quarter when things started to go badly. They tried to feed Sheed in the post several times but he just wasn't hitting them.

-Ratliff was the first one in off the bench if I recall correctly, and he had an immediate impact in the first half. In the second half not so much.

-I was really excited to see Amir come in the game, but he made no impact on the game from my viewpoint. In fairness he didn't play much.

-Z and Dice seem very similar in that they both want to shoot that perimeter J. Only difference last night was that Z was dead-accurate with it. However, Dice played some nice D (especially a stretch early in the 3rd) and pulled down several boards.

-It seems like the Pistons should just shut the Cavs down when they put Sideshow Bob and Big Ben on the floor together, but Sideshow killed us on the offensive glass and cheap put-backs. Gotta box that guy out...

-The Cavs fans have embraced Big Ben. He got the second-loudest cheer during the introductions and loud cheers whenever he checked in. I even saw a Cavs fan with a "Fear the Fro" Cavs shirt - did they acquire the rights to that slogan along with Ben's contract?

-I liked when they tried to make LBJ play D on Tay, and Tay was able to back him into the paint quite easily, but they didn't try it much.

-Way too many 3 attempts, especially in the second half. In contrast, it didn't seem like the Cavs attempted more than 6 3s the whole game.

-To me it appeared that Flip was still experimenting with different groups out there. I remember at one point near mid-4th quarter I counted 3 bench guys on the floor, and Billups didn't come back in until 5 minutes were left. At around the 7 minute mark there was a stoppage in play and Billups started to get up from his seat and looked to Flip, but never got the signal and sat back down.

-I had 3 different Cavs fans ask me who was the guy in the suit with the ponytail. One of them was an older lady and she said "he looks like Fabio!"

-Sheed is fun to watch both in- and out-of-game. Near the start of the 2nd half he took of his warm-up shirt out on the court and tossed it up in the air towards the Piston bench. It hung in the air for a second and then fell down on Tay's head. As Tay pulled it away Sheed made a pouty-baby type face at him and laughed.

cleveland has a good chance of beating boston. someone else said they weren't afraid of any teams in the west, but they were of boston/cleveland and i agree. it's because their defense is so much better. i also agree that we need to try to run more against cleveland and use our quicker guys to put pressure on them.

flip said dyess was open and he wasn't getting the ball to take shots, but that's because his shot has been off for months and i don't think the guys trust him anymore to make them.

can someone tell me how ratliff played? i'm not in favor of giving him max's minutes, but i might be in favor of him getting dice's minutes against cleveland. i saw bits and pieces on tv but it looks like we were getting outrebounded badly, or not even going for boards, which is where amir could really help.

Amir did extraordinarily well on switches/help with LBJ. I'd love to see he and Dyess get cracks @ LeBron. His patented stiff arm move plus freakish athleticism would be less effective against those guys.

Dyess did very well last year on switches vs LBJ and the game 5 LBJ blow up was sans Dyess.


Seeing Arvis completely helpless vs Wally was very sobering. I'm a big gooney slow white dude and I'd take my chances vs Wally. Any type of screen seems to absolutely destroy Arvis' ability to tag his man.

The Rattler would get a d+ in my books, he was pathetic in tryting to block out Sideshow Bob, he missed an effing dunk, he didn't block any shots that I noticed, he looked pretty lost @ times.

He's big and strong and can certainly be more of a game changer than DD but last night was not a strong showing...

Dyess has regressed BIG TIME. Think about all he was doing in 05' and contrast that with now.

Nice little piece. I like how he gives several specific examples, which is really rare in articles like this.

After reading that, I'm sort of reconsidering how much effort we put into this game. CB, Rip, Dyess, Hayes, Maxiell, and Johnson getting 0 free throws? Prince, Sheed, and Ratliff each had 1 trip to the line. Stuckey got an and-one. That is a total lack of effort. Sheed shot 8 threes and the rest of the team shot 9. Just think if each Pistons took 8 threes! That would be 80 3-point attempts for a possible 240 points.

I bet that Flip is thinking the following... 'you're probably not going to play the Cavs in the playoffs anyway. You try to prepare your team for the post season, but you don't want to show your hand, sort of like when you're doing magic tricks. You're in a position where your team is not making shots and your opponent is scoring more, which is the opposite of what you want to see have happen.'

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"I don't think MC is going to allow us to shoot as many jumpers." Tayshaun Prince.

If I have ever suggested that the NBA playoff seeding logic, which seems likely to put Cleveland out of our path until the conference finals, is flawed in any way, I hereby take it back.

Good job commish!

PistonFanInCavsTown, thank you very much for the live recap! It's excellent!

Sad, but true.

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To all of my friends, comrades and companions at PF.com

Thank you for another great season!

haha that's great. we should make a flip saunders sentence generator, where it converts all 1st person pronouns to 2nd and 3rd person, or mixes all 3.