Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 15, 2016

Over the past 20 years, teams across the NBA have tried to replicate the San Antonio Spurs’ model for success. Who could blame them? The Spurs have won five championships during that span, and San Antonio’s .710 winning percentage since Tim Duncan arrived in 1997 stands as the best in American professional sports.

But for all of the teams that have tried to duplicate what San Antonio has done, they’ve all failed to understand the most significant factor in a successful NBA franchise: strong, stable ownership. There’s been no stronger and more stable leader of a franchise over the past 20 years than Spurs owner Peter Holt, who ceded control of the team to his wife, Julianna Hawn Holt, Wednesday night.

Last week, Warriors assistant coach Bruce Fraser stood below a basket at the Golden State practice facility and engaged in an admittedly ridiculous exercise: explaining how to shoot like Steph Curry.

Ridiculous because, of course, no one can shoot like Steph Curry. The only way to shoot like Steph is to have a father who is one of the best shooters in NBA history, spend your entire life honing your craft and even then, based on Curry family history, you’ve still got only a 50–50 shot. This is not to belittle Seth, who is a fine shooter; it’s just the reality. Rarely have nature and nurture collaborated as enthusiastically as in the case of Steph.

Slugger Prince Fielder returned to the Rangers’ spring training on Friday and was inserted into the lineup as Texas’ designated hitter against Milwaukee after being tested earlier this week for a sleep disorder.

… The NBA’s analytics revolution has clearly changed the way players are evaluated and judged. But an equally powerful shift in how teams are fixing and maintaining their players continues to dive deeper than ever behind the scenes.

iPads and Catapult GPS technology are now a regular part of many teams’ player performance regimens, with small armies of personnel doing deeper and deeper dives into the physical capabilities and limitations on players, tailoring the workloads put on them at practice, and having them keep sleep diaries. It’s a logical development in a sport where there are only 15 players, each of whose improvement is critical to help a team not only play well in one season, but over several seasons.

Teams now seek convergence between what coaches are teaching players on the practice court to help them improve, and what the athletic training staffs do to help them maintain top physical performance and recover faster from injuries. The flow of information, which is often slowed in an organization for any number of reasons, now must go back and forth, and be accessible by everyone.

… He establishes the rules and the tone for the Jayhawks early, usually when five-on-five competition begins in the summer. Everything is live. There is no out of bounds. Nothing is over until the ball is scored or secured after a defensive stop. It fosters a sort of brute peer pressure; Kansas assistant Norm Roberts recalls then-freshmen Andrew Wiggins and Wayne Selden staring idly before the 2013–14 season as big men Jamari Traylor and Tarik Black tore at a loose ball. “What happens is, the other guys will look at you like, ‘Go get the ball! What’s wrong with you, man?'” Roberts says. A couple trips later, the two young wings pounced on an up-for-grabs ball themselves. “That was something that stuck out to me, and it was coming from older guys that were here four or five years that were diving on the ball out of bounds in a practice that was a month or two before the season,” Lucas says. “I was like, ‘This is no joke.'”

One of the things I am encountering around the country, and really starting to understand, is the importance of collaboration. Yet it also seems to be one of those things that could be done better in many instances. This post will talk about one such common issue I am coming across and how we could then consider improving this – and I think is relevant to all sports, not just the context I will refer to.

… Most prospects begin training for the NFL scouting combine, pro days and private workouts with NFL teams as soon as they bid farewell to college. Often with the help of their agents, thousands of dollars are spent on programs that include positional training and two, sometimes three, workouts a day to improve conditioning and to essentially turn football players into track athletes.

“When you see young men (at the combine) that are as good as they can be condition-wise right now for this event, they’re letting you know how they work, what they’re all about,” Broncos coach Gary Kubiak said. “If anything, it’s a good thing.”

But for those successful enough to make it to a bowl game, the extended season makes time for rest and recovery nonexistent.

A startup that makes sweat-absorbing liners for helmets and hats is seeking $1.1 million in equity financing as it soaks up orders from professional sports teams.

Excelsior-based NoSweat’s peel-and-stick liners are filled with super-absorbent polymers and sold in packs of three, six and 12.
An image taken from SoSweat’s website shows how the company’s sweat-absorbing pads attach to helmets.

Founded by Justin and J.T. Johnson in 2012, the company sold more than 20,000 products in its first year. Customers include NHL officiators and pro teams like the New York Rangers, the company said in a press statement. NoSweat also sells its products in more than 400 retail stores.

Wearable devices, like the Fitbits and Apple Watches sported by runners and early adopters, are fast becoming tools in the workplace. These devices offer employers new ways to measure productivity and safety, and give insurers the ability to track workers’ health indicators and habits.

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For companies with large workforces, the prospect of tracking people’s whereabouts and productivity can be welcome. But collecting data on employees’ health and their physical movement can trigger a host of potential ethical and legal headaches for employers.

On any given morning, a WHOOP user may wake up to a high green score—a “go-ahead” for practices and competitions—or a “no-go” low red score.

An ultrathin coating for prosthetics fights bacterial infections and speeds up bone healing around implants tested in rats. After delivering a high-dose burst of antibiotics in the first few days, the coating continues to release the drug for weeks along with a protein that spurs bone growth. The goal is to cut the rate of prosthetic infections, which takes lives and could cost the healthcare system at least $1.6 billion by 2020 as increasingly more people get artificial joints.

… Rod Whiteley recently gave an excellent presentation at the Aspire Monitoring Training Loads conference entitled “The conditioning-medical paradox: should service teams be working together or as enemies on the training load battlefield?” He applied Tim Gabbett’s work to rehabilitation workloads and related it to the “chronic rehabber”; s/he who never gets to build a consistently high base of chronic workload to prepare themselves for returning to the training environment, so suffers a spike in acute:chronic workload and then a reinjury (Figure 4). He called upon us to “fundamentally rethink how we’re reintroducing the athletes” as well as breaking down the traditional silo structure between medical staff and conditioning staff.

Now we obviously cannot keep athletes away from the training environment forever and nor would we want to. However, it seems avoiding spikes in acute:chronic workloads with returning athletes may help the transition into return to training and competition, and to reduce reinjury risk.

… “I think it’s important to be playing teams that you’ll probably be playing in the playoffs at some point,” Popovich said. “It’s kind of like a final exam, in a way, where you see you still have time to improve some things. But it’s about how you play — not the win or the loss, really. If we win, we won’t be that excited. If we lose, we won’t be that depressed.”

How do you stop Leicester City? Even now, eight months into the season, it remains as much of a tantalising puzzle as a question. We have become fluent in their star names’ tricks and traits, while the Foxes’ distinct viciousness on the counterattack is a staple of Match of the Day highlight reels. Yet Claudio Ranieri’s side continue to be a footballing Enigma machine, refusing to yield all their secrets. Staggeringly, Leicester have lost only three times in the league this season – and only once, a 5-2 home loss to Arsenal in September, have they been properly filleted.

So how do you stop them? That was the question that Dan Altman – a Harvard-trained economist whose company North Yard Analytics works with a number of Premier League and Champions League clubs – set about answering at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on Saturday. His starting point, he told his packed audience, was this fascinating nugget: “The more Leicester pass, the less Leicester score.”

San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich has become famous for resting his players during the regular season. The Spurs routinely allow their veteran starters to sit out games or spend long stretches on the bench in an effort to keep them fresh for the postseason.

But when they do take the court, the Spurs don’t let their aging stars idle. In fact, they race around the court like a bunch of eight-year-olds on a sugar high.

The Spurs, who have the oldest roster in the NBA with an average age of 31.3, play at one of the fastest paces of any team in the league. Entering the weekend, the Spurs ranked sixth in distance covered per game (17.4 miles), second in offensive distance covered per game (9.68 miles) and third in average speed (4.33 miles per hour).