Recap: Cavs 77, Pistons 116

The Cavs got blown out by the Detroit Pistons like a bunch of champions.

–Alright, show of hands: who watched this thing all the way through? Do you feel it in your spine? Like, a crazy straw of pain running from the rat tail of your brain up to a palm-sized region on the back of your skull, which, from what you can tell, has been pelted with about 437 D-cell batteries? Should I see a medical professional about this?

–Antawn Jamison was 0-for-10, and “led” the Cavaliers with a minus-47. I mentioned a few games ago that Donald Sloan had a plus/minus in the minus-thirties, which I thought was incredible, but minus-47 breaks my conception of math. To put that number into something approaching perspective, the Cavalier with the lowest plus/minus on the season is Omri Casspi, whose plus/minus is minus-228.

–By the way, I’m just picking on Jamison because he didn’t make a field goal. The best plus/minus of any Cavalier starter was Casspi, who was minus-38. Weird stat of the night: everyone on the Cavs’ bench had a positive plus/minus. I’m pretty sure this is impossible, and I’m not going to stop harassing my friend Dave, a math major, until he convinces me otherwise. I’m prepared to start analyzing NBA games through the lens of Dorothea Lasky poems if he can’t talk me off this “mathematics is a fallacy!” ledge.

–Tristan Thompson had 14 rebounds, which, if you ignore literally every other aspect of the way he played tonight, is really encouraging. It’s fitting that he played against Greg Monroe, who is in some ways an inversion of TT. He’s highly skilled, smart, intermittently languid, and couldn’t defend a particularly adept basketball-playing chimpanzee. Don’t get me wrong, Monroe is and will probably continue to be a much better player than Thompson, but Pistons fans would give their left hand for him to acquire some Thompsonian athleticism and intensity.

–It’s fitting that Manny Harris would post one of the best statlines of his career in an absolutely garbage game. He put up 18 points on 6-for-9 shooting. In the offseason, I will be completely glossing over the context of this game, and positing his 18 points as the key reason he should be the Cavaliers’ 11th man heading into the 2012-13 season.

–I’ll leave you with one more stat. It’s basic, but harrowing: Detroit shot 60% from the field; the Cavs shot 34.6%. A note to Byron Scott and the boys: I appreciate your herculean tanking effort, but if you could lose games by, I dunno, 15-ish, just for the sake of us who have to write recaps, it would be much appreciated.

The Cavs host the Sixers tomorrow. I have extrapolated, by comparing the records of the Pistons and Sixers, that the Cavaliers will lose by 83. See you when the sun rises, if it ever does in Cleveland, friends.