Barcelona striker Luis Suarez has responded to criticism over the timing of a knee operation that saw him miss Saturday’s Copa del Rey final defeat to Valencia.
The Uruguay international is expected to be fit in time for the 2019 Copa America and has taken to Twitter to clarify why he went under the knife before the end of Barcelona’s season.
The 32-year-old says he feels he must answer those who “question my professionalism” and adds that he was “forced to go through the operating room and miss the final yesterday against my will” after suffering a “meniscus tear” in Barcelona’s UEFA Champions League defeat to Liverpool.
In the middle of April, as Hyun-Jin Ryu nursed a sore groin, the Dodgers made a request. If Ryu wanted to return from the injured list, he had to throw a bullpen session. The assignment deviated Ryu from his usual routine, but he complied. If he had his way, he would climb atop a mound only on the days he starts.
At age 32, after seven seasons in the Korean Baseball Organization, six more in Major League Baseball and one career-altering shoulder surgery, Ryu has learned to conserve his bullets. His teammates envy his ability to manipulate a baseball. They marvel at his calm on the mound. And a few struggle to comprehend how he maintains his precision without throwing between outings.
“It’s fascinating,” pitcher Ross Stripling said. “I can’t believe it.”
Ever since he first emerged on Tour as a tall, gangly 16-year-old, Alexander Zverev has been tipped for the top, a confident teenager with a big game and big expectations on his shoulders.
With three ATP Masters 1000 titles by the time he was 21, he was singled out as the man most likely to break the stranglehold at the top, the one who might breach the Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka domination of the sport’s biggest titles. He was the leader of the “Next Gen,” the younger generation of players, and the man most likely to step up.
With that came pressure. Though he was matching the big guns at the Masters level, it took until last year’s French Open before he reached his first Grand Slam quarterfinal.
As this year’s clay-court season began in Monte Carlo, he revealed he had changed his management company; his father, Alexander Sr., had health issues; and Zverev had ended his relationship with his girlfriend. All of a sudden, he needed to deal with a lot of things on his own.
… “Actions that are happening,” Warriors defensive guru Ron Adams said prior to the start of the series, “[Green] always seems to act rather than react.” It’s a tiny piece of insight that cuts to the core of the Dubs’ revolutionary defensive ceiling: the ability to thin-slice more accurately than everyone else, to take guesswork out of the equation almost entirely.
“Draymond is very innovative,” added Adams. “We’ve learned a lot from Draymond in terms of how he does things. Each year he gets more thoughtful in what I would call a coach-player role. He’s very good at analyzing, he’s very good at enunciating what he sees not only on the court but also as we’re planning for teams.” But he has to see the problem first. What good is the world’s best calculator, after all, without numbers to crunch?
Several names come to mind when you talk about the MVP of the Golden State Warriors this season, but it’s a good bet that Rick Celebrini isn’t one of them.
Celebrini is the team’s medical director and has been given high praise from the players and head coach Steve Kerr for helping the team maneuver through a season filled with physical challenges.
It was Celebrini and his team who got DeMarcus Cousins rehabbed and back in the lineup when it appeared a torn quadriceps suffered in the first round of the playoffs had ended his season.
… When we tell ourselves we can’t do something, it might just be that we are seeing something as more challenging than it really is. When we say that what we’re up against is the impossible, it might not appear that way to someone else—and it doesn’t have to look that way to us. Our eyes are incredible tools for shaping our experience. With them, we can quite literally see a new way forward.
I have conducted a series of experiments where we tested a strategy that motivates people to do something that might otherwise look insurmountable. We taught people trying to exercise better to look at the distance to a finish line using a technique we called keeping their “eyes on the prize.” They focused their gaze at the finish line and avoided looking around at anything else. Then we compared the effectiveness of this strategy with our baseline group, who looked around as they naturally would. Both groups practiced their visual strategy, then took off on a foot race.
My team and I found that people who kept their “eyes on the prize” said the exercise required 17 percent less exertion than the baseline group.
… Can elite athletes train to be impervious to pressure? Steph Curry thinks they can, and offers his dossier following that fateful 2016 June day as evidence. Since then, Golden State has won back-to-back championships and is positioned for a three-peat. In that time, Curry has drilled 61 clutch shots within the last five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime, according to ESPN Stats & Information. His clutch ability and mental resolve were highlighted in a seminal 33-point second-half performance to eliminate the Houston Rockets in Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals after he had gone scoreless in the first half.
“I guess you can say the [2016] miss didn’t haunt me,” he says.
Elite athletes fail. What makes them elite is they learn and grow from it. Think Earvin “Magic” Johnson dribbling out the clock and missing key free throws in the 1984 Finals against the Celtics and being branded “Tragic Magic” — then returning the next season to lead the Lakers to the title over Boston, and thwarting the Celtics again in 1987 with a junior, junior hook that has become an enduring symbol of Johnson’s greatness.
There probably never will be a perfect football helmet. That doesn’t mean manufacturers won’t chase that goal.
A tour of the Riddell headquarters makes that absolutely clear. Innovation, imagination, analytics, all with advancements in the product and enhancements of player safety as the objective.
Those advancements have occurred in this century at varied paces. Some improvements have developed over a period of years, while others — particularly nowadays with so many steps forward in technology and analytics — happened rapidly and will continue to do so.
… “We built a time machine,” said Sujoy Ganguly, the Head of Computer Vision at STATS and the lead developer of the AutoSTAT and POSE software.
“One of the coolest things we can do is go back in time and get data and video all the way back to (Michael) Jordan. We’ll be able to use it with our POSE software and analyze, actually compare Jordan and LeBron.”
“We get to either start or end bar arguments.”
The POSE technology Ganguly is referring to is the proprietary software that can track, measure and analyze human motion such as swinging a bat, shooting a basketball, dipping a shoulder or any other movement-related activity that an athlete performs.
But if you have any of a variety of “smart beds,” mattress pads or sleep apps, it knows when you go to sleep. It knows when you toss and turn. It may even be able to tell when you’re having sex.
Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, said it collects more than 8 billion biometric data points every night, gathered each second and sent via an app through the internet to the company’s servers.
“This gives us the intelligence to be able to continue to feed our algorithms,” CEO Shelly Ibach told attendees at a Fortune Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego last month.
Mike Mayock sat before a camera bank late Saturday afternoon, for the third time in three days. He was comfortable in his chair, with both joy and relief evident in his face following his first NFL draft as the Oakland Raiders’ general manager.
His maiden voyage making selections instead of analyzing them as NFL Network’s senior draft expert was over, allowing him to sit back, relax a bit and compare experiences.
Mayock started doing so with a story. He had dinner with former Baltimore Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome at the Senior Bowl in January, and asked him for advice.
“He said, ‘Mike, all I can tell you is that having an opinion is a hell of a lot easier than making a decision,’ ” Mayock said. “You kind of feel the weight of that in the draft room. …
They were once the dregs of the league. Now they’re the best. In an excerpt from their new book, Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik look at the organizational changes that made that leap possible.
University of California-Santa Barbara, The Daily Nexus student newspaper, Brandon Victor from
… Despite only being a third-year, [Tony] Ortiz has flourished this year as the Undergraduate Analytics Manager for the UCSB baseball team. Since 2017 — when former Director of Analytics Evan Short took over the position — UCSB has become the most analytically driven baseball program on the West Coast. Short pushed the coaching staff to raise the money to ensure that Santa Barbara has state-of-the-art equipment, including tools like TrackMan and Rapsodo that major league teams use for their statistics.
This past year, however, Short received an offer to help build the Toronto Blue Jays’ analytics department — an offer too good to turn down. After two years of revolutionizing Santa Barbara’s analytics usage, Short left for Major League Baseball, leaving a gaping hole for the baseball program to fill.
AJC.com, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Ken Sugiura from
The reasons for Georgia Tech’s ascension from back-to-back seasons without NCAA tournament berths to the No. 3 seed in the entire 64-team field are many. Perhaps the most frequently cited are the hires of assistant coach James Ramsey and volunteer assistant coach Dan Jaffe and the leadership provided by the Yellow Jackets’ senior class, both of which have inspired a gritty approach.
The increased depth of the pitching staff and the development of players such as center fielder Nick Wilhite (whose batting average jumped from .155 last season to .320 this season) are two other factors as has Tech improved from 31-27 in 2018 to 41-17 this season. When the Jackets open regional play Friday night against Florida A&M at Russ Chandler Stadium, they’ll also have another asset that they’ve counted on this season – their increased reliance on analytics.
Coach Danny Hall and his staff rely on two data services, TrackMan and Synergy Sports Technology. Hall said that “we look at them every day, and so we depend on that a lot.”