The hysteria in this thread is pretty amusing...
The Cavs are 20-10 against the Eastern conference, while the 1st seed Celtics are 22-9...
The Cavs have been playing without their starting point-guard all season and are just implementing him now...
If Isaiah Thomas could score 29 ppg and drag his team to the ECF playing with Kelly Olynyk and Amir Johnson, I think he'll probably be ok playing with Kevin Love and the best player in the world Lebron James.
Sheesh...
Yeah, there's this thing called "context" that matters.
Record against top 7 teams in the league (GS, Boston, Houston, Toronto, San Antonio, Minnesota, Cleveland):
Cavs - 1-6
Celtics - 5-1
Granted, I will say that only 2 of their games were at home where 5 of ours were at home, but this has largely been the M.O. of the Cavs this season, especially their winning streak - beat the bad teams to better the record and lose to the good teams. They really don't have any notable wins against good teams this year. Their lone win against a top opponent was us on opening night, which given the circumstances of that game doesn't really count in my mind.
As for the IT comment, it's their defense that has been suffering, which IT will only make worse. He'll probably make their offense better, but how much that will be neutralized by his defensive deficiencies is yet to be seen.
Stop being so logical when responding to the Cleveland apologists
If context is what matters, recall that this same discussion has been had each of the past few seasons. Yet the Cavs reached the Finals every one of them. I'd argue it's less logical to place more weight on several months of data versus several years of data. But hey, knock yourself out.
You realize your argument is self-refuting, right? With context mattering, the fact that the context of this season is much, much different than the last several seasons means your argument makes no sense and refutes itself.
1) No Kyrie --> Major Change in Context
2) Implementing two new starters into the equation --> Major Change in Context
3) Implementing your new second/third best player that is heavily ball-dominant into your starting lineup halfway into the season --> Major Change in Context
4) Figuring out how to deal with IT being a walking mismatch defensively that will be exploited all playoffs long, as Westbrook did today --> Major Change in Context
5) Somehow getting an even older team this year that is even worse defensively --> Major Change in Context
And that's beside the point that this whole narrative of "they always do this" is a revamped version of the appeal to tradition logical fallacy.
The entirety of my argument is "LeBron James." I'd bank on that more than aging, line-up changes, injuries, etc. You can get hung up on new details every season. There's always going to be changes and new challenges, and superstars can transcend them.
I don't know what traditional logical fallacy means, but I can't grasp how my argument is self-refuting when it's based in several years of evidence. People create doubt every year, and a lot of it is substantiated, but every year they prove the doubters wrong. The game is dominated by top talent, and for as much as I can't wait to dethrone him, the ECF still goes through CLE until otherwise proven.
Because it's based on evidence that isn't analogous. All of the factors I listed above are changes to the fundamental context of the situation, so trying to argue from past experiences to predict this experience is then illogical given the fundamentally different contexts.
For example, it's like me trying to argue that since Obama didn't Tweet something ignorant and immature every two to three days during his presidency, then we should also not expect Trump to Tweet something ignorant and immature every two to three days during his presidency. However, this is an illogical analogical argument, because the fundamental contexts (i.e. the two presidents' characters) are not analogous enough to justify drawing this conclusion.
Things have changed so much (for the worse) that it's fallacious and illogical to simply point to the past and expect the same results; it's literally "apples and oranges."
I have to confess that I ended up getting a lot of amusement out of this thread.
I read some of these quotes to a room full of long-time die-hard NBA basketball fans and they were howling with laughter.
Essentially, everyone was in agreement you'd have to be 11 years old and have no knowledge of the past whatsoever to believe the Cavs were "done" based on the most recent first half of the season.
They even went so far as to invent a character named "Little Timmy" who would come to naive worst-case scenario conclusions based on knee jerk reactions all day long - it was a real hoot.
What I learned from the "Little Timmy" experience is that it was best not to argue with him, but instead just chuckle and say "That's nice, I'm sure you're right."
So in that light...
"That's nice, I'm sure you're right."