Bye Week Buckets: Please Don't Go Edition

After last season's desperate exercise, we're especially glad to be sad to bid farewell to Bye Week Buckets* in 2010.  Since NFL conference championship weekend, we're 9-1 against the spread on NBA (8-0) and NCAA (1-1) basketball games here, to match our 9-1 record ATS in this current NFL playoff tournament.  Also like with these NFL playoffs, we've gotten the winner right in all ten, only missing the spread when the Buckeyes won by 13 to fall short of -15 against Penn State last Wednesday. 

Tonight it's Cavs/Knicks, and "Please Don't Go" night at the Q.  If you haven't heard, Kent State junior Austin Briggs (aka, "real hip hop artist"** A. Gully), wants to help send a message to LeBron by passing out 15,000 masks to attendees of tonight's game that look like this:

It's hard not to appreciate the community organizing efforts here, as much as LeBron surely already knows that Cleveland loves him and doesn't want him to leave.  Maybe there's a chance he plays a little extra hard tonight as a result of the gesture.  And maybe his teammates too, who we have to assume don't want him to leave either.

Anyway, and either way, we've been enjoying the heck out of this current brought-to-you-by-a-historically-friendly-scheduling-spot Cavs covering streak (7 of their last 8) and said that we'd ride it out until it ends, so tonight's pick is easy: Cavs -13.5 over Knicks (6 units);

But still, those masks should have been drawn with a less pathetic expression.

It's true that it will be a tragedy if LeBron leaves, and we should do our best to help him understand this.  But that might be tricky because understanding the tragedy here requires understanding that if LeBron does leave, he's the one who's the jerk, not us.  Cleveland would surely move on eventually, and all of humanity would at least benefit from the resulting medical experiment of such a rich, famous, and public man's soul rotting from its core so irreversibly as a result of his having turned his back on his home in such a singular way. 

It won't happen.  It just won't.  But if it did, we wouldn't want to be jerks about it. 

Anyway, go Cavs.  The Super Bowl preview will be up in the morning. 

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*Bye Week Buckets is our annual transitional attempt to re-ingratiate ourselves to the Basketball Wagering Gods and our initial offering to the stern master February that occurs during the two weeks between the NFL conference championships and the Super Bowl. 

**You'll want to go to the 2:15 mark of the video here to see A. Gully's response to our friend Vince G.'s criticism of his music at Cleveland Scene.  It looks to be 100% true that 10 out of 10 people on Gully's block who knew Gully three years ago still know Gully today.