Paul Millsap had issues with his left knee for about two weeks before tightness in the joint caused the Hawks forward to miss the past eight games.
The starting forward could return today when the Hawks play at the Nets.
“It’s something I was dealing with a week or two before I sat down,” Millsap said Saturday. “(The tightness) just happened all of a sudden. It’s been hard to recover.”
There is much about modern football that would bewilder a visitor from 100 years ago. Even after they had got used to the lightweight kit, the ball that bent and swerved and did not absorb water as the game went on, the firm and grassy pitches, the goalkeepers in latex gloves and the extraordinary cost of everything, they would still be puzzled by how the game was played.
Why all the defenders? And why did they all play so far from their goal? And what was the goalkeeper doing coming that far out? (Get back! You’re not Leigh Roose!). And why did so many strikers play like GO Smith of the Corinthians, dropping deep all the time? But Everton would provide him with some solace.
All the seats and the blue plastic might confuse him but the Archibald Leitch latticework along the front of two stands would be familiar. And then they would see Romelu Lukaku and recognise a player they understood absolutely.
… 3) What is your particular area of interest in sport?
Within the world of sports medicine and exercise science, my current interest lies in putting together teams and processes that support the maximisation of the athletes abilities. Attempting to optimise our work to get the most pertinent information on the athlete so we can individualise as much as we can. This is a rather wide view, I know, but an athlete is a complex system, and as such reducing an athlete to A:C load ratio data points, wellness scores, HR data, etc is far to simplistic and will fail at the highest level. We have to move towards understanding these data points within the context of performance and life, which includes psycho-social, medical, physical, and everything else in between. I’m a far way off where I would like to be on this but its what keeps me leaping out of bed very morning excited to go to work.
4) How do you think this particular area applies to youth athletes?
Its critical to youth sports. Growth and maturation is complicated by the cognitive-psycho-social-physical aspects that underpin growth and maturation. As such we need specialist practitioners who understand this breath of information, and can account for it in their coaching process and their programming. Youth athletes change all the time and as such it’s a complicated jigsaw that is constantly evolving so we have to be dynamic in a different way to those working with adults, ie 18+.
This paper aims to systematically review studies investigating the strength of association between FMS composite scores and subsequent risk of injury, taking into account both methodological quality and clinical and methodological diversity. DESIGN:
Systematic review with meta-analysis. DATA SOURCES:
A systematic search of electronic databases was conducted for the period between their inception and 3 March 2016 using PubMed, Medline, Google Scholar, Scopus, Academic Search Complete, AMED (Allied and Complementary Medicine Database), CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), Health Source and SPORTDiscus. ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA FOR SELECTING STUDIES:
Inclusion criteria: (1) English language, (2) observational prospective cohort design, (3) original and peer-reviewed data, (4) composite FMS score, used to define exposure and non-exposure groups and (5) musculoskeletal injury, reported as the outcome. EXCLUSION CRITERIA:
(1) data reported in conference abstracts or non-peer-reviewed literature, including theses, and (2) studies employing cross-sectional or retrospective study designs. RESULTS:
24 studies were appraised using the Quality of Cohort Studies assessment tool. In male military personnel, there was ‘strong’ evidence that the strength of association between FMS composite score (cut-point ≤14/21) and subsequent injury was ‘small’ (pooled risk ratio=1.47, 95% CI 1.22 to 1.77, p<0.0001, I2=57%). There was 'moderate' evidence to recommend against the use of FMS composite score as an injury prediction test in football (soccer). For other populations (including American football, college athletes, basketball, ice hockey, running, police and firefighters), the evidence was 'limited' or 'conflicting'.
CONCLUSION:
The strength of association between FMS composite scores and subsequent injury does not support its use as an injury prediction tool.
In the 40 years that Jack Thomson has been coaching high school baseball, he has seen a noticeable rise in the talent of players trying out for his team.
They scorch line drives, they hurl blazing fastballs.
But something is often missing.
“They can’t play catch,” said Thomson, a coach in California, one of the more fertile grounds for future major leaguers. “They’re bad at it. You’d be surprised how bad it looks. We have to teach them how to play catch.”
Spend any time with Burnley boss Sean Dyche and you will want to become a manager – I know I did after a couple of hours in his company.
I went to meet Dyche to find out how his style of leadership has helped him build the Clarets’ fantastic team spirit, and ended up learning how his philosophy underpins the entire club.
I know, from my playing career, how effective his type of open, honest and inclusive approach can be in getting the best out of a team, but Dyche’s influence extends far beyond the dressing room and training ground.
The dentist is recalling her worst day as one of the world’s best cyclists. It was the day Wendy Houvenaghel was chewed up and spat out.
‘Horrible,’ she tells Sportsmail. ‘The way it happened was just awful. I had been told to warm up for the final and then, maybe 15 minutes before the start, the head coach Shane Sutton walks up and said something along the lines of “Pack up your things, you’re not racing”. No explanation, no reason, off he went. It was gone, just like that.’
Houvenaghel is talking about London 2012 and the gold that got away. More broadly, she is talking about the cold brutality of the medal business and the complex topic of athlete welfare that is here to stay.
There are numerous factors that influence injury rates in elite sporting teams, and many of them are intricately related. To achieve sustained success in decreasing injury rates, we must understand not only each of those potential factors in isolation, but also the relationships that exist between them. Rarely is one session, or one event, the true isolated cause of an injury. Typically, there has been a confluence of many events over time, which has led to the pivotal point where one event then simply becomes ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. The ‘High Performance Unit’ should take the lead in responsibility for preventing injuries, but for them to achieve long-term success,they must collaborate closely with coaches, management and the players themselves, in creating an integrated approach to preventing injuries. While there may be significant debate about the relative influence of individual factors on injury rates, there should be little debate that each of the factors discussed in the following model will have some effect. For sustained success, it is more productive to think of each factor as a building block in a pyramid, as opposed to an independent entity. Although this does not mean that addressing one aspect in isolation cannot be effective in the short term, it recognises if you do not have the foundation blocks right, then your likelihood of achieving consistent and long-lasting success is decreased. We should also be aware, that the culture of an organisation as a whole, and the psycho-social influences on each individual player within it, can have a modifying effect on the model at every stage.
Last month, Mark Clattenburg, who is generally regarded as one of the finest referees in professional soccer, left England’s Premier League for a better-paying position in Saudi Arabia. Plenty of famous players have chosen riches over prestige and joined less established leagues in Asia and the Middle East. But this was one of the first times that a referee of Clattenburg’s stature and prominence had left in his prime. Just last year, he was selected to referee two of the most important matches on Earth: the finals of the Champions League, in May, and then the European Championship, two months later—plum gigs that testified to his skill. To commemorate the occasion, he had the feat tattooed on his arm—a testament to his knack for preening.
Some fans lamented Clattenburg’s departure; it was, above all, thrillingly modern to watch a referee who carefully styled his hair and adjudicated with a sense of bravado, eager to be part of the spectacle. But the way Clattenburg was hailed as someone at the apex of the profession was a reminder of how primitive on-field officials can seem, huffing to and fro, eyeballing things in real time. The average fan watching television is often better equipped to see what is happening on the field of play. Technological innovations have become part of how we experience sports: the strike-zone grid projected onto the catcher’s body, thermal sensors tracking the flight of a ball, a feast of different camera angles and playback speeds.
As a result, it’s easier than ever to second-guess the authority of a referee or an umpire. After all, they are only human. But what if we didn’t have to rely on them?
… “Formerly, imaging required a lens, and the lens would map pixels in space to sensors in an array, with everything precisely structured and engineered,” says Guy Satat, a graduate student at the Media Lab and first author on the new paper. “With computational imaging, we began to ask: Is a lens necessary? Does the sensor have to be a structured array? How many pixels should the sensor have? Is a single pixel sufficient? These questions essentially break down the fundamental idea of what a camera is. The fact that only a single pixel is required and a lens is no longer necessary relaxes major design constraints, and enables the development of novel imaging systems. Using ultrafast sensing makes the measurement significantly more efficient.”
… It’s unclear if regular-season rest really can prevent playoff injuries, but that hasn’t stopped Popovich from trying. In the 2013-14 season, Pop strategically managed the workload of his 30-something star trio, choosing to rest Duncan, Ginobili and Parker 10 times combined over the course of the season. Duncan, in particular, was given ample opportunities to relax. The Ageless One skipped a game each month in November, December, March and April and had two games off in February. Later that year, the Spurs beat the Heat to win the championship in part because James suffered through painful cramps during his fourth consecutive playoff run to the finals after a 2,900-minute regular season. Duncan, Ginobili and Parker, meanwhile, poured it on during the series, playing an extra 3.9, 5.9, and 5.8 minutes per game, respectively, than they did during the regular season. It’s impossible to say what role the extra rest played — but it couldn’t have hurt.
A delightful afternoon sun crested over Salt River Field in mid-February, and Mike Hazen, Jared Porter and Amiel Sawdaye sat on the veranda overlooking their new lives. For all the foibles of the Arizona Diamondbacks in recent years, the dunderheaded maneuvers and the long trail of lulz, there somehow remained a decent core of ballplayers amid it all. Now it was Hazen, Sawdaye and Porter’s jobs to shepherd it.
The field below was empty, spring games still a week away, and the optimism of spring met the reality of their task. They’d worked together in Boston under the tutelage of Theo Epstein, learned as much as they could from the most successful baseball executive this generation, and now was their chance to make something of their own.
The Conversation, Winnifred Louis and Cassandra Chapman from
1. Assuming small differences are meaningful
Many of the daily fluctuations in the stock market represent chance rather than anything meaningful. Differences in polls when one party is ahead by a point or two are often just statistical noise.
You can avoid drawing faulty conclusions about the causes of such fluctuations by demanding to see the “margin of error” relating to the numbers.
Joel Sokol is founding Director of Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics degree and an Associate Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE). Dr. Sokol’s primary research interests are in sports analytics and applied operations research. He has worked with teams or leagues in all three major American sports and has received Georgia Tech’s highest awards for teaching.
icrunchdata News speaks with education leaders about their experience, programs, and latest initiatives. Today, Dr. Sokol comments on his industry-leading LRMC method for predictive modeling of the NCAA basketball tournament, Georgia Tech’s MS Analytics degree, and the future of analytics.