Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 5, 2016

The youthful Lakers raced up the court, chasing a fast-break bucket against the Golden State Warriors. But Larry Nance Jr. remained near the rear of the pack, pacing himself, surveying everything before him, calculating space and angles, searching, most of all, for an open runway.

Throughout a game, the 23-year-old Lakers forward hopes for these moments, almost hunting them but not quite. He’s learned that if he hunts too much, rarely do they unfold just the way he wants: culminating in a powerful, sky-scraping, momentum-shifting slam that blazes across social media and sends fans screaming out of their seats.

Above all, Nance, one of the NBA’s highest and most exciting flyers, has learned patience. Most of the time, he doesn’t have to seek these moments as they will often find him. He just needs to be in the right place at the right time and ready. When a shot goes up, for instance, Nance tracks its arc, then tries to position himself carefully among the rim’s tall timbers so that he can snatch the ball if it ricochets. “Seven, eight times out of 10, I’m very certain of where it’s coming off,” he said.

After the Carolina Panthers rung up points last season at an NFL Blitz-like pace, they dared to dream their 2016 offense could be even more prosperous with the return of a big piece.

At 6-5 and 245 pounds, Benjamin is the Panthers’ biggest skill-position player. General manager Dave Gettleman equated getting Benjamin back from an ACL injury to picking up an extra first-round draft pick.

But like a lot of what has transpired in this sinking season, those grand plans for the Panthers’ offense have gone awry.

… This is the two-sided story of Gronkowski’s seven-year tenure with the Patriots — off-the-charts play that at times has some asking if he might be the best to ever play the position balanced against a string of injuries that has caused fans to hold their breath every time he runs a seam route and takes a big hit.

The 27-year-old Gronkowski has had nine reported surgeries since his final year at the University of Arizona in 2009 — on his back (three times), forearm (four), knee (one) and ankle (one) — which sparks an obvious question: How much more can he take?

Giannis Antetokounmpo, the resident wunderkind of the Milwaukee Bucks, has an offer from Holger Geschwindner, the personal shooting coach of the Dallas Mavericks’ Dirk Nowitzki, to join him in Germany next summer for a master class in the art of the long-range shot.

“That’s a nice invitation right there,” Antetokounmpo said.

Imagine the possibilities. Antetokounmpo, 21, who is popularly known as the Greek Freak, already has a way of fashioning his 6-foot-11 frame into the perfect vehicle for so many tasks. He can consume acres of real estate with his loping strides. He can contort himself past defenders for leaning runners. He can post up, soar for rebounds and whip passes to teammates with his impossibly long arms.

Traditional movement screens are not always feasible when working with a multitude of athletes with time limitations. In this session from the NSCA’s 2016 Coaches Conference, Michael Bewley demonstrates how to implement the Dynamic Warm–Up Movement Assessment™, which is a succinct way to pinpoint movement deficiencies and apply correctives for an entire group at once.

As an industry performance analysis research has for a long time been all about KPI’s and analysing what happens on the court, pitch or ring. However to truly move on we need to see more research looking at how (if) analysis works, how we can get better at doing it and by that I mean not just finding new KPI’s but better way’s to analyse data, manage it and ultimately feed it back to the people who need to use it.

The methods of feedback (certainly in a sporting context) are massively under-researched. So it was great to see a recent publication in the International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport titled ‘Elite Football Player Engagement with Performance Analysis’, Craig Wright, Chris Carling, Craig Lawlor and David Collins.

Background No simple clinical measure exits to evaluate groin pain and its severity in athletes. The aim was to investigate the validity, reliability and responsiveness of a five-second hip-adduction squeeze test for football players designed to assess sports-related hip and groin function, pain and severity.

Methods Construct validity was assessed in 667 subelite male football players with a mean age (±SD) of 24±4 in the beginning of the season. Responsiveness and reliability were evaluated during the season in 52 and 10 players, respectively. Players answered the Copenhagen Hip and Groin Outcome Score (HAGOS) and performed the Copenhagen five-second squeeze assessed on a Numerical Pain Rating Scale (NRS) ranging from 0 to 10.

Results As hypothesised higher pain scores during the Copenhagen five-second squeeze correlated significantly (Spearman’s rho=−0.61, p<0.01) with a lesser HAGOS (Sport) Score. The change scores in the Copenhagen five-second squeeze also correlated significantly (Spearman's rho=−0.51, p<0.01), with HAGOS (Sport) change scores in the responsiveness analysis, and test–retest reliability (concordance correlation coefficient) was 0.90. Moreover, significant (p<0.01) between-group differences existed for HAGOS (Sport) Scores in players reporting groin pain intensity at one of the 3 different pain levels: NRS (0–2), NRS (3–5) and NRS (6–10). The NRS (6–10) group had the lowest median (IQR) HAGOS (Sport) Score of 47 (31–61).

Conclusions The Copenhagen five-second squeeze is a valid indicator of sports-related hip and groin function in football players. Players reporting groin pain intensity as 6 of 10 or more in the Copenhagen five-second squeeze experience substantially impaired sports-related hip and groin function.

StretchSense is a B2B supplier of lightweight and high-precision sensors for companies in wearables, healthcare, sports, and motion capture industries. Soft and stretchy capacitive sensors are a new type of sensor that is in strong demand for wearable technology, a current mega-trend determining new ways of human-device interaction, sports training, and healthcare provision.

We introduce the concept of “dynamic image”, a novel compact representation of videos useful for video analysis especially when convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used. The dynamic image is based on the rank pooling concept and is obtained through the parameters of a ranking machine that encodes the temporal evolution of the frames of the video. Dynamic images are obtained by directly applying rank pooling on the raw image pixels of a video producing a single RGB image per video. This idea is simple but powerful as it enables the use of existing CNN models directly on video data with fine-tuning. We present an efficient and effective approximate rank pooling operator, speeding it up orders of magnitude compared to rank pooling. Our new approximate rank pooling CNN layer allows us to generalize dynamic images to dynamic feature maps and we demonstrate the power of our new representations on standard benchmarks in action recognition achieving state-of-the-art performance.

… I sat down with Maddon and conducted a lengthy question-and-answer session for those attending the event.

Maddon answered every question I had about his strategic choices in Games 6 and 7, choices that remain a topic of conversation even in the afterglow of the Cubs’ first World Series triumph since 1908.

… what’s different now? Well for one thing the balance of personnel is right. The arrival of Tim Leiweke from AEG to become the MLSE president in 2013, signaled a new boldness about the organization. Leiweke had been the executive credited with bringing David Beckham to AEG-owned LA Galaxy, and he believed that only a similar degree of boldness could pull Toronto around. He appointed an ambitious general manager in Tim Bezbatchenko and embarked on a spending spree that brought back U.S. captain Michael Bradley from Roma and Jermain Defoe from Tottenham.

The latter transfer was trailed with a series of ads showing shocked English fans learning of “a bloody big deal” and both the Bradley and Defoe signings had an immediate galvanizing effect on how the team was perceived in MLS circles. For once the pressure on Toronto was not to defy the odds, but to deliver against them.

… League sources say there’s a strong likelihood that the start of the 2017-18 season will be moved up a week to 10 days, which is yet another measure aimed at reducing the number of back-to-backs teams face over the course of 82 games.

We’re hearing that opening night next season is likely to fall in the Oct. 15-20 range, which would be achieved by shortening the preseason schedule from its longstanding eight-game max per team to five or six exhibition games.

New research on the Premier League shows that professional football players are sprinting more and more. And it is changing the way the game is played, say scientists.

… It really looks like we’re putting lighter, faster players in the outfield: for the first time since before World War I ended, the league-indexed weight for the average outfielder dropped below league average in 2008, and it hasn’t quite recovered. This is also weighted for playing time.

The analyst must be able to translate analytical results into coaching recommendations.

Data analytics can only be effective in organisations with a cultural commitment to evidence-based practice.

Start simple when first introducing data analytics as a coaching tool.