True, but even there you've got:

And then there's the Rust Belt and the Great Lakes Region, which overlap but are not the same. It is complicated. Not surprising, I guess, that you can't just take a 1000+-mile wide, 500+-mile tall swath of the country and assign identical attributes to everyone living inside your arbitrary borders.

Maybe this "Lakers are better without Kobe" talk isn't just all gas.

Fair enough. Giants fans (the old school ones, not the newly hatched gold hatters) are some of the most knowledgeable fans in baseball, and Warriors fans always seemed smart to me as well (particularly during the long years of agony when they were doing things like taking Joe Smith over McDyess, Wallace and Garnett,…

That is absolutely spot-on about how Bay Area folk tend to interact with the media. Because the level of local hackery is so advanced and completely entrenched, Bay Area sports fans get insanely defensive when they read national stories focusing on real problems with the franchises they root for, and when those teams…

A TAKE SO STRONG MY MONITOR IS ON FIRE.

Wall, but I'd also take Irving and turn him into a two guard and have the most insane backcourt in the league for the next ten years.

Bullshit. He had a terrible game and he knew he wasn't a viable option to take a potentially game-winning shot, maybe for the first time in his career. His pride is hurt.

If he took 18, his team would have lost the game.

That's six straight games holding the other team under a hundred. People were predicting 130-120 shootouts every night before the season. Their biggest weakness might actually be offense.

I'm starting to wonder if something is physically wrong with the dude. The Cavs didn't start to win until LeBron and Irving figured out a way to work around him rather than through him; Mozgov has effectively become a Love in the middle who can play a little defense and doesn't pretend to shoot threes. Occasionally…

Right, which is why you save nights for these for when Love is suboptimal and LeBron is sitting.

Exactly. That whole scene basically just moved over to the Warehouse District after the partying on the river got out of hand and places started getting shut down.

It's cool, they found something else to fine him for.

I think maybe your phrasing is the problem. You make a couple decent points, but "free rider" was simply hyperbole, and you know it.

Yeah, W 6th is gross. It's all sweaty douchey guys and their dates, pushing and shoving and getting their body spray fumes near you. East 4th is better if you have a little money, but the fact that there are actually two different downtown districts where you can get a nice meal and a drink now is pretty special. Or…

Not to mention all the crap they're selling with his name on it.

So sportswriters would stop writing about the game if they didn't get their canned post-game platitudes? I call bullshit. This dynamic the NFL has set up, where everyone is required to be a good soldier and spend x number of minutes repeating themselves ad infinitum, is a relatively new phenomenon. Professional sports…

Downtown Cleveland's pretty nice now. It's weird.

I could show him some pretty good bars on the east side. He'd have to be into Miller High Life, though.