… As the game tipped off, DeAndre Jordan rose high to slap the ball away from Knicks star Kristaps Porzingis. Jordan did so with a black sweatband covering his right wrist. The thing is, Jordan doesn’t historically wear wristbands. But he did in this game, he tells ESPN, to hide a little biometric computer he has taken to wearing strapped to his wrist.
The WHOOP is a biometric device like many others — think Fitbit or Garmin. This one tracks heart rate, skin temperature and other metrics. What has Jordan learned from the collected data? It has helped him with his sleeping habits, his recovery from travel, what to eat and what not to eat. Simply put, he has learned “what I need to do and what I don’t need to do.”
“It’s pretty good,” Jordan told ESPN.com two days after the Knicks game. And it’s the future — the brave new world of big data is coming to the NBA, and every sport, thanks to an influx of new technologies like this, promising to reduce injuries and improve performance. Jordan is among the first of many.
… The first time D’Antoni and Harden met at Toyota Center as colleagues, they watched video of Nash. “James,” the coach cooed, “you can do all this.” D’Antoni, who spent so many empty seasons trying to sell superstars on his system, wanted to coax Harden from the wing to the point. Finally, he found a headliner he didn’t have to sway. “I can actually coach,” D’Antoni thought, “instead of convince.” Another year, it might have been a harder conversation, but the NBA has caught up to D’Antoni, accepting his theories as truths. Harden needed D’Antoni as much as D’Antoni needed him. While the coach was trying to rebuild his career, the Beard was trying to streamline his life, and point guard was a place where he could do it. His team, his ball, his decision. Every possession, every game. There is no nuance to the Rockets. They are the James Harden Experience, unfiltered and unleashed.
“This,” Harden says, “is probably what I should have been doing all along.”
One of the joys of spring training is the freedom to enjoy the good and dismiss the bad. So when Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom looked sharp in their exhibition debuts, with sizzling fastballs and two scoreless outings apiece, Mets fans could savor it. And when Matt Harvey allowed four runs Sunday and could not complete two innings — well, hey, we’re just getting started.
“It’s still early in spring,” Harvey said after facing 10 hitters in a 14-11 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals. “Coming back from Tommy John was a little different story — I was pretty pumped up for that one. But the biggest thing for me is just going out there more and more and getting used to facing other teams. The ‘velo’ will come.”
… His journey toward the top 100 in the tennis rankings has its roots in a backyard in Mexico, where his grandfather taught his father how to play. Nurtured on the public courts of Los Angeles, [Ernesto] Escobedo, 20, is blazing a trail for young Mexican-Americans with a sporting narrative similar to the Williams sisters’ in its genesis and improbability.
Some of the factors that make Escobedo a top prospect are not hard to spot. There is the serve that can exceed 135 miles per hour; the penetrating power of his forehand; the strength in his 6-foot-1, 180-pound frame; the assured way he wields his Babolat racket; and the precision with which he swings through the baseline.
… “I only played, like, really two seasons of college,” LeVert told Basketball Insiders. “So I do still have a lot of development left.”
A foot injury began in his sophomore season before multiple re-injuries to the same foot cut short both his junior and senior years, plus his ability to participate in the NBA Draft Combine.
Consider fellow four-year senior Frank Kaminsky, drafted a year before LeVert in 2015. LeVert actually logged more total games than Kaminsky during their respective freshman and sophomore seasons, but his injuries saw him finish with 103 games played at the NCAA level, barely two thirds of Kaminsky’s 144 appearances over the same four-year period.
… “I’ve only been there four weeks, but I already feel a change in how I view myself as a player,” Dunn said. “It has been eye-opening. I’m not used to working 9 to 5, but I’m going in there early and I’m not leaving the training ground until 3 p.m. They are true professionals and I feel like I’m part of a team that lives and breathes and dies soccer.
“We take our careers very serious and there’s only a certain window that we’re allowed to experience these opportunities, and it is a down year. It’s unfortunate that people seem to take it as a hit to NWSL, but we’re just focusing on our careers. This is the time to do it and I don’t regret it. The next World Cup is in two years.”
I was going from event to event, as you do at All-Star, and catching up with all the other players — some guys I know as friends, but a lot more who I just know from playing against. And at some point, it hit me: Damn. Look at all these young bucks.
It’s not like I was feeling old or anything, but I caught myself a few different times that weekend realizing that I was no longer one of the young guys in the league.
P.K. Subban spent the first seven years of his career with the Montreal Canadiens before he was traded this past offseason to the Nashville Predators. On The Bill Simmons Podcast, the star defenseman explains how commissioner Gary Bettman has grown the league and considers changing the NHL’s 82-game regular season.
After the Golden State Warriors’ 103-102 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Friday, coach Steve Kerr announced he would be sitting Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson and Andre Iguodala for Saturday’s contest against the San Antonio Spurs.
Kerr said his decision was strictly due to health concerns and the fact the Warriors will have been on the road for seven of their past eight games.
Every week I get the same plea to explain how to improve compliance with athletes— mainly with diet and sleep, but monitoring as well. No matter how much research coaches read or years of experience they have, a limiting factor to athlete success is the athlete themself. Instead of writing a great theoretical piece on monitoring or tips on sleep and sports nutrition, I wrote the article that everyone needs but rarely asks for publicly.
This guide on compliance deals with the reality of coaches’ experiences. I understand because I, too, struggle and succeed with getting athletes to do what they need to do. The promise is simple; what is shared works for me and other coaches. How much you want and believe in the data you collect will dictate what you get back from athletes.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AJC.com, Ken Sugiura from
… Lammers particularly relished a class he took last summer, Mechanical Engineering 2110 (Creative Decisions and Design), in which students collaborate to build a robot that competes against other teams. The robot was tasked with grabbing one block, pushing away another and holding a third over the game board. Having clicked with the computer language LabVIEW, Lammers became the team’s go-to programmer. … The team was seeded 27th of 28 teams, Lammers said, but ended up reaching the semifinals. When he called home to tell his parents, Chris Lammers said, his son was as excited as he was after the last-second win over Notre Dame in January.
… Poor sleep behaviors can ultimately be broken down into two domains, sleep duration and sleep hygiene. Sleep duration is simply the length of time habitually slept over the course of a 24-hour period. Sleep hygiene is a more recent descriptor, representing both the pre-bedtime routine, sleeping environment, and sleep-wake schedule. Collectively, irregularities in aspects of either sleep duration and / or sleep hygiene can have detrimental consequences for the elite NBA athlete.
… Over the last few months, I’ve been working with a blockbuster group of professional runners to bring you their most tested and proven recovery ideas.
If you’ve ever been curious how elite runners handle all that running without getting hurt every day, this book is for you.
The journey from rock bottom starts before dawn for Rutgers.
The Scarlet Knights trickle into their bubbled practice facility, escaping the chill of a winter morning. Basketball shorts, hoodie, T-shirt and headphones are the standard uniform. They stretch. They yawn. They warm-up by jogging a few laps. Then … controlled chaos . An hour of rolling and tumbling, diving and jumping on large gymnastic mats. And tug-o-war. Lots of intense tug-o-war.
Winter is rise and grind season in college football. Players cannot practice with coaches, but they can do conditioning training. Winter workouts have long been part of college football, but they have become more structured, more strategic and more intense as coaches look for any edge in what has become a year-round process of preparing a team.
Data collection has been a part of the daily routine of strength and conditioning coaches since well before the invention of software-based spreadsheets. There has long been a focus on quantifying heights, times, distances, weights, and much more within a strength and conditioning program. Regardless of programming paradigm, the ability to objectively define improvements in performance is a central need of strength and conditioning coaches.
While handwritten records have largely progressed to a digital format, the process and procedures involved in testing and recording data have not experienced the same evolution. The logistics of data collection and recording in a large team environment where supervision and coaching take precedence creates many issues for strength coaches. The result of these actions creates an issue: How sure are we that the data we are recording in strength and conditioning, practice, competition, nutrition, rehabilitation, wellness, and recovery is accurate and reliable?
The Conversation, Neil Gibson and Kevin O'Gorman from
Bullying can take place in all manner of settings, from the school yard to the boardroom. Recently there has been an increase in allegations associated with sport, particularly around athletes competing at the highest level.
As one Canadian sporting body put it, bullying is a pattern of behaviour that occurs when there is an imbalance of power between peers, and in the absence of provocation. It is a definition that may make you think cases of bullying in sport are limited to the relationship between coach and athlete.
Breathing dysfunction is frequently associated with common musculoskeletal problems and is present in approximately 60% of active, healthy adults. It is also a contributing factor in movement dysfunction and can lead to decreased pain thresholds and impaired motor control and balance.
In collaboration with renowned osteopath and researcher, Dr. Rosalba Courtney, Functional Movement Systems has developed a course that equips professionals to identify and correct breathing dysfunction in their clients and patients.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Hildward Vandormael et al from
When making decisions, humans and other primates move their eyes freely to gather information about their environment. A large literature has explored the factors that determine where the eyes fall during natural scene perception and visual search, concluding that deviant or surprising perceptual information attracts attention and gaze. Here, we describe a sampling policy that paradoxically shows that in a decision-making task, the eyes are attracted to expected rather than unexpected information: When classifying the average of an array of numbers, human observers looked by preference at the numbers that were closest to the mean. This policy drove a behavioral tendency to discount the influence of outliers when making choices, leading to “robust” choices about the stimulus array.
… Michael Schrage from the MIT Center for Digital Business nets it out pretty simply. If you want to encourage teamwork, reward it. And not just a little. In his Harvard Business Review article “Reward Your Best Teams, Not Just Star Players,” he turns it into simple math: a 50/50 split.
“For every executive utterance praising a high-impact individual, there should be an equally emphatic expression of support for a high-achieving team… Teams, not just individuals, should get their fair share of bonus pools. A perceived — or real — absence of fairness can cripple team culture.”
This study was aimed at examining how basketball players view unexpected performance errors in basketball, and under what conditions they perceive them as choking. Fifty-three basketball players were randomly assigned into 2 groups (game half) to evaluate the linkage between performance decline and choking as a function of game-time, score gap and game half. Within each group, players viewed 8 scenario clips, which featured a different player conducting an error, and subsequently rated the extent of performance decline, the instance of choking and the salience of various performance attributions regarding the error. The analysis revealed that choking was most salient in the 2nd half of the game, but an error was perceived as choking more saliently in the beginning of the 2nd half. This trend was also shown for players’ perception of performance decline. Players’ ratings of the attributions assigned to errors, however, revealed that during the end of the 2nd half, time pressure and lack of concentration were the causes of errors. Overall, the results provide evidence towards a conceptual framework linking performance decline to the perception of choking, and that errors conducted by players are perceived as choking when there is not a salient reason to suggest its occurrence.
Visit just about any tennis club on a Saturday, and you’re likely to witness otherwise sensible adults losing their minds over line calls. Players suffer complete meltdowns as they hurl insults. Parents morph into brooding teenagers. Friends become enemies. Postmatch beers can undo some of the damage, but the shame and resentment linger for days.
More civilized times may lie ahead. French inventor Grégoire Gentil has designed a $200 GoPro-size device that can be fastened to any net post and detect whether balls are in or out with surprising accuracy. It’s called, reasonably enough, the In/Out. “I was born in Paris and raised on clay,” Gentil says. On clay, the ball leaves a mark, and he recalls many arguments over a blemish on the court. “It was the starting point of this, I would say.”
The authors present an approach for designing self-monitoring technology called “semi-automated tracking,” which combines both manual and automated data collection methods. Through this approach, they aim to lower the capture burdens, collect data that is typically hard to track automatically, and promote awareness to help people achieve their self-monitoring goals. They first specify three design considerations for semi-automated tracking: data capture feasibility, the purpose of self-monitoring, and the motivation level. They then provide examples of semi-automated tracking applications in the domains of sleep, mood, and food tracking to demonstrate strategies they developed to find the right balance between manual tracking and automated tracking, combining each of their benefits while minimizing their associated limitations.
… After Villarreal and FC Barcelona, Seattle Sounders will be benefited with FootMapp, as their primary tool of tactical analysis, with the objective of making a success out of the challenging next season.
I’ve just got back from a sunny Barcelona covering Mobile World Congress and as our features editor already so eloquenty put it, there really weren’t a lot of wearables to talk about. There were a few nice ideas and concepts being played around with, but it was a pretty quiet show on the whole.
The biggest story came courtesy of the Huawei Watch 2, the company’s second generation Android Wearsmartwatch that now comes in two versions. There’s the Sport and the Classic, so it’s pretty much matched Samsung’s strategy with the Gear S3 Frontier and Classic, or more recently LG with its Watch Sport and Style smartwatches.
It’s pretty obvious to see what’s happening here. These companies are covering the bases by appealing to two very different types of watch wearers. One that’s obsessed with style and the other that actually doesn’t mind wearing something a bit more bulky as long as it’s packed with sports tracking goodies.
When Andrew Murray is making decisions about his athletes, he wants those decisions to be based on data, not opinion. In fact, the University of Oregon’s Director of Performance and Sports Science says utilizing data is the best way to decide how to work with individual student-athletes and programs at large.
“For us, the Polar Team Pro system provides evidence and data to support our decisions,” says Murray. “We can look at the ‘dose’ a coach is prescribing and the response from the athlete. We use objective markers from Polar Team Pro – data such as how long we spent in each heart-rate zone at a particular intensity – to help us make our decisions on how to train athletes.”
On an athlete-by-athlete basis, the Polar Team Pro system allows athletic performance coaches to create programs based on individual fitness levels and measure individually, as well.
Early-stage basketball analytics and data company Noah Basketball won the startup competition and $5,000 at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last week in Boston as it pitched investors, potential customers and business partners.
It’s currently working with five NBA teams including the Miami Heat, Utah Jazz, Dallas Mavericks, Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers, which was one of the first organizations to utilize the Noahlytics Data Service to improve players’ shooting percentages. According to Noah Basketball, it’s also looking to add an additional 12 NBA teams in the coming months following Sloan.
On playing fields across the country, nervous trainers stand on the sidelines, hoping none of their players will sustain a head injury. After years of denial, organizations such as the National Football League are finally beginning to recognize the dangers of concussion. Although awareness of the issue has increased enormously, diagnosis remains difficult, relying exclusively on players’ subjective reports of symptoms such as blurred vision, dizziness, headache and nausea.
At least two life sciences companies are now developing blood tests that can detect concussion more reliably and objectively, and a recent study suggests such tests may eventually be game-changers. “The biggest problem is that the clinical criteria for diagnosing concussion are very vague,” says Henrik Zetterberg, a professor of neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “If someone hits their head and doesn’t feel 100 percent well afterwards, that can fulfill the criteria—it’s not much stricter than that.” A blood test that diagnoses concussion accurately and reliably would, therefore, be a valuable aid to sports teams—and to medicine in general.
Objective To assess whether a difference exists in the prevalence of mild or more severe depressive symptoms between high-performance athletes and non-athletes.
Design Comparative OR meta-analysis.
Data sources We searched PsycINFO, PubMed, MEDLINE, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus and Google Scholar, as well as the reference lists of reviews of mental health issues in high-performance athletes.
Eligibility We included studies that compared high-performance athletes and non-athletes, included a validated measure of depressive symptoms and included the prevalence of individuals who indicated at least mild depressive symptoms.
Results Five articles reporting data from 1545 high-performance athletes and 1811 non-athletes were examined. A comparative OR meta-analysis found high-performance athletes were no more likely than non-athletes to report mild or more severe depressive symptoms (OR=1.15, 95% CI=0.954 to 1.383, p=0.145). Male high-performance athletes (n=940) were no more likely than male non-athletes (n=605) to report mild or more severe depressive symptoms (OR=1.17, 95% CI=0.839 to 1.616, p=0.362). For females, high-performance athletes (n=948) were no more likely than non-athletes (n=605) to report mild or more severe depressive symptoms (OR=1.11, 95% CI=0.846 to 1.442, p=0.464). Overall, male high-performance athletes (n=874) were 52% less likely to report mild or more severe depressive symptoms than female high-performance athletes (n=705) (OR=0.48, 95% CI=0.369 to 0.621, p<0.001).
Summary/conclusions High-performance athletes were just as likely as non-athletes to report depressive symptoms. Researchers need to move beyond self-report measures of depressive symptoms and examine the prevalence of clinically diagnosed depressive disorders in athletes.
Researchers at Toronto Western Hospital’s Canadian Concussion Centre (CCC) have discovered the presence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brain of a deceased patient with no known history of traumatic brain injury or concussion, the first known case of its kind.
The case study, published in the International Journal of Pathology and Research and presented at the CCC’s 5th annual symposium on Research on the Concussion Spectrum of Disorders, discusses the unexpected finding which resulted from an autopsy examining the brain of a patient with a seven-year history of clinically diagnosed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and motor neuron disease (MND), yet no history of head trauma or any participation in activities associated with risk of concussion, according to his family.
Yale Daily News, Sebastian Kupchaunis and Matthew Mister from
The Yale Athletic Department proposed a new budget for the upcoming year that will increase its sports medicine staff by at least two full-time trainers, should it be approved by the Office of the Provost.
Director of Athletics Tom Beckett met with Provost Ben Polak and the University Budget Committee on Friday in the department’s annual meeting to present the budget plan for the 2017–18 academic year. The department has been plagued by understaffing in recent years, failing to meet its recommended number of full-time athletic trainers as specified by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association.
NBA physicians, trainers, players and teams increasingly rely on sports analytics and devices to prevent injuries.
Here are six things to know:
1. IBM’s analytic results show that injured players impact a team’s chemistry, record and fan attendance. The correlation has led to an increased reliance on predictive analytics, which allows physicians and teams to predict injury risk and modify training regimens for players.
National Football League teams violated federal laws governing prescription drugs, disregarded guidance from the Drug Enforcement Administration on how to store, track, transport and distribute controlled substances, and plied their players with powerful painkillers and anti-inflammatories each season, according to sealed court documents contained in a federal lawsuit filed by former players.
The sealed material, which was reviewed by The Washington Post, provides a rare look into the league’s relationship with drugs and how team doctors manage the pain inherent in a bruising sport to keep players on the field.
… “All other things being equal, if you took a meal and blended it, you’re likely to feel fuller longer,” Spiller said.
The body is very sophisticated, of course, but initially when you take a meal it’s the size of your stomach that determines how full you feel—regardless of what’s in it. After a bit, when the body has analyzed what’s coming out through the duodenum, it’ll start to take a view on whether what you took had nourishment or not. And if it didn’t, you start to feel hungry again a lot quicker.
British Journal of Sports Medicine, Editorial from
Good nutrition choices can support optimal health and performance of footballers. The intake, type, quantity and timing of foods, fluids and supplementation can optimise preparation, performance and recovery of players within and between matches. In the fast-paced world of elite football, a one-stop shop resource gathering current best practice and research information would greatly benefit practitioners and players. Expert consensus statements are widely used to improve the quality of player care. Recently, a generic sports nutrition consensus was published; however, football is different and somewhat unique, and specific nutrition guidelines have not been updated for over a decade.
We believe that sports-specific recommendations are needed, and 10 years on we ask ourselves, are these guidelines relevant today? This editorial highlights (1) why an updated football-specific consensus is necessary and (2) how it can benefit the modern-day football practitioner and player.
Is there a drug I can take, Limitless-style, that will make me better at video games? Ideally, it would be something legal. And something that wouldn’t put me in any medical danger.
There are a lot of drugs on the market that claim to boost gaming prowess. This week, I tried two.
For the first time in its 93-year history, the American Heart Association has released a “scientific statement” on meal timing and frequency, and how they can affect weight and cardiovascular disease. The advisory committee behind the statement — a mix of physicians and nutrition researchers — note several reasons for the review’s importance now. These include rising rates of obesity, heart disease and diabetes, as well as increased professional and popular interest in meal-timing topics.
For example, is breakfast good or bad for health and weight control? Does fasting reduce body weight? Can it improve glucose control? What about calories consumed after dinner?
… Much of the Pittsburgh-based activity in the young, dynamic field of sports analytics has taken place since the beginning of the decade. A handful of academics connected to CMU have joined the staffs of professional sports teams, including Mr. Ventura and former faculty member Andrew Thomas, now the lead hockey researcher for the Minnesota Wild.
“In my first year of grad school at CMU, which was in 2010, I took a sports analytics seminar from Andrew, where we just sort of read papers and brainstormed ideas of how could we improve the methodology used here if we wanted to,” Mr. Ventura, 29, said.
That led to further activity: Mr. Thomas and Mr. Ventura held a conference in Pittsburgh on hockey analytics in 2014 and launched a website, WAR On Ice, devoted to the subject. The Tartan Sports Analytics Club was established in 2013.
SB Nation, Beyond the Box Score blog, Henry Druschel from
Modern baseball remains completely tied to its past, despite all the new data and analysis at our disposal. What could pitching look like if that wasn’t the case?
… a six-month internal review of the NBA’s officiating program, pushed for by Commissioner Adam Silver, has reached the conclusion that more eyes and more technology can only help. The results of that review, announced by the NBA last week, boil down to this: the refs are good, but they could be better.
So the NBA’s President of Basketball Operations, Byron Spruell, announced a series of initiatives the league believes will improve officials’ performance from all areas: in number, in scheduling, in evaluation and in game responsibilities.
“Like we like to say, they’re the best at what they do,” Spruell said by phone Friday. “But any team and any individual can always get better.
To examine more deeply, I’ll compare 6 independently created win probability models using projections from Super Bowl 51. Lessons learned can help us better understand how these models operate. Additionally, I’ll provide one example of how to check a win probability model’s accuracy, and share some guidelines for how we should better disseminate win probability information.
… In this post, I’ll introduce a few tools that can help us evaluate WPMs probabilistically. All WPMs assume some kind of probabilitistic evolution of the game’s future given the present situation. By assuming randomness in the sequence of game events, and because win probability is itself a function of game events (e.g., the score, time remaining, etc.) win probabilities themselves are random variables; a function applied to something random produces something random; randomness in, randomness out. This allows us to ask questions like “what’s the probability that the winning team’s win probability could dip as low as 5%”?
To help with this, we have NFL in-game win probability data for the past 8 seasons from pro football reference, thanks to Maksim Horowitz’s data scraping package. There are more sophisticated WPMs out there, but this already has public historical data. We can also simulate win probabilities for a mathematical game/example where we know win probability as fact.
International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology from
This review poses three key issues that will progress our understanding of the sport expertise literature and its translational scientific impact. Primarily relying on research conducted in interceptive sport tasks, and to a lesser extent team sports, we review the perceptual-cognitive skills of sports experts and explore the challenge of designing a sufficiently representative task to examine expertise. We focus on the methodological challenges presented by the reciprocal relationship between players’ action capabilities and their perceptual-cognitive skill. Second, we consider the need for a paradigm shift in the experimental approach used when examining the development of sport expertise. In short, a shift from traditional expert-novice designs to more prospective longitudinal designs that cross-sectionally track the development of expertise is discussed. The final issue considers how the volume of in situ data now collected provides a rich source of information that sport expertise researchers have only begun to consider and integrate with more traditional sport psychology research. We demonstrate how statistical approaches that have described the likely trajectories of expert performers on their journey toward expertise coupled with more traditional qualitative experimental approaches can provide useful insights into the development of psychological performance skills and more broadly sport expertise.
… the idea of a Statcast-based WAR system is very intriguing. The current versions of WAR still struggle with the difficulty in separating run prevention credit (and thus value) between the pitcher and the fielder. Statcast’s tools seem likely to bridge that gap, and with hit probability and catch probability — though it should be noted, the latter is outfield only right now, as infield calculations are more complicated — we are now closer than ever to being able to build metrics that directly measure the quality of contact a pitcher allowed, and adjust both the pitcher and the fielder’s contributions to the play made (or not made) based on that important variable.
So, yeah, Statcast is going to improve WAR calculations in a significant way, and should allow us to move past the FIP/ERA divide in the not-too-distant future.
… coming up with a metric for pace is pretty tricky, and it depends specifically on what type of pace you’re talking about. Going all the way back to 2013, Ted Knutson looked at pace as the total number of shots taken in a game. More recently, Thom Lawrence looked at pace as the distance covered over time within a team’s possessions. Both of these definitions speak to a certain amount of directness of play that I don’t think meshes with what people currently mean when they say MLS is playing ‘faster’ so far this year.
Alex Olshansky has done a lot of work to define tempo within MLS based on the number of possessions in a match. This is probably a pretty good stand-in for the type of pace MLS fans and analysts are talking about- a faster pace means the ball is changing between teams more quickly. In a similar vein, Matthew Doyle recently used total passes per game as a shorthand for MLS’s pace. Generally I think the rationale there is that the more passes made, the quicker and more often the ball moves, and the quicker a player makes a decision about how the ball will move, and therefore the faster the pace. This, I’d suggest, is what is currently meant by ‘pace’, and therefore I think the logic behind the metric is sound.
… Q: Much has been made of you and Thad bumping up the analytics side of things and the baseball research side of things. You’re bumping up your baseball research department. … How far behind the curve were the Twins in that department and how fast are you trying to catch up?
Falvey: When it comes to analytics, I think there’s a little bit of a misunderstanding on what role that plays in baseball. I think we’re trying to constantly critique how to better make decisions and what information we’re using to make those decisions. It doesn’t push out any of the scouting information and, in fact, in many ways I see it enhancing our scouting information and building a process for us to make better decisions. I think the Twins had a staff that was committed to that work. I think it was behind where we wanted it to be. We are investing in some people, some different systems externally that we’ve acquired that in our minds will help us make better decisions but also allow us opportunities to develop players internally in ways that maybe we couldn’t before.
… The relationship between coaches and analysts. There seems to be an assumed false dichotomy in many conversations about the role of traditional “football people” and the incoming generation of statistics-informed analysts. Ted Knutson touched on this issue with his answer to the opening question of the panel. There is more data available for competitions down to just above semi-pro level (at least in English football), but the person looking at and analyzing the data matters. The ideal is to have a “football person” formulate analysis questions that are relevant to the objectives of the club, and then a “nerd” proficient in data and statistical modeling to translate that question into an analytics problem and then report the results in an understandable way. The success of the relationship depends greatly on mutual understanding and the credibility that each party has to offer. Here Knutson and Smith agreed that the biggest thing that an analytics department can do is identify high-quality talent consistently.