Raptors are in to New York for a game this afternoon against Knicks as they try to extend its winning streak to six games. If things go well, they could make it an even seven up against the Knicks in the home and home on Sunday at the Air Canada Centre. Toronto's current five-game win streak is the first in two seasons as you have to go back to the 2006-07 campaign when they won six in a row at close to the same point in the season, April 4-15, before losing the final two games.
The latest victims, the Orlando Magic have redeemed themselves in a big way last night with a 116-87 pasting of the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs saw their 13-game winning streak go by the books with a loss to Washington Thursday night in D.C. The skeptic says that both teams were looking ahead to this match up but not so fast if you are Stan Van Gundy. He had lamented his team's performance before the game against the Toronto Raptors even though they had won six-straight games. Problem was that Stan, who is approaching Larry Brown status in that he's not happy unless he has something to be unhappy about, couldn't say very much because of the string of wins. Van Gundy had his team's attention after the loss to the Raptors and you can bet Cleveland's head coach Mike Brown, the NBA Eastern Conference's Coach of the Month for March, has all his men's ears in the wake of the blowout loss.
Weather wreaked havoc with the team's travel schedule yesterday as it did for most of the people traveling via airplane to New York. It started with sitting two hours on the aircraft on the ground in Orlando and not departing for the Big Apple until 3:00 p.m. Once in the air, apparently the ground traffic was so bad in New York city that no planes were allowed to land because they didn't want more traffic on the road. So after what seemed like a few hundred laps in the air, the aircraft touched down at 6:35 p.m. The usual two hour flight from Orlando to New York, including the bus rides to and from the airport upon take off and landing turned into a seven-and-a-half-hour trek. As one passenger put it, "Man, it would have been faster to have flown to London, England".
The Allen Iverson situation has gone from bad to worse in Detroit. In the category of "If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck then it must be one" you have to wonder if Iverson is really hurt? Let's face it, for the last 13 years nobody, in these eyes, has played harder night in, night out, than Iverson, regardless of the accompanying bumps and bruises he is carrying. So for a competitor like that to be hurt now, in April, with his team struggling to make it into the playoffs has me asking the question, is he really injured? For Detroit's GM Joe Dumars, this transaction also falls under the category of "sometimes you swing and you miss."
You can see what one former coach says here.
The coaching carousel is starting to crank up as we near the end of the season and teams start looking ahead to put things in place for next season. The Sacramento Kings are rumoured to be thinking about a name familiar to folks in the California capital but it may have fans of other franchises saying, "Who?"
Let's hope things go well in recovery for Portland assistant coach Maurice Lucas as he is battling back from cancer surgery.
