Live Coverage Of The First Republican Debate

Q:What’s the over/under on Cavs comparisons to a participant? — Dylan Z Gioia A:Here’s the best statistical comparison between the Cavaliers and the GOP debate lineup I can think of: lining up the distribution of the candidates’ most recent RealClearPolitics polling average against the Cavs’ Value Over Replacement Player ratings compiled during the 2014-15 regular season: The distributions are pretty similar. Trump is LeBron James, Jeb Bush is Kyrie Irving, and Scott Walker is Kevin Love. Finals darling Matthew Dellavedova finished the season outside the team’s top 15 (he was below replacement level, in fact), so he’d have been relegated to the JV debate field if he were a GOP presidential candidate.

To my eye, the Republican candidates have been pretty sharp as a group in the first portion of the debate tonight. But it seems like it might be hard for any of them to gain much momentum when they could go 20 minutes or half an hour between answers. It might be better to divide the Republican field into smaller groups, as some of our readers have suggested.

Chris Christie can talk all about how things were bad before he came in as governor of New Jersey, but New Jersey Republicans are still very lukewarm about him. Only 50 percent of Garden State Republicans think he would make a good president, according to a recent Rutgers-Eagleton poll. Moreover, he trailed Donald Trump in a Republican primary poll in his home state.