This has been a crazy year in the NBA championship tournament and this is great news because I was rather non-plussed by the season as a whole. Normally I don't watch a great deal of NBA basketball until the end of the season and this year has not been an exception.
We have made history 3 times already in this tournament, with the 76ers coming back from 3-1 and then it happened again with the Pistons doing the same thing, overcoming Orlando after being down at a 3-1 deficit.
We also saw one of the largest victory margins of all time when the Knicks absolutely stomped the Hawks in the first round. They set the highest halftime lead of all time in that same game.
Now we are looking at potentially seeing another piece of history and one that only has a 8% chance as far as the statistics gathered from the all-time NBA records.
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It's ok Duncan Robinson, nobody else knows what the hell is going on with your team either!
Detroit has had a very topsy-tuvey post-season, and I am going to have to look into how it is that they managed to have such a dominant regular season, but seem to really be struggling as the number 1 seed in the tournament. They appeared as though they were going to get eliminated by 8 seed Orlando, but got their shit together to win 3 games straight and win the series 4-3. Then they appeared to return to form by beating the Cleveland Cavaliers 2 games straight.... then they proceeded to drop the next 3 in a row. At the moment Cleveland only needs to win tomorrow's game and they will be through to the semi-finals to face the Knicks.
This game takes place in Cleveland and the Cavaliers are favored by Vegas odds to win this game by 3.5 points. Obviously you cannot win a game by half a point but that is just how sports-betting works because we can't have draws on bets.
while coming back from being down 2-0 is exceptionally rare, there has been instances of it happening every year from 2021-2025. There has been a grand total of 34 times that this has happened over the course of 460 game series. So it's not quite as rare as coming back from 3-0, which has never happened, but it's pretty rare.
Once again Detroit finds their backs against the wall and this is just extremely rare for a team that had a rather comfortable regular season winning most of their games with what appeared to be rather large margins. Perhaps there was an injury in there that happened while I wasn't paying attention.
The East is considered much weaker than the West this year by most people's metrics and of the 6 remaining teams Detroit actually has the WORST odds of winning the entire tournament at +6,000. I might just go and bet a dollar on them for the pure hell of it. But when you get odds this defeatist from Vegas bookies, you can be all-but-guaranteed that the experts have a very real reason for feeling this way and it isn't just a "gut feeling" or some sort of team loyalty. They know something that I don't and Detroit has had rather bad odds in almost every game since the first one against Orlando.
There are no clear injuries in the reports, but maybe something has happened in the locker room where semi-injured players are playing at a reduced pace because of some sort of nagging pain.
I have no idea. All I know is that almost nobody has any faith in Detroit and there is a very good chance they are going home for good after tomorrow. Will they make history or quietly crawl away in defeat?