Since the formula last week worked so well for me (and that formula, in case you forgot, was me NOT having to watch the Cavaliers but still getting paid as if I had thanks to Twitter) well, I’m sticking with a winner.

Here are some first quarter Tweets to give you the flavor. And since the Cavs scored 28 points and were still down by eight points you can pretty much guess that defense was not mentioned much. Except derisively.

First Quarter

StepienRules Brendan Bowers

Lotta empty seats in Q prior to tip but my guess is everyone's still tailgating in the munilot

Nice. Way to start us off sir. You and I are going to get along fine.

 

EddieSportas Eddie Sportas

#cavs simplified defense is simply amazing!

I sense some sarcasm here. I could really find some friends on the #Cavs twitter thing.

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It used to be easy to be a Dan Gilbert fan. How could it not be? The owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers was a do-something person with a history of success. Besides, compared to the owners of the other two professional teams in town, Gilbert is number one almost by default.

Gilbert got an undeserved reputation early on in his career as a NBA owner as being meddlesome. To the contrary, he came across as a committed owner willing to approach his franchise not like a toy but like another critical business in his empire. He recognized that his main job was to find competent people to run the basketball operations on a day to day basis and once that was accomplished he would sit back and enjoy the view from the preferred seats.

In fact that's what Gilbert did. It helped tremendously when the ping pong balls allowed LeBron James to fall into their laps. But Gilbert then did everything he could to capitalize on that fortune. That the Cavaliers fell short wasn't for his lack of trying.

Lately, though, Gilbert is trying the patience of even his staunchest supporters mostly because he's no longer the Gilbert that the fans were growing to trust. At a time when the franchise is struggling to find an identity, a face, Gilbert has adopted a bunker mentality as his team embarrasses its way through the 2010-11 season.

Since the whole James fiasco, in fact, Gilbert has changed and not for the better. The same goes for the front office. Instead of being out front, it comes across as left behind. The lack of noise is deafening. Meanwhile the fans are screaming as the team is in the midst of foisting upon its fans all the history it thought had been erased once Ted Stepien sold the team to the Gund Brothers.

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For those of you expecting a full-blown Cleveland Cavaliers recap in the tradition of Burt Graeff or even Bob Fortuna, well, you fools can suck it.

It ain’t happening.

If the boss man wants to withhold pay for this recap I’m all for that too. I wouldn’t pay for what he’s about to get.

To be clear, I’m not forsaking my duties tonight because I had other better options that kept me busy. It’s not even because I’ve had some health issues for the last few weeks or because I was engrossed in NFL playoff football.

Nope. It’s simply because this Cavaliers team blows and is not worth the time it would cost to watch them. Shit, this Cavaliers team is so bad that someone HAS to pay me to watch them and I’m still not going to do that.

I’ll do this though: I’ll tell you the Cavaliers lost to the Denver Nuggets 127-99, that the game wasn’t that close and that this team could suck a squirrel through a straw it sucks so much. The score at the half was 80-49 (and Denver had the lead if you have trouble following along).

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Being in different conferences, the Cavaliers and Utah Jazz only play twice per season. Despite their paucity of meetings the teams have a colorful and dramatic history, one filled with back-and-forth games, buzzer-beating shots and moments straight from the theater of the bizarre.  Going all the way back to when Price and Daugherty matched pick-n-rolls with Stockton and Malone at the Salt Palace and the Richfield Coliseum, it’s been a memorable all-time series between these two teams.

Friday night’s latest installment in Salt Lake City, however, will not go into the annals. It was yet another night of punishment out West for the Cavaliers, who dropped their twelfth in a row and twenty-second in twenty-three games, 121-99. Cleveland is now 8-31, losers of seventeen straight on the road- and there’s still another game left on this seemingly endless western swing, Saturday night in Denver. Hard as it may be to believe, we haven’t hit rock-bottom yet.

The story of Wednesday’s humiliation in Los Angeles was bad offense, as Cleveland scored a franchise-low 57 points. The story of Friday’s humiliation in Salt Lake was bad defense, particularly in the first half. Utah blistered the twine with a season-best 70 first-half points, shooting over 61 percent from the field in the process. The Jazz poured in 39 points during the second quarter, when they blew the game wide open in turning a six-point lead at the beginning of the period into a twenty-point bulge by its merciful end.

Utah took complete command early in the second and did it in scalding fashion. After a J.J. Hickson dunk cut Cleveland’s deficit to four at 35-31, the Jazz went off for fourteen unanswered points in less than two minutes, doing it in circus fashion with behind-the-back passes, monster throw-downs and heat-check three-pointers that touched nothing but the bottom of the net. Doing most of the damage for Utah was C.J. Miles, who came off the bench and scored eleven points in barely over three minutes. Cleveland lost its composure during this run, turning the ball over and basically quitting on defense while Byron Scott, as usual, stood by with his arms folded and his head in the clouds.

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