Originally Posted by
wangichu
Damn CK that cleveland game is a tough one. I think that's gonna be a cave in spread come morning, and my theory dictates to take the originally favored team with the newly acquired points. On top of that, I just think that the nuggets essentially match cleveland at most points now. I know LeBron is still the best SF (obviously assuming kobe as a SG) but I can still work with a Melo. No big Z means they don't have any bigs that are scorers, which is pefect because that's not where denver scores either, their bigs are more for D. then you get your shooters, mo williams, d-west (sometimes), czerbiak, i'm fine with kleiza and JR smith, and chauncey.
Then after all that, you're adding the whole billups package. Chauncey is the reason that denver plays good ball, just like chauncey was the reason detroit worked. Plus he knows the lebrons as well as just about anyone in the east. If anyone can lead a victory against cleveland, it's him.
and theres more. CLeveland has 4 losses: @BOS 85-90, @NO 92-104 @DET 89-96, @ATL 92-97, never lossing by less than 5, putting it out of reach of a legitimate buyup from the 1 that they HAD. Biggest commonality here is that these are all legitamite contenders in their respective leagues. Their road wins came against Dallas, Chicago, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, Minnesota... a few decent teams, but nothing that impressive. The best team in there might be dallas and denver spanked them twice, so you can only give cleveland so much credit for doing that before dallas go rolling.
The books want some of that cleveland money back, and they hadn't been running into any dominant teams on the road for a good stretch, so they look all but invincible, which makes everyone salivate over points. The books could have favored them here and gotten split money, its revenge time, just like this game is for the nuggets and here they come to win some cash for vegas. i have learned my lesson trying to fade them a few times. They are an elite team, they had the talent, they just needed to boot the problem child and bring in a leader, and that's chauncey. Doesn't it trip you out a bit to know that in some small way, you're betting against the pistons that you always took in the big game? I'd rather collect with the minority of sharps who aren't falling
DENVER +2 (come game time)