Jrue Holiday of the New Orleans Pelicans was announced Tuesday as the winner of the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year award.
NBA players choose the winner from a field of 12 finalists. Holiday received 53 of 267 first-place votes to win over Philadelphia’s Tobias Harris (48 first-place votes), Milwaukee’s Kyle Korver (26 first-place votes) and Miami’s Udonis Haslem (20 first-place votes).
Holiday announced in July that he would donate about $5 million in salary — what he earned after the NBA season restarted — to start a social justice fund with his wife, Lauren, a former soccer player for the U.S. Women’s National Team.
Novak Djokovic is still in the French Open – but only after a drawn-out struggle in four sets on Wednesday night against Pablo Carreño Busta, the Spaniard who cashed in at the US Open when the world No 1 was disqualified for striking a line official with a spare ball. It was not a joyous reunion.
A month after their shared New York drama, Carreño Busta had notions of winning on his own merits after taking the first set of the second quarter-final on day 11, but Djokovic ignored nagging pain in his upper left arm and his neck as he cobbled together a 4-6, 6-2, 6-3, 6-4 win in 3hr 10min under the lights on Court Philippe Chatrier. He has two days to recover before playing Stefanos Tsitsipas on Friday, and he will need every waking hour of them.
Djokovic was coy about his injuries later and would only say: “I had some neck and shoulder issues. I’m still in the tournament, so I don’t want to reveal too much. I’m feeling OK. As the match progressed, I warmed up and the pain faded away. It allowed me to play better and feel better.”
Mooney’s focus at that age was more on basketball, his true love. He thought he would play point guard in college, up until he was a high school senior and realized that, at 5-foot-11, he would have an uphill climb.
“Basketball I thought was my ticket,” Mooney said. “I loved basketball. … But football was gifted to me. It’s just a God-given ability, and then when college basketball wasn’t there for real, I just took what God gave me and tried to showcase it out to the best of my ability.”
Hutchins, who grew up an Ohio State fan in Lima, Ohio, pushed football. She would have played if girls had been allowed to in her day, and when she moved her family to Alabama for a job at Goodyear, she immediately put the twins in Pee Wee football.
When Mooney’s high school basketball coach tried to persuade her to let him focus on basketball, she shut it down.
The Los Angeles Lakers’ Anthony Davis has sculpted features and wings for arms. He is, by any measure, and by every account, one of the most gifted players in the N.B.A. He can bully big men in the paint, splash long jump shots, deliver deft passes. He is uncommonly quick and strong and intelligent. There is no good way to stop him. During these playoffs, the Houston Rockets tried to swarm him with smaller defenders, and the larger Denver Nuggets tried to keep him out of the paint. Davis calmly and efficiently rained down points on both teams. And, on the other end of the floor, he is one of the top two or three defenders in the league.
Davis is sometimes described as a “unicorn,” a nickname for big men with great guard skills. Davis might be the rarest of them. In the playoffs, he’s already got the better of Nikola Jokić, another variation of the breed. He is a more complete player than the 76ers’ Joel Embiid, and he posts similar statlines to Giannis Antetokounmpo, while possessing a better jump shot. He does all this coolly, almost casually. Davis is universally admired; he is not, as superstars go, especially adored. He doesn’t thrill with the almost unharnessed power of Antetokounmpo; he doesn’t have Jokić’s sense of humor with the ball, or Embiid’s impish charm. He is more reserved. When he hit a game-winner to beat the Nuggets, in Game Two of the Conference Finals, he yelled, “Kobe!,” in homage to the late Lakers legend. But, for all his obvious competitiveness, Davis doesn’t show the almost cruel killer instinct that characterized Bryant on the court. Watching him during these N.B.A. Finals, I find myself thinking of a different mythical beast. Davis is more sphinx than unicorn: body of a lion, wings of an eagle, head of a mysterious human being.
… “Totally sucks,” the 36-year-old Rodgers said after the Packers’ Monday night victory over the Atlanta Falcons. “That’s all I can say about that. Obviously it is what it is, the situation. But especially as a older player, I look forward to the bye weeks immensely. I look forward to kind of a reset, recharging the batteries.”
Indeed, players often have used these off weeks to visit their hometowns, take their families on a quick trip or return to their alma maters to watch college football games from the sidelines. They won’t get those chances this year.
Over 200 member associations across all confederations have signed up for FIFA’s first-ever Talent Development Programme, setting a new benchmark for initiatives created by world football’s governing body in the area. The list comprises, among many others, the current men’s and women’s world champions, France and the USA respectively, as well as member associations (MAs) that have never qualified for a FIFA tournament.
Launched in January 2020 by FIFA’s Chief of Global Football Development Arsène Wenger, the programme aims to provide member associations with a thorough analysis of their high performance ecosystem in both men’s and women’s football, including all national teams, domestic leagues, scouting projects and academies, in order to ensure that every talented player gets a chance to reach their potential.
Health agencies recommend wearing a face mask to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 to others. But what if a face mask could be used as much more than a mitigation strategy in the battle against COVID-19?
A team of students at the University of Rhode Island has developed a “smart mask” named RespDetect that can quantitatively monitor COVID-19 symptoms.
Using a respiration sensor in the mask, a throat microphone and an ear temperature sensor, a patient’s breathing rate, body temperature and coughing rate can be monitored wirelessly using an app. A health care provider can then use the data to determine the best course of treatment for someone experiencing symptoms of the virus.
Ten sports startups from around the world will share their vision and prove their potential for generating venture returns at 1pm EST Thursday, October 8 at the Techstars Sports Accelerator Powered by Indy Demo Day, which will be virtually streamed for global viewing. Demo Day is a showcase event for these carefully selected 10 startups to present to a live digital audience of venture capitalists, corporate leaders, and industry experts.
The 10 startups were selected to participate in the 3-month Techstars Sports Accelerator based on their unique business models and technologies focused on the future of sports in categories including eSports, fan engagement, fitness and nutrition, AI and robotics, sports media and athleisure.
The light and temperature of an office are automatically adjusted to the personal state of mind of employees for optimal performance. Futuristic perhaps, but something that students, researchers and the business community within the POWEr FITTing project will investigate over the next four years. The knowledge institutes of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and the Fontys University of Applied Sciences, the research organizations imec and TNO and the Eindhoven field hockey club Oranje Rood are working together on this project which seeks ways to provide more vitality in the workplace. As of September 1 of this year, it makes up part of the Eindhoven Engine, a co-location project where people from different backgrounds, such as industry, knowledge institutes and government, work together on applied research projects.
Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano has called for a rethink of the football pyramid to consider the inclusion of Premier League B teams, and has described the EFL’s business model as “not sustainable enough”.
All eyes are on the Premier League to come up with a rescue package for EFL clubs struggling for survival amid the coronavirus pandemic which has deprived them of matchday income.
The Government has insisted the top-flight clubs should be the ones to look after the EFL, resisting calls for a state bailout.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver acknowledges that he had doubts if this was even possible. So did many players. Racial injustice protests were happening around the country and coronavirus positivity rates were skyrocketing in Florida when the NBA moved into Walt Disney World — the league calls it a campus, everyone else calls it a bubble — three months ago. It wasn’t a stretch to think it was only a matter of time before trouble started.
Never happened. The NBA got the games in and kept the virus out. Players managed to find a balance between what they felt were their basketball obligations and social responsibilities.
… The bubble plays a trick on us. The NBA has done a remarkable job of creating a great viewing experience, one with few reminders of just how different the environment is. For those watching games at home, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking this is basketball as usual. In many ways, of course, it is—the core aspects of the game haven’t changed. But there are still some notable differences from a standard postseason.
NFL Football Operations, The Extra Point blog from
No two NFL quarterbacks are exactly alike. Some, like Philip Rivers, Drew Brees and Tom Brady, are more traditional pocket passers. Others, like Russell Wilson and Lamar Jackson, have shown they are more comfortable passing when they’re on the move. We can see this by looking at the pattern created from a quarterback’s dropback and release point. The result: each quarterback’s unique “fingerprint.”
Here is a chart using NFL Next Gen Stats data that shows pass release locations for each QB in 2020, in order of least variety in their positions to most. Each pass is a red dot, and the darkened blue to yellow density areas correspond to the frequency with which each quarterback throws from each spot behind the line of scrimmage.
There was a time when San Diego’s Petco Park was considered a paradise for pitchers. The dimensions were deep, particularly in right field, and the damp marine layer coming in off the bay created atmospheric conditions, particularly at night, where well-struck baseballs dropped like latkes before they could get to the fence.
The year the park opened in 2004, the host San Diego Padres managed only 57 home runs in Petco. The issue took center stage when first baseman Phil Nevin launched a shot he thought should have gone out. Instead, he had to settle for a double. While standing on second base, Nevin looked up to then-general manager Kevin Towers, seated in his box, and spread his arms wide in exasperation– an early viral moment that sent media atwitter.
“When we first moved in, there were no buildings or structures around the park,” said Nevin, now the New York Yankees’ third base coach. “The fences were too far out. All the complaining was blown out of proportion, but at the end of the day it had to be fixed.”
Making Sense Of: Containing the Pandemic
Most current COVID testing programs haven’t been good enough filters, failing to identify enough infected individuals and, in terms of critical follow up, failing to remove the infected from situations where they can harm others. According to a new paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine there have been crucial data collection and management problems in the testing criteria (too few tests taken), in the test itself (too expensive, too slow for test results) and in the population-wide evaluation of results (too imprecise for population-level disease surveillance). A broadly usable, low cost, fast, easy to administer, easy to access test for COVID-19 is a much different test than the ones being used today.
Current tests meet a high threshold for analytic sensitivity. But they are expensive and, in most cases, take days to process. The cost and scarcity limit access of the tests to possible asymptomatic carriers, so while the tests are quite accurate the population-wide screening isn’t truly effective. The paper authors feel we need a new, different type of testing regime. COVID-19 testing should be inexpensive, fast, easy and, as a result, frequent and universal. There’s an emerging consensus that new rapid tests can be a paradigm shift, a dramatic positive step in ending the COVID-19 pandemic.
The NEJM authors write: “For an effective Covid filter that will stop this pandemic, we need tests that can enable regimens that will capture most infections while they are still infectious. These tests exist today in the form of rapid lateral-flow antigen tests, and rapid lateral-flow tests based on CRISPR gene-editing technology are on the horizon. Such tests are cheap (<$5), can be produced in the tens of millions or more per week, and could be performed at home, opening the door to effective Covid filter regimens."
The test developed by Yale scientists and used in the NBA bubble is a saliva test that was faster and easier than testing materials gathered via nasal swabs. It has been an enormous success but it represents an in-between step on the path to the still faster, easier testing that needs to occur more broadly.
College campuses across the United States that have instituted in-person teaching are experiencing the pandemic at vastly different control levels, from almost completely unmanageable to almost completely manageable.
The University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign developed its own rapid saliva test but couldn’t contain the asymptomatic spread as students socialized at the beginning of the term. University of Virginia students have learned that athletes get COVID testing priority. Faster, lower cost tests solves both of these problems.
Some universities are managing to keep their infection rates down to single-digit cases weekly. Testing programs in place at Colby College and at Cornell and at Quinnipiac are using the expensive tests, and mandating students take them frequently (2-3 times per week). These have been costly undertakings. Colby has spent $10 million and while Cornell doesn’t specify an amount but the school has built its own test processing facility in Ithaca, New York.
We’re six-plus months into the U.S. COVID pandemic, and we should be making progress toward solutions. Thankfully scientists are, but the solution requires innovation in order to transfer their ideas into practice. Pro sports and university campuses have demonstrated their willingness to innovate and have succeeded with their new methods and technologies. It is time for pro sports and university leaders to go the next step. Testing is central to stopping the pandemic. Playing fields and campuses are necessary places to make needed progress.
