Old AmrapinVA

Pistons were a combined 1-5 vs. Atlanta and Toronto this year. They were swept by the Hawks. They also finished behind both in the standings and, specifically, 12 games behind the Raptors. Of course nobody "knows" because they didn't play each other in the playoffs, but every objective measurable we have to go on says the Hawks and Raptors are better teams. I'd agree that Detroit is on the rise, but they are still missing a few pieces before they will be true contenders. Until then, they are stuck in mediocrity and if they continue to slip into the playoffs as a lower seed (i.e. out of the draft lottery), there they will stay in all likelihood. I agree with you for the most part but the regular season means nothing when the playoffs start. Cavs were 1-2 against the Raptors. Cavs were 1-3 against the Pistons (1-2 if you don't count the last game with scrubs). I could see Detroit taking Toronto or Atlanta to 7. Hell I think the Pistons could beat Atlanta with the way SVG was aligning the defense.

To be fair we've had over a decade of best-of-seven through the entire playoffs and no team has done better than 10-0. So it still would be quite special to go 12-0 even if one of those games is not in the Finals. I'm quite aware of the 2001 Lakers. As I stated upthread they were one insane Mr. "Practice" AI performance away from going 15-0. The Lakers had some rust from having 8 days off. Even though the Lakers played really bad in the first half they still forced that game into OT. What was nuts about that game was after Philly won "experts" were saying Kobe was already handing the torch over to AI and that the Sixers would sweep. Uh, yeah. We don't know what Detroit would do if they played Toronto or Atlanta. I think Detroit is just as good as Indiana and Boston and Miami without Whiteside and Bosh.

it was so noticeable in the first 5 minutes they were focused on the perimeter, and I immediately saw those gaping holes in the paint for guys to get into. Lue obviously saw them as well and within minutes cavs were getting open lay up and dunk after open lay up and dunk. I truly believe the Hawks were superior to the raptors. Again, regular season means nothing. I really don't care about 56 wins...its how you perform in the 7 game series. Looking for the same result tomorrow night. I give them a punchers chance at game 3 in Toronto, but definitely not 2 games there In all honesty the best team the Cavs have played so far is the Pistons. They may not have been the best talent wise but SVG had no fear of the Cavs and he showed it in his coaching schemes on both sides of the ball. I never felt the Cavs ever really had control of that series even though it was sweep. Without Hack-a-Drummond you have to wonder if the Pistons would have won one or two games. If the Cavs sweep Toronto it would be the first 12-0 postseason start in NBA history. Not betting on it but who knows.

Don't forget the 5000:1 underdogs King Power.

Thanks for looking at what you want to see on this. I was responding to Hts. question. I think I've been pretty clear about why $15/hr. won't do that much. How many minimum wages hikes have we had? What effect has it had on US poverty? It's not "total stupidity". It is an understanding of very, very basic economics. To put it another way -- why is $15/hr. such a sensible number? Why is $100/hr. part of a "disingenuous argument"? What's the magic amount that is called a living wage? How can you maintain it without price controls?

Did I say that? Are you in favor of making the minimum wage $200/hr.? Without price controls the minimum wage will never catch up with the constantly rising cost of living. And no, I'm not in favor of price controls.

I like it -- although it didn't help the Spurs. On top of home court the Cavs handled OKC pretty well this season. I know the regular season isn't indicative of the playoffs but I feel like the Cavs will do better to play them than the Warriors. I certainly will be pulling for the Thunder in the WCF.

It's good to see Mayor Jackson show some sense on this issue. Even on a national level it's not a real issue and an incredible waste of time. If you make the minimum wage $15/hr. then the baseline for a living wage will just go up. How many cycles does this have to happen before it is realized it doesn't move people out of "poverty". Like I tell Bernie supporters: Why go for a paltry $15/hr. when you can go for $100/hr. or $200/hr.? The higher the base wage, the richer everyone will be! It's silly. To be fair, this was brought to the Council. They didn't bring this up.

Raising the minimum wage doesn't lift peoples' standard of living. How many times has it been raised already with no real effect on US "poverty". Doubling the federal base will only drive prices even higher and be passed on the to the same consumers it is supposed to help. There are better ways to solve "poverty" in the US but it's third-rail stuff to the establishment wing of both parties. Also, why is the standard $15/hr? Why not make it $100/hr. and make everyone "rich"? Anyway this petition movement in Cleveland is just a another wing of the SEIU. So this is just a piece of their nationwide initiative to pressure Congress into raising it. If they can get the Council to pass the hike, it's one more reason to force the hand of the folks in DC.

The 401 that runs from Toronto Pearson Airport to Scarborough is the widest freeway in North America. It's insane and I say that living in the DC area. The GTA has the Gardiner, the Don Valley, the 401, the 400, the 404, the 427, the 410, on and on. Ontario is currently in the process of building a long toll-road expressway from the 400 at Newmarket all the way out to Ajax. Equivalent of building a toll road from Cleveland to Ashtabula. Toronto and Montreal a littered with expressways, just like here. I wont even get into the rosy-eyed view that Europe is some sort of racial nirvana compared to US. Only have to do a recent news search on the migrant crisis to see how Euros are behaving along the lines of Trump with a new wave of outsiders at their gates. Remember the recent Paris suburb riots? That reaction was because North Africans are treated so kindly in France. I wouldn't say Europe is a racial nirvana by any means; bigots, hate groups and accompanying political rhetoric have been on the rise there in recent years. I would, however, say that racism and racial polarization is much, much stronger in the United States than in Europe or Canada. It's deeply ingrained in so many facets of American life, we don't even realize it. Even though French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville greatly admired America's new political experiment, his famed 1830s treatise "Democracy in America," sadly predicted that slavery (and it's predicted demise and after effects) threatened divide America and harm its orderly legal/political process... Tocqueville proved not only to be great scholar/observer, but a soothsayer as well. Look, we disagreed on this before. There's widespread long term institutional racism and "culturalism" in all European nations and Canada, it just manifests itself in different ways. But I think we can agree on this: Over the last half-century "white flight" has had a profound negative effect on American cities not seen in Canada and most of Europe. The 401 that runs from Toronto Pearson Airport to Scarborough is the widest freeway in North America. It's insane and I say that living in the DC area. The GTA has the Gardiner, the Don Valley, the 401, the 400, the 404, the 427, the 410, on and on. Ontario is currently in the process of building a long toll-road expressway from the 400 at Newmarket all the way out to Ajax. Equivalent of building a toll road from Cleveland to Ashtabula. Toronto and Montreal a littered with expressways, just like here. I wont even get into the rosy-eyed view that Europe is some sort of racial nirvana compared to US. Only have to do a recent news search on the migrant crisis to see how Euros are behaving along the lines of Trump with a new wave of outsiders at their gates. Remember the recent Paris suburb riots? That reaction was because North Africans are treated so kindly in France. Toronto's expressways were not jammed through pre-existing parts of the city like what happened everywhere in the United States. That one was built along the northern edge of the city back in the 50s or 60s. When looking at the metro on google earth, there is evidence that growth boundaries are keeping the edge of development from expanding haphazardly. The metro's size is growing rapidly, so they are permitting development of farmland, but it is not all happening at the whims of developers and knuckle-head township trustees. You said that Canadian expressways aren't built on the scale of the U.S. Of course they are. The 401 is on a scale not seen in the United States. Ontario and Quebec have a lot of expressways and the GTA continues to expand the network plowing under farmland. I will say the major eastern Canadian cities have done a better job of keeping the "spaghetti junction" connections out of their downtowns. Toronto has the Gardiner connecting to the Don Valley but it's a small interchange. Montreal has AutoRoute 720 that goes below Montreal but the main expressway interchange at AutoRoute 20 is over a mile outside of the center city and Quebec has AutoRoute 440 which is half boulevard/half expressway but doesn't connect with anything in the city center. Ottawa's main spaghetti junction is across the river in Hull, Quebec. Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec all have expressways that were built over existing neighborhoods. Toronto didn't need to plow under as much because it was much smaller in 1950s and 1960s but the Don Valley, the Gardiner, the 427, the 401, the QEW, the expressways around Hamilton all were built over existing developments. Montreal has lots of Quebec AutoRoutes built through neighborhoods because it was much larger than Toronto during the decades of freeway expansion. The GTA does not have a handle on sprawl despite the condo boom. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/09/15/gta_sprawl_out_of_control.html From the 2013 editorial: The population in Toronto’s core neighbourhoods grew by 52,000 people from 2006 to 2011, and the transit suburbs grew by another 26,000 people, which was good news. Meanwhile, the less sustainable exurban and automobile suburbs grew by 390,000 people, or 83 percent of the regional growth. Toronto actually has less office space going up than in DC currently. It's the first wave of office construction since the early 1990s with most of it concentrated in the expanding city center. Meanwhile many neighborhoods are being fueled by large condos with smaller offices. There are fewer office mini-downtowns going up in Toronto vs. American cities of the same size over the last few decades, this despite Toronto being the NYC of Canada.

According the article, Jacobs is saying they'll likely first build the parking garage and dig out the moat for the apartment building in early 2018. Seems like it'll be three years minimum before they even get to actually building apartments and such.

Why can't they maintain the 3-point pace throughout the playoffs? It's not like they are depending only or two players to his threes. For example, the main 3 point machine -- JR Smith -- disappeared after Game 2 and it didn't matter. Frye was the 3 point machine in Game 3, then Love in Game 4. Kyrie really hasn't even gotten going yet and is still inconsistent with his shooting, Kyrie has shown he can be even better than he is right now. Shots aren't being contested because LeBron is still drawing defenders in the lane. As long as everyone is getting open looks, it's hard to believe that the Cavs will slow down to something even like 8 3PMs a game. I'm waiting for the game where Kyrie, Love, Smith, LeBron, Frye, Shumpert and RJ are all feeling it at the same time. Why can't they score 140+ one night? Amazingly, there's room for improvement here.

Beyond the renovation issues, what's the plan if K&D doesn't get the credit? Nothing? I hope that's not the case.

That's great news about FC staying in Cleveland.

. Looked it up, good catch. Stats are for the "current playoff format". Showed one team losing in the semis, six teams losing in the Conference Finals and four teams losing in the Finals. Our friends at ESPN sure love to plant the seeds of doubt when it involves Cleveland. I forgot about that Lakers team. They would have gone 15-0, if not for one crazy AI performance.

ESPN put a stat out that no team starting 6-0 in the playoffs has won an NBA title. I hope they break that record too.

Fair point on Geis. As for K&D: this is the Terminal Tower and not a random early 20th-century building. The question should already have been asked about what's the plan going to be without the credit. City leaders or someone should find out.

I'm not sure why the situation would be any better with Geis in charge, but I share this worry. The availability of the huge credit could end up creating perverse incentives to roll the dice instead of moving ahead with a feasible, though less profitable project. Hard to know from the outside if this in that category, though. It may not be better with Geis but the way they turned around Ameritrust in such a short amount of time was amazing. I worry about K&D. The Terminal Tower, to me, isn't a property to be flipped if the tax credit doesn't work out. The renovated PS would be facing a vacant May Co., TT and a Jacobs lot where it seems like nothing is ever going to be built.

Geis would have moved on this project. I just worry the Terminal Tower will fall into disrepair if K&D doesn't get the funding. This isn't the East Ohio Gas building or something along those lines.

For some reason, I have very low hopes that Forest City will stay in Cleveland. Just a feeling, no facts on that one. I hope I am wrong. I'm not thrilled that K&D is waiting for tax credits to renovate the Terminal Tower. What are K&D's plans if they don't come about? This building is way too important to sit vacant hoping the state will pay for their renovation costs. I wish Geis had gotten their hands on this.

The 401 that runs from Toronto Pearson Airport to Scarborough is the widest freeway in North America. It's insane and I say that living in the DC area. The GTA has the Gardiner, the Don Valley, the 401, the 400, the 404, the 427, the 410, on and on. Ontario is currently in the process of building a long toll-road expressway from the 400 at Newmarket all the way out to Ajax. Equivalent of building a toll road from Cleveland to Ashtabula. Toronto and Montreal a littered with expressways, just like here. I wont even get into the rosy-eyed view that Europe is some sort of racial nirvana compared to US. Only have to do a recent news search on the migrant crisis to see how Euros are behaving along the lines of Trump with a new wave of outsiders at their gates. Remember the recent Paris suburb riots? That reaction was because North Africans are treated so kindly in France.

If it is the city, can they actually handle this? Or will all the programming be run-down and out of service in a decade or so. Looking at the very positive changes at Edgewater, it almost feels like Metroparks should take over the new PS as well.

Rooting for Boston and Indiana in the final two games of their series. Easiest route to the Finals would be the Cs and Hornets/Pacers, IMHO. I don't want to face Boston again. Too much bad blood from last year's series, esp Game 4. There could be the possibility of more altercations, more injuries and even game(s) suspensions. We don't need any of that... Right now, there's no team I fear in the East, so I'd just as soon it be Atlanta, who we'll make short work of. We'll it's Atlanta. A lot of bad blood there but on the Hawks side. Delly took out Korver in the ECF last year when he was scrapping for that loose ball. They're already talking, feeling confident now that they are healthy.

Good or bad, what's done is done. Sorry if this was mentioned upthread but who will take care of the new PS after all the construction is complete?

Rooting for Boston and Indiana in the final two games of their series. Easiest route to the Finals would be the Cs and Hornets/Pacers, IMHO.