So Houston. They need to be left for dead before they respond. That was some onslaught. GSW made 20 threes AND LOST. By plenty.
It's pretty doubtful that this happens again.
1. GSW -- winning the Western Conference in five games, should that happen, is not a sign of weakness. If Curry shows ill effects from his fall, now that would be troublesome.
2. CLE -- I would not be surprised to see this series get pushed to six games, honestly
3. ATL -- obviously, they need tonight. If they get it they can get back home and maybe make a series of it.
4. HOU -- all they need to do is shoot like that three more times.
I'll add that I was thinking about the likelihood that either team would sweep before last night's game. I had figured that GSW had about a 70% chance of winning game 4 and the Cavs I think are at about 55%. Cleveland is -7.5. I would take ATL and the points there.
In Cleveland?
I suppose, only because ATL will go down swinging.
I am less surprised by Houston winning one at home. The surprise was how turrble GS was to start that game.
ATL just about beat them in Cleveland the other night, with Al Horford missing about 75% of the game. So, I see that as being pretty close to a toss up -- slight edge to CLE.
I'm not sure how turrble GSW was, unless you are talking about not defending the three. HOU started 7-8 from three. That's pretty crazy.
Houston was just hitting threes at an absurd rate, and it wasn't just Harden (Josh Smith was making them. Josh Smith!). It was pretty much the very definition of unsustainable, which is why GS made a game out of it. That, and Klay Thompson stopped looking awful sometime in the second quarter.
The same Josh Smith whom GSW was fouling intentionally late in the game to get him on the free throw line.
There he was, hitting his first 6 shots, or something like that, in the first quarter.
Wait, Josh and JR Smith are different players?
It took the Warriors over three minutes to score. They were 8-23 in the first quarter with , having started 2-10 from the field with a couple of bad turnovers. Meanwhile, the Rockets scored the first 12 points of the game and were up 19-3 at the 7:13 mark. And any time the best defensive team in the league gives up 45 points in a quarter, that's bad. I think that constitutes a bad start for GSW.
I get what you are saying, but 22 points in a quarter isn't terrible. The 45 points, that was just Houston throwing everything in. It was, in my view, more of Houston being absolutely unconscious. No one, other than Corey Brewer, missed a shot for Houston in the last 10:26 of the first quarter. Everything else (15-15 FG) went in. That's just one team going off. If they miss half those shots, it's about an even quarter or pretty close to it.
On the other hand, GSW had a LOT of attempts (23 FGA) in the period in significant part because Houston was running down and throwing the ball in the hole so quickly. If you get 23 FGA, you should be able to score 22 points in a period.
Okay, not in Cleveland.
Heh.
ATL really laid an egg this whole series. Game 3 was by far the best game of the series. They maybe would have won if Li'l Tito hadn't lost his temper with Dellavadova.
What are the chances that Danny Santana is sent down for Vargas? With Nunez hitting well, I'd say it could happen.
If he gets a third game off in a row, I'd say it's a possibility.
Nah. They'll probably bring Doug Bernier back instead.
Nunez has played 0 innings at shortstop this year. If they decide that Vargas or Pinto is ready to come up and DH with Escobar taking over at short, that would be when Santana gets bumped to AAA. The real question is how long will it be before Buxton gets called up. Schafer has a 42 OPS+, Hicks 47. Robinson has a .488 OPS since April 26.
how are Hicks' defensive stats looking? He's made several highlight reel catches already but I don't know how he's doing on balls in his zone.
Of course, Buxton is an elite defender, too, so it's not like we'd lose anything there.
DRS has him at +1 so far, prorated to +12/year. UZR has +2, prorated to +43/year.
Much better than Schafer's, that's for sure. I don't know how long he's been affected by his leg injury, but his defensive stats are the worst of the outfielders, ii included.
Buxton first needs to go through AAA. He's having a good, not great year in AA. His SLG is nice, .506 compared to a league average of .371. But, the team average slugging is .446 and last year they had a slugging of .407 compared to the league average of .382. Plus, Buxton has a below average OBP despite a barely above average batting average.
Holy shit, Razor pitched 3.1 innings for the Indians.
BRING THIS MAN TO THE MAJORS
I never meant to imply that Nunez would play SS. Just meant they wouldn't cut him at this point.
I hope they keep Hicks up all year.
Nice -- Twins back on top in the AL in fewest BB allowed.
I don't really want national attention on the boys this early in the season. Unfortunately, under the theme of "Giving love," we get the following conclusion:
Add it all up and if there's one word to describe the 2015 Twins, it's "clutch." Timely hits, timely relief pitching. FanGraphs keeps track of a stat they call BaseRuns -- the number of runs a team would be expected to score and allow given all the bases it has gained or allowed. Entering Monday, the Twins had outperformed their BaseRuns win total by seven -- 25 wins as opposed to the "expected" total of 18. No other teams in the majors was more than plus-4.
that's pronounced cLUCKtchY.
With the rotation finally resembling competency, I was hoping the could go back to a six-man bullpen. I never expected they would somehow revert in the opposite direction.
Molitor couldn't justify dropping anyone from the current bullpen in favor of Stauffer. They should have just DFA'd him after he got healthy, but I guess they're going to give him a chance to prove it was injury that made him so bad.
They could save themselves some time and just let baseball-reference tell them that he's what made himself so bad.
Couldn't justify?
What about Stauffer and Duensing's performances this season would have kept them on any other team's staff?
They're not ready to give up on Duensing, and as I stated, he couldn't drop any other reliever just to activate Stauffer. My guess is they aren't going to DFA Stauffer until he's been given a chance to pitch when healthy.
There's sometimes a difference between what you can justify doing and what you actually do.
Bison Slayers? Wooly Mammoths? Green Bombers? The UND nickname saga continues. Those names and 60 more made the cut after review by the 11 person nickname committee (seriously, Bison Slayers?). Also, they left North Dakota on the list, which is what the Sue folks want. No nickname, informally the Fighting Sioux Forever. Also, Warriors is an option, which was the name that Marquette had before they changed it. Ha!
Also:
Padilla will now purchase accompanying website domains for the 63 names if they haven't already been purchased. The company had purchased 265 domain names as a preliminary precaution.
So, they will buy the domain name for Bison Slayers. And Wooly Mammoths. I wonder if warriors.com is available. Huh, seems there is another team out there with that name.
northdakota.com is taken as well
undnorthdakota.com is not.
I like Nighthawks, Nodaks (not Nodakkers?), and Sundogs.
Fighting Sue all the way.
Fighting Suh would actually be pretty fantastic
So my wife is trying to pressure me to let her sign up for Best Buy and Sprint's One Plan so she can get an iPhone 6. The plan is unlimited and costs $65, about $20 of which is a 24 month lease on the phone.
We're currently using Virgin, who no longer offer iPhones. I want to get her an LG Tribute for $60 since her iPhone 4 is working like crap after two years (while my ZTE Vital is working great after two years.) Her plan is $40 (about $42 after taxes)/ month so it'd cost around $600 more over the 24 months just for a frickin iPhone.
Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? I don't really like the lease idea and I don't like the idea of having to pay more for an iPhone when Androids work perfectly good, dammit, and allow expandable memory.
iPhone 4 or 4S? Rumors are the next iOS will perform much better so if she has a 4S then it might last a bit longer with a new OS.
Just the 4. I would really rather not pay $600 more over 24 months than we pay now just for a product that has shown itself to not work particularly great over that period. (no idea if the 6's will be the same, but I really just don't trust the iPhones at this point.)
Costs More, Does Less.
Uh, the ZTE Vital was announced in 2013. The iPhone 4 was released in 2010. They're hardly comparable.
Three years is a huge amount of time for processor, camera, and feature evolution when it comes to smartphones.
My comment was generic about the Apple price premium.
Apple machines are great if you are doing certain things (*cough* Final Cut *cough cough*). Otherwise, I haven't seen the justification for the fanboyism.
That's a very fair point. However, I will counter that, when I bought both phones, they were both $200. The latest and greatest iPhones are, 100% of the time, well above what I can afford.
My wife had a 4S and we traded it in for a 5S for no additional cost. I had a 4S and I got $45 back to move into a 5C. Now, we had to sign up for 2 more years, but we were going to do that anyway.
The issue I have is that we're on Virgin Mobile which does not subsidize phones. The only way we can really afford data plans is to use a carrier like this because all the options I've looked into from the regular carriers are stupidly expensive. So, there's no trading in to be had.
I think her problem right now is a battery issue. I found a battery replacement kit online for the 4, though, so I'm going to try that.
I am no help. All my arguments about the relative quality of iPhones fell on deaf ears. Probably because she was already dreaming about how great her crappy iPhone would be.
My Galaxy S3 is a better phone with a better interface. Only drawbacks are a poorly placed hard power button and a somewhat touchy soft back button (that she cannot seem to navigate, oy).
Mine are falling on similarly deaf ears. I made the mistake of buying a cheap crappy Android for our first smartphones that lasted about 6 months. Once I was willing to spend a bit more, mine has worked great. I have to re-start it every other day or so when apps update, but that's no big deal.
Perhaps this would help. (NSFW) httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg
that was hilarious. I need to send that to The Boy.
Wait, that was viral?! A friend sent that to me years ago, but I didn't know it was truly a Thing.
Extranormal was this weird company that made these videos where you would just input the dialog and choose between a few different templates, and it would spit out this weird as hell computer-speech.....thing.
I had to pull up a YouTube of one that dealt with infection prevention and show it to a room full of doctors and higher-ups at the behest of the director of IP. It was surreal.
yep, Samsung Galaxy is my go-to
Just got the S6 when my S4's power button died over the weekend. I'm not a fan of the new pricing model (leasing is pretty much the thing now), but I needed a phone immediately (on call), and didn't have time or inclination to mess around much.
The S6 is pretty awesome (beautiful screen and the camera has never been better*), but it does feel more iPhone-like than previous iterations (no removable battery, no SD card support, even the newest Android interface seems to be more Apple-y).
*able to focus on print from four inches away! That will actually come in very handy for what I use it for.
Device comments aside, I've been really happy with Ting. It's either on the Sprint network, which is not a great network, or T-Mobile network, which is also not a great network. But I brought my iPhone 5 over and am happily paying <$40 most months. Granted in a month I am on wifi, mostly talk < 100 minutes, and mostly text < 1000 times.
(Referral link saves you $25. Gets me $25. Absolutely sign up without the link if you prefer. Just sharing in case you want a bit of cash in your pocket if you do decide to go with Ting.)
Looking at that pricing structure, I think my wife would zip into the higher levels pretty quick and we're already on the Spring network anyway, so service wouldn't change. Something to check into though, after reveiwing her usage tendencies maybe they won't be so bad.
Twitter is great
Patrick Reusse @1500ESPN_Reusse
I doubt if he will. @mpfrid What do you say when Boyer asks what do you think of him now? Ripped him.
Phil Hughes @PJHughes45
@1500ESPN_Reusse I'll remind him
I'll have to see if I can find a screenshot -- the local card store owner and another guy I know were front row at yesterday's ballgame near the on deck circle at New Busch, and they found out that the camera was focusing on Miguel Cabrera when he was on deck, so late in the game when they saw the camera's red light on, one of them was feeding the other from a fruit cup in the background. Ha!
That's a sixty win team that Cleveland is dismantling.
And Big Pelf currently has a sub-3.00 ERA. Crazy year in sports.
I haven't tuned in to any of this series, though. Seems to me these playoffs aren't going to get real until the finals.
So Houston. They need to be left for dead before they respond. That was some onslaught. GSW made 20 threes AND LOST. By plenty.
It's pretty doubtful that this happens again.
1. GSW -- winning the Western Conference in five games, should that happen, is not a sign of weakness. If Curry shows ill effects from his fall, now that would be troublesome.
2. CLE -- I would not be surprised to see this series get pushed to six games, honestly
3. ATL -- obviously, they need tonight. If they get it they can get back home and maybe make a series of it.
4. HOU -- all they need to do is shoot like that three more times.
I'll add that I was thinking about the likelihood that either team would sweep before last night's game. I had figured that GSW had about a 70% chance of winning game 4 and the Cavs I think are at about 55%. Cleveland is -7.5. I would take ATL and the points there.
In Cleveland?
I suppose, only because ATL will go down swinging.
I am less surprised by Houston winning one at home. The surprise was how turrble GS was to start that game.
ATL just about beat them in Cleveland the other night, with Al Horford missing about 75% of the game. So, I see that as being pretty close to a toss up -- slight edge to CLE.
I'm not sure how turrble GSW was, unless you are talking about not defending the three. HOU started 7-8 from three. That's pretty crazy.
Houston was just hitting threes at an absurd rate, and it wasn't just Harden (Josh Smith was making them. Josh Smith!). It was pretty much the very definition of unsustainable, which is why GS made a game out of it. That, and Klay Thompson stopped looking awful sometime in the second quarter.
The same Josh Smith whom GSW was fouling intentionally late in the game to get him on the free throw line.
There he was, hitting his first 6 shots, or something like that, in the first quarter.
Wait, Josh and JR Smith are different players?
It took the Warriors over three minutes to score. They were 8-23 in the first quarter with , having started 2-10 from the field with a couple of bad turnovers. Meanwhile, the Rockets scored the first 12 points of the game and were up 19-3 at the 7:13 mark. And any time the best defensive team in the league gives up 45 points in a quarter, that's bad. I think that constitutes a bad start for GSW.
I get what you are saying, but 22 points in a quarter isn't terrible. The 45 points, that was just Houston throwing everything in. It was, in my view, more of Houston being absolutely unconscious. No one, other than Corey Brewer, missed a shot for Houston in the last 10:26 of the first quarter. Everything else (15-15 FG) went in. That's just one team going off. If they miss half those shots, it's about an even quarter or pretty close to it.
On the other hand, GSW had a LOT of attempts (23 FGA) in the period in significant part because Houston was running down and throwing the ball in the hole so quickly. If you get 23 FGA, you should be able to score 22 points in a period.
Okay, not in Cleveland.
Heh.
ATL really laid an egg this whole series. Game 3 was by far the best game of the series. They maybe would have won if Li'l Tito hadn't lost his temper with Dellavadova.
What are the chances that Danny Santana is sent down for Vargas? With Nunez hitting well, I'd say it could happen.
If he gets a third game off in a row, I'd say it's a possibility.
Nah. They'll probably bring Doug Bernier back instead.
Nunez has played 0 innings at shortstop this year. If they decide that Vargas or Pinto is ready to come up and DH with Escobar taking over at short, that would be when Santana gets bumped to AAA. The real question is how long will it be before Buxton gets called up. Schafer has a 42 OPS+, Hicks 47. Robinson has a .488 OPS since April 26.
how are Hicks' defensive stats looking? He's made several highlight reel catches already but I don't know how he's doing on balls in his zone.
Of course, Buxton is an elite defender, too, so it's not like we'd lose anything there.
DRS has him at +1 so far, prorated to +12/year. UZR has +2, prorated to +43/year.
Much better than Schafer's, that's for sure. I don't know how long he's been affected by his leg injury, but his defensive stats are the worst of the outfielders, ii included.
Buxton first needs to go through AAA. He's having a good, not great year in AA. His SLG is nice, .506 compared to a league average of .371. But, the team average slugging is .446 and last year they had a slugging of .407 compared to the league average of .382. Plus, Buxton has a below average OBP despite a barely above average batting average.
For real?
Holy shit, Razor pitched 3.1 innings for the Indians.
BRING THIS MAN TO THE MAJORS
I never meant to imply that Nunez would play SS. Just meant they wouldn't cut him at this point.
I hope they keep Hicks up all year.
Nice -- Twins back on top in the AL in fewest BB allowed.
I don't really want national attention on the boys this early in the season. Unfortunately, under the theme of "Giving love," we get the following conclusion:
that's pronounced cLUCKtchY.
With the rotation finally resembling competency, I was hoping the could go back to a six-man bullpen. I never expected they would somehow revert in the opposite direction.
Molitor couldn't justify dropping anyone from the current bullpen in favor of Stauffer. They should have just DFA'd him after he got healthy, but I guess they're going to give him a chance to prove it was injury that made him so bad.
They could save themselves some time and just let baseball-reference tell them that he's what made himself so bad.
Couldn't justify?
What about Stauffer and Duensing's performances this season would have kept them on any other team's staff?
They're not ready to give up on Duensing, and as I stated, he couldn't drop any other reliever just to activate Stauffer. My guess is they aren't going to DFA Stauffer until he's been given a chance to pitch when healthy.
There's sometimes a difference between what you can justify doing and what you actually do.
Bison Slayers? Wooly Mammoths? Green Bombers? The UND nickname saga continues. Those names and 60 more made the cut after review by the 11 person nickname committee (seriously, Bison Slayers?). Also, they left North Dakota on the list, which is what the Sue folks want. No nickname, informally the Fighting Sioux Forever. Also, Warriors is an option, which was the name that Marquette had before they changed it. Ha!
Also:
So, they will buy the domain name for Bison Slayers. And Wooly Mammoths. I wonder if warriors.com is available. Huh, seems there is another team out there with that name.
northdakota.com is taken as well
undnorthdakota.com is not.
I like Nighthawks, Nodaks (not Nodakkers?), and Sundogs.
Fighting Sue all the way.
Fighting Suh would actually be pretty fantastic
So my wife is trying to pressure me to let her sign up for Best Buy and Sprint's One Plan so she can get an iPhone 6. The plan is unlimited and costs $65, about $20 of which is a 24 month lease on the phone.
We're currently using Virgin, who no longer offer iPhones. I want to get her an LG Tribute for $60 since her iPhone 4 is working like crap after two years (while my ZTE Vital is working great after two years.) Her plan is $40 (about $42 after taxes)/ month so it'd cost around $600 more over the 24 months just for a frickin iPhone.
Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? I don't really like the lease idea and I don't like the idea of having to pay more for an iPhone when Androids work perfectly good, dammit, and allow expandable memory.
iPhone 4 or 4S? Rumors are the next iOS will perform much better so if she has a 4S then it might last a bit longer with a new OS.
Just the 4. I would really rather not pay $600 more over 24 months than we pay now just for a product that has shown itself to not work particularly great over that period. (no idea if the 6's will be the same, but I really just don't trust the iPhones at this point.)
Costs More, Does Less.
Uh, the ZTE Vital was announced in 2013. The iPhone 4 was released in 2010. They're hardly comparable.
Three years is a huge amount of time for processor, camera, and feature evolution when it comes to smartphones.
My comment was generic about the Apple price premium.
Apple machines are great if you are doing certain things (*cough* Final Cut *cough cough*). Otherwise, I haven't seen the justification for the fanboyism.
That's a very fair point. However, I will counter that, when I bought both phones, they were both $200. The latest and greatest iPhones are, 100% of the time, well above what I can afford.
My wife had a 4S and we traded it in for a 5S for no additional cost. I had a 4S and I got $45 back to move into a 5C. Now, we had to sign up for 2 more years, but we were going to do that anyway.
The issue I have is that we're on Virgin Mobile which does not subsidize phones. The only way we can really afford data plans is to use a carrier like this because all the options I've looked into from the regular carriers are stupidly expensive. So, there's no trading in to be had.
I think her problem right now is a battery issue. I found a battery replacement kit online for the 4, though, so I'm going to try that.
I am no help. All my arguments about the relative quality of iPhones fell on deaf ears. Probably because she was already dreaming about how great her crappy iPhone would be.
My Galaxy S3 is a better phone with a better interface. Only drawbacks are a poorly placed hard power button and a somewhat touchy soft back button (that she cannot seem to navigate, oy).
Mine are falling on similarly deaf ears. I made the mistake of buying a cheap crappy Android for our first smartphones that lasted about 6 months. Once I was willing to spend a bit more, mine has worked great. I have to re-start it every other day or so when apps update, but that's no big deal.
Perhaps this would help. (NSFW) httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg
that was hilarious. I need to send that to The Boy.
Wait, that was viral?! A friend sent that to me years ago, but I didn't know it was truly a Thing.
Extranormal was this weird company that made these videos where you would just input the dialog and choose between a few different templates, and it would spit out this weird as hell computer-speech.....thing.
I had to pull up a YouTube of one that dealt with infection prevention and show it to a room full of doctors and higher-ups at the behest of the director of IP. It was surreal.
yep, Samsung Galaxy is my go-to
Just got the S6 when my S4's power button died over the weekend. I'm not a fan of the new pricing model (leasing is pretty much the thing now), but I needed a phone immediately (on call), and didn't have time or inclination to mess around much.
The S6 is pretty awesome (beautiful screen and the camera has never been better*), but it does feel more iPhone-like than previous iterations (no removable battery, no SD card support, even the newest Android interface seems to be more Apple-y).
*able to focus on print from four inches away! That will actually come in very handy for what I use it for.
Device comments aside, I've been really happy with Ting. It's either on the Sprint network, which is not a great network, or T-Mobile network, which is also not a great network. But I brought my iPhone 5 over and am happily paying <$40 most months. Granted in a month I am on wifi, mostly talk < 100 minutes, and mostly text < 1000 times.
(Referral link saves you $25. Gets me $25. Absolutely sign up without the link if you prefer. Just sharing in case you want a bit of cash in your pocket if you do decide to go with Ting.)
Looking at that pricing structure, I think my wife would zip into the higher levels pretty quick and we're already on the Spring network anyway, so service wouldn't change. Something to check into though, after reveiwing her usage tendencies maybe they won't be so bad.
Twitter is great
I'll have to see if I can find a screenshot -- the local card store owner and another guy I know were front row at yesterday's ballgame near the on deck circle at New Busch, and they found out that the camera was focusing on Miguel Cabrera when he was on deck, so late in the game when they saw the camera's red light on, one of them was feeding the other from a fruit cup in the background. Ha!
That's a sixty win team that Cleveland is dismantling.
And Big Pelf currently has a sub-3.00 ERA. Crazy year in sports.
I haven't tuned in to any of this series, though. Seems to me these playoffs aren't going to get real until the finals.