… If watching his father’s decline taught Curry one lesson, it was this: how diligent the fight against those inevitable forces of decline must be. So when Steph entered the NBA, he was determined to stave off a similar fate.
“I won’t be playing catch-up,” he says, shaking his head, “when things start to slow down.”
Now, at 30, Curry has reached the age at which history shows NBA players of all positions — but especially point guards — often begin to decline, some sharply. In his past: three championships in the past four years and a historic two-year stretch in which he won consecutive NBA MVPs.
Teenager dazzled on debut and told his teammates he was the best, say those who worked with him, but his inspirational performances took the club to another dimension
… Tryggvi Hlinason, who is 20 years old and about 7 feet 1 inch tall, grew up in the northeast corner of this rugged, largely uninhabited island the size of Kentucky that rises out of the sea. The land is textured by lava flows and glacier melt, and mythically explained by tales of trolls and ogres and Gods. Goðafoss Waterfall, waterfall of the Gods, a popular tourist destination, is in this region. It is not an especially thunderous or towering waterfall, but it is striking, with hazy blue glacial water spilling over a horseshoe cliff of volcanic basalt columns. If you leave behind the tourist-rammed parking lot and turn to the interior, taking the Sprengisandur highland road for about an hour, you reach the farm. To get there from Goðafoss, Bjarki Oddsson, Hlinason’s first basketball coach says, “Follow that river.”
The plan, for most of Hlinason’s life, was to stay on the farm. He went to school and studied to become the country’s tallest certified electrician, a decision shaped partly by curiosity (“I always thought it was fascinating how electricity worked because nobody could really explain it where I was a from”) and partly practicality (“My dad was not a very good electrician”).
… The Bulls’ process — small p — is entering its second season. Lauri Markkanen and Kris Dunn, also acquired in the Butler deal, are two more foundational pieces that management believes can open a new championship window.
There are no guarantees it will lead to even a lone 50-victory season that the still-young 76ers have produced. But there is excitement and optimism, even with Markkanen injured and Thursday serving as merely a brief comparison point.
“I believe there’s talent on this roster,” executive vice president John Paxson said in an interview. “It’s young. But I told the guys at the beginning of the year that I don’t consider our talent to be that inexperienced other than the rookies. The key to this is how this group comes together.
SB Nation, Ridiculous Upside blog, Dakota Schmidt from
On late Thursday morning, the NBA G League made shock waves in the basketball world as they introduced a comprehensive professional path meant to attract elite high school prospects. These Select Contracts would go out to players that are 18 years old but not yet eligible for the NBA Draft. Starting during the 2019-20 season, players that sign robust opportunities for development and would pay them $125,000 for the five-month season. That contract is a gigantic improvement on the $35,000 that regular G Leaguers will make for the 2018-19 season.
Aside from that eye-popping salary, players on these Select Contracts will have additional benefits to help ready themselves before the G League season begins in November. According to a Q&A with G League president Malcolm Turner, the league will be “building a calendar of basketball development opportunities” that will start in the summer before they move to the G League.
Last season the NBA leaned in on teams resting players, particularly in high-profile, televised games. The NBA built in rest before those games to help, and teams mostly played along, but players who teams wanted to be cautious with still got their rest. That is not changing now, NBA teams have science to back it up.
The rest is starting early this season — Toronto’s Kawhi Leonard, Boston’s Gordon Hayward, and Minnesota’s Jimmy Butler are all out Saturday night on the second night of back-to-backs.
… The Steelers recently signed a four-year deal with Activbody and ActivSports products, which use technology to “measure, quantify, and improve muscle function for isometric and traditional gym-based exercises,” according to the company.
For the Steelers, that means players occasionally ditching the squat rack to huddle around a table full of iPads that track isometric scores.
Biometric parameters are the hidden gems found in leading biometric sensor technology that don’t get much attention, but hold a great deal of potential for next generation wearables and hearables. As background, one of the reasons PPG sensor technology has come to dominate the market for biometric sensors in wearables is that the PPG waveform can provide a broad range of insights on blood flow characteristics beyond simple heart rate measurement. This in turn enables a rich set of biometric measures, including continuous heart rate, R-R interval (heart rate variability), VO2 max, cardiac efficiency, blood pressure, and more.
But wait there’s more…the “metadata” about the PPG signal (what Valencell calls Biometric Parameters) can provide important contextual information for advanced use case development. The graphic below shows these biometric parameters overlaid on a simplified PPG waveform produced by Valencell sensors.
The Clippers and Second Spectrum just introduced Clippers CourtVision, a product that could revolutionize the way we watch and talk about the NBA. But what happens when every basketball question has an answer and all the magic tricks can be explained? Is it possible to know too much about the game we love?
With its Sports Tech Tokyo initiative, the advertising giant hopes to open up data and new business streams while positioning Tokyo as a hub for sports-related innovation.
A Duke research team has found a way to help sporting officials detect whether an athlete’s blood has been doped by an infusion of their own stored blood.
While tests have been developed to detect two of the three most common methods of dramatically boosting the oxygen-carrying capacity of a competitor’s blood, so-called “autologous” or self-transfusions have been impossible to detect.
An autologous transfusion takes some of the athlete’s blood out well before the competition, sorts out just the red blood cells, and then transfuses those cells back into the athlete right before competition to enhance the blood’s ability to carry oxygen, the essential fuel of muscle performance.
With the legalization of cannabis in Canada now through its first phase, the trend of legalization in North America continues its powerful momentum. With this legalization comes unprecedented access to the substance, and naturally, there will be a growing user base inclined to try it…or simply don’t have to hide it anymore.
With that growing usership and public exposure comes a responsibility to understand what cannabis is, what it does, and its potential uses are in sports. To do just that, let’s start by taking a look into the active ingredients in the plant.
As we moved closer and closer to a world where marijuana would be legal in Canada, some people surely dreamed of hitting the bong. For Matt Nichol, though, it was time to hit the books.
Nichol, a nutritionist and strength and conditioning coach who works with numerous elite-level NHLers, knew he was obliged to learn whatever he could about a product that could play a role in helping athletes do anything from deal with chronic pain to calm nerves.
“Over the last six months it’s been a major area of focus for me,” says Nichol, the founding partner and chief formulator of Biosteel Sports Supplements Inc. “I want to at least make sure I’m directing my athletes properly and making sure they’re getting the best advice possible.”
Of all the ways for the Houston Astros to talk themselves out of a penalty, a fine, even a reprimand for deploying a man to illicitly monitor the dugouts of two playoff opponents using a cellphone, they did it with the Chris Correa defense. Correa is the former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director who went to federal prison after habitually, unlawfully accessing an Astros database filled with scouting information and trade talks. His excuse: He believed the former Cardinals employees running the Astros had stolen proprietary materials and wanted to prove it. In other words: He was making sure the Astros weren’t doing something wrong.
Major League Baseball cleared the Astros of wrongdoing Wednesday after Yahoo Sports and the Metro newspaper reported that Kyle McLaughlin, a man with ties to Astros owner Jim Crane, had been removed from the photographers’ well in Cleveland during Game 3 of the American League Division Series and in Boston during Game 1 of the AL Championship Series. Houston argued that it directed McLaughlin to surveil the opposing dugouts to ensure their opponents weren’t using any illegal tactics to steal the Astros’ signs. In other words: The Astros were making sure the Indians and Red Sox weren’t doing something wrong.
“We were playing defense,” Astros president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow said. “We were not playing offense. We want to make sure it’s an even playing field.”