Posted this in the kyrie thread
Thought I would here too because it's about tonight's game
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NBA
NBA Betting Lines: Kyrie vs. Dipo, Knicks-Celtics, and Dwight Comes to the Oracle
By Jay Caspian Kang on December 13, 2013 4:00 PM ET
KEVIN C. COX/GETTY IMAGES
We have reached the dog days of the betting season. What once was clear, robust conviction has devolved into mushy, degenerate gloop. Let's get on with it.
Magic at Cavaliers (+2.5)
o/u: 194.5
Doesn't matter the metric or the eye-tester, Cleveland is one of the worst offensive teams in the league, especially on the road, where they put up 90.1 points per game. Orlando just got done with six straight losses on the road against pretty weak competition and although it's nearly impossible to shit on a team more than to say "They lost six straight games and two of those games were against the Sixers and the Knicks," Orlando somehow looked even more lost than its record might suggest. In five of those six losses, they couldn't crack 90 points. The Magic started the year playing well in transition, a system that made sense given their relative youth and their desire to maximize Victor Oladipo's talents. But as the season has gone on, Orlando has run less and much, much worse. They now rank 22nd in the league in plays in transition and 28th in points per transition possession.
Point being, 194.5 is way too high a number.
On a slightly related note, this has been a pretty weird year for Kyrie Irving. He's shooting 38.4 percent in the half court, per Synergy Sports, and when you look at that number and the horrendous 22.5 percent Kyrie shoots with the shot clock under four seconds, you'd assume he's been dribbling around too much, getting frustrated when he sees he might have to pass to Dion Waiters, and jacking up bad shots in isolation. This isn't necessarily true. I expected Kyrie to be in the top three in the "Time of Possession" stat tracked by SportsVU. He's actually only 18th at 5.8 minutes per game, behind Michael Carter-Williams and Jordan Crawford.
I'm loath to promote any sort of hero ball, especially when a guy is having this inefficient of a season, but I think there's a slightly counterintuitive argument to be made here that Kyrie should actually create more isolation opportunities for himself. His teammates are garbage, especially Waiters, who has assessed his garbage-ness and calmly lit himself on fire this year, and nothing Mike Brown "draws up" is going to be much better. I think we can safely say Kyrie isn't going to become Chris Paul Lite. He's lost too much early on in his career and he doesn't have the same third-gear competitiveness Paul showed way back at Wake Forest. But there's no reason he can't become, say, a normalized version of Gilbert Arenas, scoring 25 a game for bad teams. Sadly, I think this is probably Kyrie's ceiling at this point.
