Friday, February 08, 2008

Who's Going to Play For Cleveland Tonight?

Four of Cleveland's six best players could miss tonight's game leaving Mike Brown to ponder the heretofore unsolved question of who will hurt the offense less: Ira Newble or Damon Jones?

Drew Gooden, Anderson Varejao, and Sasha Pavlovic all missed
last night's 92-77 loss in Houston. Hoopsworld reports on the injury situation for tonight's game:
Sasha Pavlovic and Anderson Varejao will both miss Saturday's game against the Atlanta Hawks while Daniel Gibson is listed as doubtful and Drew Gooden will be a game-time decision, the team announced Friday.
Brian Windhorst (as always) provides more information. From his post-game report last night:
Daniel Gibson has a right hamstring issue. He told me he never popped it, it was just very sore and then he started getting spasms. He was holding it in the third quarter and in the fourth he left the court. He was uncomfortable after the game and the thought of playing tomorrow was not in his head, he was more concerned with getting the leg to quiet down.

Second, LeBron hurt his right thumb. He said he jammed it going to the basket. He played through it but he wasn’t sure how it would fell to today. When I asked him about the giant ice bag on his hand, he looked down at the bucket of ice his right ankle was in and just shrugged.
This appears to be another chance for the Hawks to pick up a win against better team which is down (at least) a big man and whose best and highest-usage player suffers from a damaged digit on his dominant hand. Cleveland is unlikely to pick up any of LeBron's slack by making 11 three-pointers as the Lakers did Wednesday night. Daniel Gibson shoots 46.7% from beyond the arc and takes a quarter of Cleveland's attempts. The rest of the Cavs make just 31.6% of their three-pointers.

Ballhype: hype it up!

2 comments:

Drew Ditzel said...

These injuries would excite me if not for a team called the Clippers beat us with four players last week.

Drew Ditzel said...

and by excitement, i mean excited to win, not excited people are on crutches.