… [Brock] Boeser’s 19-hour whirlwind is an extreme example, but going directly from college to the NHL within days is now the norm as teams see benefits outweighing the risks.
The Coyotes played top prospect Clayton Keller two days after Boston University was eliminated from the NCAA tourney. The Buffalo Sabres signed free agent C.J. Smith and the New Jersey Devils signed Michael Kapla soon after UMass-Lowell was out. Elsewhere, the Avalanche injected some youth into their miserable season by bringing in first-round pick Tyson Jost from North Dakota, and the Canucks inked free agent Griffen Molino out of Western Michigan.
“It gives them a chance to get some games underneath their belt to kind of get accustomed to the speed and the size of NHL players,” Vancouver general manager Jim Benning said. “I think the players now, they’re so smart and they’re so well-coached that they understand different systems and once they’re explained to them, they pick them up pretty fast.”
… So how has Brady, in a league where hits are likened to car crashes, stayed healthy? “I have no doubt that Tom Brady’s ability to recover is due to his lifestyle health,” says Fergus Connolly, football performance director for Brady’s alma mater, the University of Michigan. Connolly, who served as the San Francisco 49ers director of performance under Jim Harbaugh, believes that maintaining a healthy lifestyle – diet, sleep, strength, flexibility and spiritual/cognitive resilience – is critical in a long NFL career.
“You can’t survive in the NFL without giving lifestyle an emphasis,” says Connolly, who just completed a soon-to-be-published book on sports science titled Game Change, “and for a long career it has to be all aspects.” In that sense, Brady’s longevity is more than just luck. His all-encompassing approach to the variables that he can control has made Brady the master of his own destiny, making his desire to play into his mid-40s all the more realistic.
… Acosta’s strong start to 2017 really began in the offseason. After winning the Supporters’ Shield, Dallas was expected to contend for MLS Cup but lost early in the playoffs in no small part due to the injury to Mauro Diaz.
Acosta decided not to take much of a break in the offseason. After a week off he traveled to Michigan to train at an athletic center and work on specific goals. He wanted to be “more clinical in front of the goal” by working on his finishing as well as his crossing. He also wanted to become more of an offensive threat from the central midfield position.
The end result has been apparent and Acosta believe his intense offseason workouts made the difference: “I’m glad I put in the effort. It’s really been showing.”
The numbers say Joey Votto will be worse in 2017. Or, perhaps more accurately, not quite as fantastic.
Yes, the Cincinnati Reds first baseman is coming off arguably the best two-year stretch he’s ever enjoyed at the plate. Yes, only a pair of injuries have interrupted what otherwise would have been an eight-year run of offensive dominance. Odds still remain he’ll get worse.
That’s the prediction of every baseball projection system, all of them dense algorithms created by intimidatingly smart statisticians. Some say only slightly worse, from great to a little less great. Others say he’ll be merely pretty good.
… “There’s a fine line there because you’ve obviously gone and drafted these young men,” Kubiak said then. “They work hard to get ready for the combine. What have they been doing since then? You run them in here this weekend and all of the sudden, you go full-speed for four practices. Probably not the smartest thing to do. So we’re adjusting. We want to do a lot of teaching. We’d like to come out of the weekend knowing exactly where our guys are and then put them with our football team on Monday and start to acclimate them with the guys. That’s a great point. I think everybody has taken a hard look at that, and I think we have too.”
… Marsalis also implies a religious aspect in his short article: “when you practice, it means you are willing to sacrifice to sound good… I like to say that the time spent practicing is the true sign of virtue in a musician.” Maybe this piety is intended to dispel the myth of quick and easy deals with infernal entities. But most of Marsalis’ “twelve ways to practice” are as pragmatic as they come, and “will work,” he promises “for almost every activity—from music to schoolwork to sports.” Find his abridged list below, and read his full commentary at “the trumpeter’s bible,” Arban’s Method.
1. Seek out instruction: A good teacher will help you understand the purpose of practicing and can teach you ways to make practicing easier and more productive.
Research suggests when volunteers are taught and required to practice rituals, they demonstrate greater trust toward others who practice the same ritual, and diminished trust toward those who don’t. [audio, 3:22]
Yankees reliever Dellin Betances wears a sleeve around his elbow to measure stress on a ligament. Chris Coghlan spent spring training with the Phillies using a wrist band to check his sleep and recovery. Others have GPS devices hidden under their uniforms.
In 21st-century baseball, digital devices monitor heart rates, skin temperature — they even track fielder’s movements, all part of the exponential data explosion used to determine batting orders, pitching changes and defensive shifts.
“I love to compare what the results say to how I really feel,” Coghlan said. “After three years of data, I enjoy comparing to see how accurate it is. I think that it’s such a better barometer to measure against than just like, I feel lethargic today.”
… Next to 3-D motion capture, Sparta’s technology can seem a little, well, spartan. Why be content with looking at an athlete through the soles of his feet when you could be measuring his whole body? Wagner’s retort: All of the others are gathering data they don’t know how to interpret. They’re compiling haystacks instead of finding needles, and then drawing conclusions no more scientific than the baby-crawling pitching guru’s. “That’s a key problem in sports science right now–it’s more about marketing,” he says. Wagner points across the gym to where Daniel Descalso is flying down an AstroTurf strip used for sprint workouts. “We could gather force data on this sprint and everyone would write stories and talk about how cool it is. The problem is, it has no scientific validity.”
Because Sparta has been measuring one thing and one thing only in the same way for almost nine years, Wagner says, its data is all “clean,” or usable. That mountain of clean data yields the kind of rigorous insights that not only impress coaches but also stand up to peer review. Sparta has turned its data into six scientific papers (four published, two pending) on injury risk factors, more than any of its competitors. The crown jewel is one published in collaboration with researchers at the famed Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado, showing a correlation between force-plate patterns and UCL tears, the injury that costs MLB teams more than any other. The startling conclusion: Pitchers who demonstrate the most drive relative to the other parts of their jumps blow out their elbows more often.
How is it possible to deduce anything about a pitcher’s elbow on the basis of how he jumps? “How could you not?” says Wagner. “There’s a big rubber on the mound for a reason. People forget that all movement is initiated through the ground. Even in swimming, races are won or lost in starts and turns, which are essentially a jump.”
… “Scott [O’Neil] could ask me if I wanted to sell watermelons with him on the beach in Southern California, and I’d be happy to do it,” Berger said. “The initial attraction was the opportunity to work with Scott again.
“After that, I really needed to understand the accelerator and lab space. I wasn’t really familiar with it. I’ve run a few businesses part time since I sold AND1, but I haven’t been an investor or familiar with what this space is. So, the second thing I had to do was really learn what other people were doing to see how we could be unique versus putting up another flagpole in a crowded map.”
The Sixers Innovation Lab Crafted by the Kimball, which officially launched last April, is led by Berger and his counterpart Rhyan Truett, Manager of Innovation Lab Operations. When asked about what differentiates the Lab from other similar operations, Berger said there’s no standard window for when companies apply and enter the Lab nor is there a cap— at least for now — on the number of early-stage companies in the accelerator.
Background Early identification and evaluation of concussions is critical. We examined the utility of using visible signs (VS) of concussion in predicting subsequent diagnosis of concussion in NHL players.
Methods VS of concussion were identified through video review. Coders were trained to detect and record specific visual signs while viewing videos of NHL regular season games. 2460 games were reviewed by at least two independent coders across two seasons. The reliability, sensitivity and specificity of these VS were examined.
Results VS were reliably coded with inter-rater agreement rates ranging from 73% to 98.9%. 1215 VS were identified in 861 events that occurred in 735 games. 47% of diagnosed concussions were associated with a VS but 53% of diagnosed concussions had no VS. Of the VS, only loss of consciousness, motor incoordination, and blank/vacant look had positive likelihood ratios greater than 1, indicating a positive association with concussion diagnoses. Slow to get up and clutching of the head were observed frequently but had low positive predictive values. Sensitivity decreased and specificity increased when multiple VS occurred together.
Conclusions Non-medical personnel can be trained to reliably identify events in which VS occur and to reliably identify specific VS within each of those events. VS can be useful to detect concussion early but they are not enough since more than half of physician diagnosed concussions occurred without the presence of a visual sign. The results underscore the complexity of this injury and highlight the need for comprehensive approaches to injury detection.
… In the beginning Wenger’s tactics were considered to be ahead of their time, and thoughtful. His nickname, “the professor” reflected this. Part of his original approach was to focus on more than just match day. The “non-visible” preparation of his squad ranged from improving the food menu the players ate, to adjusting training methods to place more emphasis on ball control. … A second key initiative was his ability to call on a network of scouts to help spot talented and undervalued players – especially from France. This brought him influential and talented footballers like Patrick Vieira, Robert Pires and Thierry Henry. He also used statistical data when purchasing players. This was not a new sporting tactic (think of the film Moneyball and what the Oakland A’s achieved in baseball by using statistical analysis). But it was one of the first proper applications of it to English football. Clubs now employ full time statisticians and the data being collected has created a new industry in offering analysis of it.
The Premier League is too fast, too physical and at times too dangerous. There is a potentially career-ending challenge in almost every game and for the safety of the players, it has to stop.
Saturday’s Merseyside derby had a handful of X-rated tackles. Ross Barkley was the main offender with a particularly menacing lunge at Dejan Lovren. The Everton midfielder was not the only culprit; players from both sides threw themselves into challenges with a reckless disregard for their opponents — and themselves.
The problem was not just at Anfield. Harry Winks may be ruled out for the season after falling awkwardly on the Turf Moor sideline but the Tottenham Hotspur midfielder’s hack at Stephen Ward seconds earlier could have had equally severe consequences. The Burnley defender limped away from the situation as the focus turned to Winks’ injury but the 21-year-old’s knee-high lunge was worthy of a yellow card at least.
The Washington Post, Fancy Stats, Neil Greenberg from
… how can managers maximize that advantage? Is there such thing as a “perfect” bullpen? While no team is ever going to shut out every opponent, statistical research can tell us how to consistently and most effectively put the odds in the pitcher’s favor, even if some of the ideas are a bit unorthodox. In that way, perfection is absolutely achievable.
It all comes down to four keys, and while none are hard-and-fast rules, the one requirement to optimizing your bullpen is thinking outside the box.
Use a reliever in the first inning on the road
As crazy as it may sound, one idea presented at this year’s Sloan Sports Analytics conference by Willie K. Harrison, an assistant professor at University of Colorado — Colorado Springs in the electrical computer engineering department, and John L. Salmon, an assistant professor at BYU in the mechanical engineering department, suggested you should start a “leadoff pitcher” on the road who pitches only the first inning.
arXiv, Statistics > Applications; Jongbin Jung, Connor Concannon, Ravi Shroff, Sharad Goel, Daniel G. Goldstein from
From doctors diagnosing patients to judges setting bail, experts often base their decisions on experience and intuition rather than on statistical models. While understandable, relying on intuition over models has often been found to result in inferior outcomes. Here we present a new method, select-regress-and-round, for constructing simple rules that perform well for complex decisions. These rules take the form of a weighted checklist, can be applied mentally, and nonetheless rival the performance of modern machine learning algorithms. Our method for creating these rules is itself simple, and can be carried out by practitioners with basic statistics knowledge. We demonstrate this technique with a detailed case study of judicial decisions to release or detain defendants while they await trial. In this application, as in many policy settings, the effects of proposed decision rules cannot be directly observed from historical data: if a rule recommends releasing a defendant that the judge in reality detained, we do not observe what would have happened under the proposed action. We address this key counterfactual estimation problem by drawing on tools from causal inference. We find that simple rules significantly outperform judges and are on par with decisions derived from random forests trained on all available features. Generalizing to 22 varied decision-making domains, we find this basic result replicates. We conclude with an analytical framework that helps explain why these simple decision rules perform as well as they do.