SB Nation, We Ain't Got No History blog, David Pasztor from
Thibaut Courtois’ future was one of the big storylines over the summer, with the young Belgian getting constantly linked to moves back to Spain and rumors of discord within the goalkeeping camp with coach Christophe Lollichon brewing ominously.
Given that new head coach Antonio Conte also had his preferred coaches to bring alongside with him to the club, Chelsea did the sensible thing and moved Lollichon into a new role after almost ten years at the club. (Chelsea are calling him a “goalkeeper development coach” with vague duties of developing the club’s goalkeepers and “identifying future ones.”)
The new man in charge of goalkeepers was 49-year-old Gianluca Spinelli, who had worked with Conte for two years at the Italian national team and had been Genoa’s goalkeeper coach since 2004.
The ramp-up to tipoff is routine by now for Kemba Walker, a shot-making showman in his sixth season with the Hornets. He pulls out from his manse in a white Mercedes Benz GLE and waits for the black, wrought-iron gates by the community’s security hut to open automatically. He drives eight miles north to the Spectrum Center, his workplace. Once on site, he parks down by the loading docks, in a lot below street level, and walks through sterile corridors painted purple and teal. He changes out of black distressed jeans and readies for game action by slipping on compression boots to quicken his circulation. That lasts a half hour, after which he lowers his body into a 54-degree tub. He wears his disdain on his face.
“I do hate it,” he says, wincing. “I just really, really hate being cold.”
Walker, 26, walks out onto the drafty arena’s hardwood wearing a hoodie. He hustles into the lane and blows into his hands like a pitcher in October before acquainting himself with the ball, rubbing its pebbled leather repeatedly. He splits his time between two coaches. First, he performs touch shots, free throws and square-ups with Bruce Kreutzer, a mustachioed shooting doctor whom Walker credits for his three-point accuracy, 40.2%, a career best. He follows that with makes from predetermined marks. That series is done with Steve Hetzel, a stoical assistant known for fine-tuning Walker’s pick-and-roll plays into performance art. Together, they hurry over to the bench to review a few plays on a MacBook. Hetzel harps on Walker’s finishing efficiency. Results have never been better as Walker averages 22.9 points per game. His recent net tickling gives him goose pimples. It also provides evidence of his evolution, from a New York blur to a nuanced All-Star.
… “Usually, in the last couple years, if I got caught somewhere, I always knew I’m able to get a shot off,” LaVine told SI.com in January. “It might not be the best shot.” The solution he found was a temporary reset. Whenever LaVine was in control of a possession going nowhere—any time a set stalled with the ball in his hands or a move didn’t go quite as intended—and see a different level of understanding. Often LaVine would pitch the ball to Karl-Anthony Towns or another big out on the perimeter, only to immediately follow the ball’s path into a dribble hand-off. “Like a two-man game,” LaVine said. “If you backdoor or if you go around a hand-off, it’s a hard play to guard. Me and KAT—or Gorgui [Dieng]—we can both shoot. With me attacking, they have to make a decision.”
And with that, LaVine turned the emptiest portion of his shooting diet into an item of real sustenance. There are positive trends like this littered throughout LaVine’s offensive game—all of which make the news of his season-ending knee injury that much more unfortunate. LaVine has tore his ACL on Friday, the result of an awkward fall. But some of the pain with an injury like this one, structural and severe, comes by the way it thwarts progress.
It always looks simple enough. The Patriots huddle up, Tom Brady calls a play, the players align themselves into a formation, Brady barks out a few calls, then he takes a snap and hands the ball off to LeGarrette Blount or completes a pass to Julian Edelman.
But to execute all of this within a 40-second time frame is no small feat. The chain of communication is wrought with potential breakdowns — from Josh McDaniels speaking with coaches in the press box, to McDaniels calling the play into Brady, to Brady communicating effectively to his 10 teammates in the huddle, to Brady setting the blocking scheme at the line of scrimmage, to receivers going in motion, to all 10 players hearing any audibles from Brady, and finally to everyone hearing the proper snap count.
“Communication goes on throughout the whole game — personnel groups, play calls, on the ball,” Edelman said. “You have to be able to communicate in a split second at all times. That’s what practice is for, and that’s what we try to prepare for in practice.”
Overlearning refers to the continued training of a skill after performance improvement has plateaued. Whether overlearning is beneficial is a question in our daily lives that has never been clearly answered. Here we report a new important role: overlearning in humans abruptly changes neurochemical processing, to hyperstabilize and protect trained perceptual learning from subsequent new learning. Usually, learning immediately after training is so unstable that it can be disrupted by subsequent new learning until after passive stabilization occurs hours later. However, overlearning so rapidly and strongly stabilizes the learning state that it not only becomes resilient against, but also disrupts, subsequent new learning. Such hyperstabilization is associated with an abrupt shift from glutamate-dominant excitatory to GABA-dominant inhibitory processing in early visual areas. Hyperstabilization contrasts with passive and slower stabilization, which is associated with a mere reduction of excitatory dominance to baseline levels. Using hyperstabilization may lead to efficient learning paradigms.
Sports medicine or strength & conditioning in pro sports is a different beast versus the clinical setting. This is one of the things that drew me to my current position as the Head Strength & Conditioning Coach of the LA Lakers. I wanted the opportunity to work at the highest level but I also wanted the opportunity to grow and learn at the highest level. During my 6 seasons as a strength coach in the NBA, here are 6 things that I’ve learned:
1. Pro athletes don’t need the weight room to make highlights, they need the weight room to endure highlights.
… “I feel it’s very important we get the best players back in the game,” Terry told BBC Radio Five Live’s Sportsweek programme.
“This generation of footballers have earned very good money throughout their time, and we need to make it easier for them to get into coaching roles – by not doing the full length of the FA coaching course, which I know (technical director) Dan Ashworth at the FA is on board with.
The Conversation, Steven Rynne and Chris Cushion from
In top-level sport, success is the overwhelming criterion for judging coaches. In professional sport, team owners, directors and fans clearly value the product (winning) greater than the process (performance). … No evidence exists that a person can only coach at the highest levels if they have performed there. More specifically, there is no established threshold to be crossed to be eligible for future coaching success.
he NFL players’ union will be making a push for improved equipment and for more consistent compliance with the concussion protocol.
At their annual Super Bowl news conference Thursday, the NFL Players Association also insisted there will be no extension of the 10-year labor agreement signed in 2011. But the union would be open to a renegotiation before that deal expires.
“There’s a need to up the research and what sort of equipment we can look at,” said Bengals offensive tackle Eric Winston, the union president. “A new helmet, a new design to the helmet? It seems like the medical has come so far and with changing rules it has come a long way, but it doesn’t seem we have with helmets and shoulder pads.”
A proposed bill in the Connecticut state legislature would create a “athletic protection commission” to monitor and enforce the safety for all NCAA athletes in the state.
If the bill ever passes — and the concept is still in the very early stages — it’s believed Connecticut would be the first state to oversee college athlete medical care to this degree. State Reps. Matt Lesser and Patricia Dillon introduced the bill, which has support from the National College Players Association. NCPA executive director Ramogi Huma will testify Tuesday before the legislature’s Higher Education and Workplace Committee.
So far, the bill’s language is brief and vague, contributing to several athletic directors in Connecticut wondering why a commission is needed. The bill states it would be for the purpose of “protecting the health and safety of college athletes participating in an interscholastic athletic program by developing guidelines, gathering best practices, receiving and investigating complaints, and issuing remedies and penalties for violations.”
On the training pitches at Arsenal is where Jason Brown feels at peace. Coaching academy players, the retired goalkeeper feels unburdened of the mental anguish.
“This is my distraction,” Brown, who played internationally for Wales and in the Premier League for Blackburn, told The Associated Press. “I honestly feel if I didn’t have this distraction (at Arsenal) I might not be having this conversation with you right now.”
Instead, Brown is hoping to combat any stigma still attached to those in soccer with mental health issues by speaking out about the depression that struck as his playing career came to an end in 2015.
Like many professional athletes, Brown reveled in the adulation of fans in packed stadiums and the elevated status he held in the local community. He also craved the structure in his life: Training, rest, matches.
… There’s no doubt injuries have hurt the Bolts. But this narrative belies a more fundamental problem that was starting to become obvious before the Stamkos injury.
As we noted last month, Tampa already had worse than coin toss odds of making the playoffs at the 25 game mark. Many may have snickered at the time, but we bucked the “experience matters in a long NHL season” conventional wisdom and gave the rookie-laden Toronto Maple Leafs squad, which was two points behind Tampa Bay at that point, a 62.5% chance of making the playoffs vs. the Bolts’ 44.3%.
Andrew Gelman, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog from
… t’s natural to reason as follows: “We got statistical significance under inauspicious conditions, and that’s an impressive feat. The underlying effect must be really strong to have shown up in a setting where it was so hard to find.” The idea is that statistical significance is taken as an even stronger signal when it was obtained from a noisy study.
This idea, while attractive, is wrong. Eric Loken and I call it the “What does not kill my statistical significance makes it stronger” fallacy.
What went wrong? Why it is a fallacy? In short, conditional on statistical significance at some specified level, the noisier the estimate, the higher the Type M and Type S errors. Type M (magnitude) error says that a statistically significant estimate will overestimate the magnitude of the underlying effect, and Type S error says that a statistically significant estimate can have a high probability of getting the sign wrong.
We have tried to predict the future since ancient times when shamans looked for patterns in smoking entrails. As this special section explores, prediction is now a developing science. Essays probe such questions as how to allocate limited resources, whether a country will descend into conflict, and who will likely win an election or publish a high-impact paper, as well as looking at how standards should develop in this emerging field.
Social scientists and the machine learning community are acquiring new analytical tools to distinguish meaningful patterns from noise. New tools are exciting. But using software packages of the shelf, without understanding them fully, can lead to disaster. Several authors in this special section describe the importance of realistic goals that seek to balance machine learning approaches with the human element.
… it seems the value is less in the quality or proprietary nature of a team’s ideas, and more in the vehicles that move those ideas around. Teams are now spending more resources on people who can help bridge the gap between the front office and the coaching staff or the players themselves. With guys like Brian Bannister making an impact by helping the Rich Hills of the baseball world become something more than what they were thought to be, the value won’t be in having someone in the organization who advocates for a plan as simple as “throw more curveballs”, but will be in having someone with enough credibility that the players will actually throw more curveballs.
This doesn’t mean that new ideas have no value, of course, but it does seem like MLB is well past the time when a team can simply figure out what the next undervalued statistic is and turn that into a winning roster. With a very short shelf life on actual proprietary ideas, the new way to beat your opponents may be about better implementing well-accepted concepts in a way that actually makes a difference on the field. It’s no longer just about finding new ideas and then exploiting those ideas for maximum gain, but in figuring out how to deploy ideas that might make a small difference on a wide scale.