Brian Lewis spoke this week with one of New York’s top orthopedists and Dr. Laith Jazrawi, chief of the division of sports medicine at NYU Langone Sports Health, thinks Kevin Durant is likely to “do just fine” when he returns.
“He’s not an old guy, 36, 37 towards the end of his career,” said Dr. Jazrawi. “I don’t think it’s like that in him. He’ll do just fine. I don’t see any issue to say he won’t be as good of a player as he was a year-and-a-half ago.”
… Tip your cap to Doug Melvin, the Brewers’ longtime general manager, too. He tried to trade for Betts before anyone else.
Betts was only 20 years old at the time, a relatively unheralded prospect in the middle of a breakout 2013 season in Class A ball. The Red Sox were on their way to a World Series title, and Melvin was offering bullpen help in the form of Francisco Rodríguez.
“Doug Melvin was the first to ask, so I always give Doug credit,” said Ben Cherington, the Pirates’ general manager who held the same role in Boston from 2011-15. “He was the first one to ask for him.”
Tyrese Haliburton was a 6-foot-4 point guard and only weighed 170 pounds when he was entering his freshman year at Iowa State. The Cyclones had one of the most talented teams heading into the 2018-19 season with incoming freshman Talen Horton-Tucker, sophomore guard Lindell Wigginton and senior Marial Shayok. NBA scouts started packing the gym early in the season to evaluate an elite roster that would eventually go on to win the Big 12 that year.
“An NBA scout came up to me after one of our practices early on in the season, pointed to Tyrese and said, ‘He’s going to be your highest draft pick out of this whole group,’ ” Iowa State head coach Steve Prohm told Yahoo Sports.
Training load monitoring is a core aspect of modern-day sport science practice. Collecting, cleaning, analysing, interpreting, and disseminating load data is usually undertaken with a view to improve player performance and/or manage injury risk. To target these outcomes, practitioners attempt to optimise load at different stages throughout the training process, like adjusting individual sessions, planning day-to-day, periodising the season, and managing athletes with a long-term view. With greater investment in training load monitoring comes greater expectations, as stakeholders count on practitioners to transform data into informed, meaningful decisions. In this editorial we highlight how training load monitoring has many potential applications and cannot be simply reduced to one metric and/or calculation. With experience across a variety of sporting backgrounds, this editorial details the challenges and contextual factors that must be considered when interpreting such data. It further demonstrates the need for those working with athletes to develop strong communication channels with all stakeholders in the decision-making process. Importantly, this editorial highlights the complexity associated with using training load for managing injury risk and explores the potential for framing training load with a performance and training progression mindset.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Cass Sunstein from
One of Friedrich Hayek’s most important arguments pointed to the epistemic advantages of the price system, which incorporates the information held by numerous, dispersed people. Like John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek also offered an epistemic argument on behalf of freedom of choice. He emphasized that outsiders know much less than choosers do, which means that interferences with personal freedom, by those outsiders, will make choosers worse off. A contemporary challenge to that epistemic argument comes from behavioral economics, which has uncovered an assortment of reasons why choosers err, and also pointed to possible distortions in the price system. But even if those findings are accepted, what should outsiders do? How should they proceed? A neo-Hayekian approach would seek to reduce the knowledge problem by asking not what outsiders want, but what individual choosers actually do under epistemically favorable conditions. In practice, that question can be disciplined by asking five subsidiary questions: (1) What do consistent choosers, unaffected by self-evidently irrelevant factors, end up choosing? (2) What do informed choosers choose? (3) What do active choosers choose? (4) In circumstances in which people are free of behavioral biases, including (say) present bias or unrealistic optimism, what do they choose? (5) What do people choose when their viewscreen is broad, and they do not suffer from limited attention? These kinds of questions can be answered empirically. An ongoing program of research, coming from a diverse assortment of people, explores these questions, and can be seen to be producing a form of Hayekian behavioral economics – Hayekian in the sense that it can claim to be respectful of Hayek’s fundamental concerns. These conclusions are illustrated with reference to the controversy over fuel economy standards, with an acknowledgement that on broadly Hayekian grounds, the best approach might be to inform consumers of potential savings, while using a corrective tax to control externalities. [full text download pdf]
Lehigh University, The Brown and White student newspaper, Justin Lafleur from
… Even though Lehigh student-athletes are not able to compete in their respective sports this fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic, several are competing in the new Homefield Advantage program – a partnership between Lehigh Athletics and the Baker Institute for Entrepreneurship, Creativity and Innovation (Lehigh’s premier organization dedicated to the advancement of entrepreneurial thinking and action).
“The pandemic has been challenging for all of us, especially our student-athletes who are mourning the loss of their opportunities to compete in a sport they love,” said Director of Athletics Leadership Development Julie Ammary. “Helping our athletes identify ways to compete intellectually, and in group dynamics, may provide them more insight into how to access that spirit once they get back to their physical game.”
The development of wearable sensors has allowed the analysis of trunk kinematics in match play, which is necessary for a better understanding of the postural demands of the players. The aims of this study were to analyze the postural demands of professional soccer players by playing position. A longitudinal study for 13 consecutive microcycles, which included one match per microcycle, was conducted. Wearable sensors with inertial measurement units were used to collect the percentage (%) of playing time spent and G-forces experienced in different trunk inclinations and the inclination required for different speeds thresholds. The inclination zone had a significant effect on the time percentage spent on each zone (p < 0.001, partial eta-squared (ηp2 = 0.85) and the G-forces experienced by the players (p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.24). Additionally, a significant effect of the speed variable on the trunk inclination zones was found, since trunk flexion increased with greater speeds (p < 0.001; ηp2 = 0.73), except for midfielders. The players spent most of the time in trunk flexion between 20° and 40°; the greatest G-forces were observed in trunk extension zones between 0° and 30°, and a linear relationship between trunk inclination and speed was found. This study presents a new approach for the analysis of players’ performance. Given the large volumes of trunk flexion and the interaction of playing position, coaches are recommended to incorporate position-specific training drills aimed to properly prepare the players for the perception-action demands (i.e., visual exploration and decision-making) of the match, as well as trunk strength exercises and other compensatory strategies before and after the match. [full text]
Oxygen is absorbed by a protein in your blood called hemoglobin. When you breathe, your lungs load up blood cells with oxygen, then the pumping of your heart circulates the oxygen-rich blood through the rest of your body. Fresh, oxygen-rich blood keeps everything from your brain to the tips of your toes functioning and healthy. A pulse oximeter measures the amount of oxygen being carried by blood cells through your system and reports it as a percentage. That percentage is your oxygen saturation level (also called SpO2). Normal oxygen levels are between 95 and 100 percent. A rating lower than 95 can indicate problems with your body’s circulation, but your normal baseline might vary. A person’s SpO2 can also be lower because of preexisting conditions, the type of device taking the measurement, or even the amount of light in the room. (More on that in a moment.)
Current knowledge of gaze behavior in football has primarily originated from eye-tracking research in laboratory settings. Using eye-tracking with elite players in a real-world 11 v 11 football game, this exploratory case study examined the visual fixations of midfield players in the Norwegian premier league. A total of 2,832 fixations by five players, aged 17–23 years (M = 19.84), were analyzed. Our results show that elite football midfielders increased their fixation duration when more information sources became available to them. Additionally, participants used shorter fixation durations than previously reported in laboratory studies. Furthermore, significant differences in gaze behavior between the attack and defense phases were found for both areas of interest and fixation location. Lastly, fixation locations were mainly on the ball, opponent, and teammate category and the player in possession of the ball. Combined, the results of this study enhance the knowledge of how elite footballers use their vision when playing under actual match-play conditions. They also suggest that laboratory designs may not be able to capture the dynamic environment that footballers experience in competition. [full text]
Asked this week about his concern over staff members testing positive for COVID-19, given recent positives of some coaches nationally, Gundy said: “I just think it’s a matter of time. I’ll be honest with you, I’m shocked that I haven’t gotten it yet. I’ve been fortunate up to this point. I think our staff is the same way.
“We have some coaches that may be a little more in the at-risk category in somebody’s opinion. I guess it depends on who you listen to. Those guys stay away a little more and sometimes aren’t involved in activities with groups of people.”
The purpose of this current opinion paper is to describe the journey of ingested carbohydrate from ‘mouth to mitochondria’ culminating in energy production in skeletal muscles during exercise. This journey is conveniently described as primary, secondary, and tertiary events. The primary stage is detection of ingested carbohydrate by receptors in the oral cavity and on the tongue that activate reward and other centers in the brain leading to insulin secretion. After digestion, the secondary stage is the transport of monosaccharides from the small intestine into the systemic circulation. The passage of these monosaccharides is facilitated by the presence of various transport proteins. The intestinal mucosa has carbohydrate sensors that stimulate the release of two ‘incretin’ hormones (GIP and GLP-1) whose actions range from the secretion of insulin to appetite regulation. Most of the ingested carbohydrate is taken up by the liver resulting in a transient inhibition of hepatic glucose release in a dose-dependent manner. Nonetheless, the subsequent increased hepatic glucose (and lactate) output can increase exogenous carbohydrate oxidation rates by 40–50%. The recognition and successful distribution of carbohydrate to the brain and skeletal muscles to maintain carbohydrate oxidation as well as prevent hypoglycaemia underpins the mechanisms to improve exercise performance.
Many people approach their diet with the motto, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If you’ve found something that works for you, why not eat it on a regular basis? It’s easier and less expensive to stick to what you know than to constantly mix things up. For example, the standard dinner of many fitness-minded folks is grilled chicken breast, steamed veggies and brown rice—and they eat it every night, no problem! Also, lots of people eat their favorite salad every day for lunch.
Is this behavior nutritionally sound? Should people eat the same meals day in and day out? Or is variety a key to health? STACK talked to registered dietitian Brian St. Pierre to learn whether eating the same thing every day is a smart move.
… “You will not get hired on a resume,” [Nancy] Lieberman said. “You will get hired on a relationship.
“The women who are starting to break into the NBA, it’s been relationships.”
That’s how Hammon got hired, meeting Popovich on a flight back from the 2012 Olympics in London. She impressed him enough to get invited to attend a couple of the Spurs meetings and practices — she was playing for San Antonio’s WNBA team at the time — and when she retired from playing, Pop hired her.
… When the money was flowing freely, this system was able to slide by without much scrutiny. Now? Not so much. Sports are being trimmed at schools all over the country, and UC-Riverside is considering the nuclear option — no sports at all.
Making Sense Of: Rankings
Rankings are the bane of sports. It’s worst when a ranking is presented as science. Knowing who is good, better, best at something is a human activity. Rankings are personal judgements with individual biases, criteria and decision heuristics, all of which are full of problems.
Adam Krohn at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently looked at high school football rankings, asking how was it even possible to start with approximately 16,000 high school teams from every corner of the U.S. and progress to a “Super” 25 list of who’s best. National rankings that are “objective” like the Massey Ratings look at team versus team outcomes and weigh those outcomes based on historical differences between regions. Subjective rankings like the USA Today’s rely mostly on the eye test and the time that enlisted experts have to apply it. The process is science and it is art, according to Krohn. Mostly it’s crap, according to me.
Computer science departments get ranked similarly. US News includes them in published subjective rankings. CSRankings.org is the primary objective ranking. Only it can be shown that CSRankings.org rankings are also subjective, and bad. The CSRankings favor the traditional top departments and traditional top conference citations, and they work against new interdisciplinary research subjects. Citing CSRankings.org reinforces those biases, and makes the field less progressive and forward-thinking.
The human failing in subjective ranking methods is also severe. It’s hard to seriously consider rankings of polls of experts when true experts are increasingly rare. Vicki Boykis makes the point that gaining serious in-depth expertise is nearly impossible — the scope is too broad and time is too short. Non-expert experts become, as a result, our go-to people, and their skill sets offer limited expertise. Instead of expertise non-expert experts possess extensive networks and frequently those networks are a downward spiral with linkages to even more non-expert experts.
People make guesses, lots of them bad. What I find especially discouraging is that the process of soliciting opinions to inform guesses is, many times, horribly inefficient. “If you want somebody’s opinion, don’t tell them your opinion first. It sounds so simple and almost dumb when you hear it, except that nobody does it,” says Annie Duke in a recent interview with Katy Milkman.
Systems exist that combine computation and human subjectivity to create rankings. Pairwise comparisons consider A versus B, and as which one of the two is better, and an algorithm calculates a ranking outcome based on the human inputs. The decision heuristic is simpler with fewer things to consider. Bias can be discounted if participants are numerous and diverse. Criteria can be whatever a participant wants. And outcomes are closer to ground truth.
Shitty rankings have real downsides. The societal importance of crap rankings reinforces traditional pathways to progress, meaning that real people with extraordinary talents and abilities go overlooked and unselected. When rankings lack quality and diversity it indicates an information pipeline that lacks quality and diversity. Unfortunately, as we see, fixing rankings isn’t as simple as tweaking an algorithm or interface. Rankings require human judgement and collaboration. Endeavor to fix rankings and you’ll improve both.