Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 7, 2017

The 18-year-old winger is part of a young generation of promising Yanks who are making noise in the Bundesliga. American Soccer Now’s Brian Sciaretta spoke with the Virginia about playing soccer overseas.

Teenagers are thriving in American soccer circles. Christian Pulisic, of course, is a household name and just received the star treatment on 60 Minutes. Weston McKennie is starting for Schalke in the Bundesliga. Tyler Adams is excelling on the Red Bulls and Jonathan Gonzalez is a rock in central midfield for Liga MX runaway leaders Monterrey.

And then you have Nick Taitague, 18, who could be next to breakthrough. The Richmond, Va., native, is the youngest member of Schalke’s American trio, which includes McKennie and Haji Wright. An explosive winger playing for Schalke’s U-19 team, he is considered a top prospect for both club and country.

In this episode of The Journey, Sponsored by Motrin, Illinois native and Chicago Red Stars defender Casey Short takes us around her hometown and gives us some insight into her transition to the big city. We also get to meet some of the people who knew Casey when she was younger and have witnessed her rise through the professional ranks to earn a spot on the U.S. Women’s National Team, all after overcoming three knee surgeries in three years.

For the first time in nearly three months, Ashlyn Harris stepped between the posts of a soccer net suited up and ready to compete.

It was Aug. 12, the day Harris returned from a lengthy recovery following a quad injury to lead the Orlando Pride defense once more. She recorded a shutout during the Pride’s 5-0 slaying of Sky Blue FC.

Harris and Orlando have been unbeaten since.

“Everything’s been really good,” Harris said. “I’m starting to get into my rhythm now. My leg is starting to feel much better, my kicking is getting better, um, my timing on things and feeling confident. Felt like I had one of my best all-around performances last game, so that’s a good feeling moving forward.”

… These days, hardcore fitness sells. Even Nike, which made its name with that inclusive Just Do It tagline, has taken to lambasting joggers in its latest ad campaign: “If You Like It Slow, Jog On”, or “You Win Some Or You Win Some”, proclaim its new billboards. Gyms run “go hard” promotions, with discounted packages for those taking up unlimited classes for short periods of time, such as 10 classes in 10 days – the kind of training that many dub “binge workouts”.

But nowhere is full-on training more powerfully advocated than on social media, where inspirational quotes such as “Pain is Weakness Leaving The Body” and “Sweat Is Your Fat Crying” are liked and shared millions of times. In the age of “wellth”, a well-honed tricep is more desirable than the latest pair of designer shoes. The so-called world of “fitspo” began as a niche way for gym nerds to share tips and document how their bodies changed, before spreading into a whole lifestyle movement. Instagram’s short videos lend themselves to fitness content; people started following routines in the gym.

In cool conditions, physiologic markers accurately predict endurance performance, but it is unclear whether thermal strain and perceived thermal strain modify the strength of these relationships. This study examined the relationships between traditional determinants of endurance performance and time to complete a 5-km time trial in the heat. Seventeen club runners completed graded exercise tests (GXT) in hot (GXTHOT; 32°C, 60% RH, 27.2°C WBGT) and cool conditions (GXTCOOL; 13°C, 50% RH, 9.3°C WBGT) to determine maximal oxygen uptake (V̇O2max), running economy (RE), velocity at V̇O2max (vV̇O2max), and running speeds corresponding to the lactate threshold (LT, 2 mmol.l−1) and lactate turnpoint (LTP, 4 mmol.l−1). Simultaneous multiple linear regression was used to predict 5 km time, using these determinants, indicating neither GXTHOT (R2 = 0.72) nor GXTCOOL (R2 = 0.86) predicted performance in the heat as strongly has previously been reported in cool conditions. vV̇O2max was the strongest individual predictor of performance, both when assessed in GXTHOT (r = −0.83) and GXTCOOL (r = −0.90). The GXTs revealed the following correlations for individual predictors in GXTHOT; V̇O2max r = −0.7, RE r = 0.36, LT r = −0.77, LTP r = −0.78 and in GXTCOOL; V̇O2max r = −0.67, RE r = 0.62, LT r = −0.79, LTP r = −0.8. These data indicate (i) GXTHOT does not predict 5 km running performance in the heat as strongly as a GXTCOOL, (ii) as in cool conditions, vV̇O2max may best predict running performance in the heat.

… he Arsenal manager is at the beginning of a demanding week, in which his team face West Bromwich at Emirates Stadium on Monday and return to their home ground for another Premier League fixture against Brighton on Sunday, which kicks off at 12 noon. In between times, they play Bate Borisov in Belarus in the Europa League on Thursday.

Wenger will make sweeping changes to his team for the European tie, in keeping with his policy for the group phase of the competition, and he will leave a host of names at home in London.

The manager is unhappy but phlegmatic about the squeeze that has been placed on his squad, saying with a shrug it was television alone that dictated the timings and decreed the West Brom game be moved to a Monday night and the Brighton match should have a midday start.

Whenever I am unable to walk, climb or sail away from the world, I have learned to shut it out.

Learning this took time. Only when I understood that I had a primal need for silence was I able to begin my search for it – and there, deep beneath a cacophony of traffic noise and thoughts, music and machinery, iPhones and snow ploughs, it lay in wait for me. Silence.

The immune system plays an interesting role in exercise, recovery, and adaptations from exercise. In an article I read years ago I had read that delayed onset muscle soreness (that soreness we get 24-48 hours post-exercise) tracks well with the timeline for the immune system response to that exercise session. In other words, we might become sore from exercise due to the fact that the immune system is attacking/repairing the damage that we did.

… Would a Brooks executive care to comment? When I reached out to brand manager Steve DeKoker, he said Brooks is confident that supporting the running community is beneficial for the Brooks brand. However, he added that with sports marketing and athlete sponsorship, the ROI is difficult to quantify. (Symmonds, for the record, said the same thing.) At the end of the day, so much of it comes down to an intangible, emotional connection to a brand. But that connection, DeKoker pointed out, is more likely to happen if top athletes are wearing your product.

“You need people to authenticate your brand. By that, I mean you need the best people in the world validating that your product is legitimate and that your products can perform at the highest level. Whether people are aware of that or not, I think it factors into their purchase decision,” DeKoker said.

That what is self-evident to one person can be seen as silly by another should give us pause about the reliability of common sense as a basis for understanding the world. How can we be confident that what we believe is right when someone else feels equally strongly that it’s wrong—especially when we can’t articulate why we think we’re right in the first place? Of course, we can always write them off as crazy or ignorant or something and therefore not worth paying attention to. But once you go down that road, it gets increasingly hard to account for why we ourselves believe what we do. Consider, for example, that since 1996 support among the general public for allowing same-sex couples to marry has almost doubled, from 25 percent to 45 percent. Presumably those of us who changed our minds over this period do not think that we were crazy fourteen years ago, but we obviously think that we were wrong. So if something that seemed so obvious turned out to be wrong, what else that we believe to be self-evident now will seem wrong to us in the future?

… when Barrett and the rest of Ohio State’s passers trot out roughly 90 minutes before kickoff for a game like the one Saturday against UNLV at the Horseshoe, an actual pigskin will be one of the last things they need to get ready.

Waiting for them in the southwest corner of the end zone is the wooden stretching stick. A couple of hula hoops are on the ground in front of a net, which eventually will be on the receiving end of heavy balls colored blue and green, and a baseball. Plus, there are a handful of resistance bands for good measure to complete the warm-up before a football is handed over to the Buckeyes.

But quarterbacks love nothing more than routine, no matter how elaborate it might be.

… Nelson said he was indecisive. He waited too long to choose, and he graduated from Maryland’s DeMatha High, where he’d suffered a sprained MCL shortly after arriving, without an athletic destination.

As his mom, who’d already raised his four older brothers, worked multiple jobs to pay his way, Nelson hopped the bus to U.Va. A plan began to form.

“So coming out of DeMatha without having a committed school, it shook me,” Nelson said. “But when I walked on here, there was no reason why I can’t compete with these other guys. I’m just as good. So I worked. I worked hard.”

Confidence is often spoken about as being key to any sportsperson’s performance, but according to AFC Bournemouth sports psychologist Dan Abrahams, it is possible to perform effectively even without any.

Walk into the Washington Nationals’ clubhouse before any given game, and you’ll see the standard assortment of baseball apparel and equipment. That day’s jersey and the corresponding hat hang at each locker. Bats and gloves from various companies fill locker shelves. Under Armour, Adidas, Nike and New Balance cleats and sneakers are scattered everywhere.

Almost everything is MLB-issued or sanctioned, but if you look down at a few players’ feet — and squint — you’ll find something out of place, something that belongs down the road in the Wizards’ locker room: tiny NBA logos on the side of otherwise plain white or red socks. These are not just any socks, though. They are the iconic “logo man” socks NBA players have treasured for years — their comfort so legendary that an uproar erupted when the NBA switched to another company for on-court socks two years ago.

… Muscle ultrasound also gives highly accurate body composition analyses, instead of calipers, using measurements at a variety of locations on the body. Both the muscle fuel and body comp tests are quick—less than five minutes. Since they only require a handheld ultrasound device and a tablet with MuscleSound software, results are immediate.

Though the company’s headquarters is near Denver (tests can be done there), MuscleSound is working with fitness centers, physical therapists and other sports professionals to bring the system to individuals and teams worldwide.

NFL officials—much like players—need to practice in order to be at the top of their game, and watching football on a screen is no substitute for standing on the field in the middle of the action. To get that practice, many attend team practices and camps, making unneeded calls while players run through drills and throwing flags that result in no penalties. Away from the field they review game film, study the rules book and take quizzes, but nothing beats reality.

That might be about to change, though, thanks to the virtual equivalent. STRIVR is a Silicon Valley-based virtual reality firm that records practice plays using a 360-degree camera positioned where a player would stand on the field, allowing players to watch that play later using a VR headset, getting extra, virtual, reps. The NFL has been keeping a close eye on what STRIVR has been doing with sports teams since 2015, and a year and a half ago, the league reached out with a question: Can virtual reality help our officials perform better?

TechCrunch has learned that Amazon has acquired Body Labs, a company with a stated aim of creating true-to-life 3D body models to support various b2b software applications — such as virtually trying on clothes or photorealistic avatars for gaming.

One source suggested the price-tag Amazon paid for Body Labs could be $100M+. However a second well-placed source suggested it’s closer to $70M than $100M — so we’re pegging it at between $50M and $70M.

Sensoria is getting into healthcare in a big way.

The Seattle smart apparel startup today announced a new spinoff company, Sensoria Health, formed in partnership with Genesis Healthcare, the largest post-acute care provider in the U.S.

Sensoria Health will focus on bringing Sensoria’s wearable technology to post-acute care providers and their patients at approximately 450 skilled nursing centers and senior living communities owned by Genesis Healthcare.

All of the diverse operations of Verily, the life sciences technology company that began its life as Google X Life Sciences, can be summed up with a simple sentence: We should be treating our bodies at least as well as we treat our cars.

At the Health 2.0 Fall Conference in Santa Clara this week, Verily Chief Technology Officer Brian Otis spoke with Health 2.0 cofounder and CEO Dr. Indu Subaya on stage.

“We have instrumented cars with a huge number of sensors and communications devices constantly generating data, analyzing that data, and making decisions based on that data,” Otis said. “There are two types of feedback loops that are performed. One is the second-by-second tuning of the engine based on the sensor data. The other is longterm monitoring of maintenance conditions over time. Both of those things could apply to the human body, but we’re just doing a terrible job of it.”

… “I would argue that engagement means you have actually gotten to healthier behaviors,” said Amy Schwartz, Human Centric Design Thought Leader at Battelle.

How, then, can healthcare organizations and software developers attain that level of engagement?

Schwartz, speaking at the HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Pop Health Forum here on Tuesday afternoon, offered four tips.

1. Gain an empathetic understanding of users and context of use through contextual research.

I’ve been posting preprints on arXiv since its beginning ~25 years ago, and I like to share research results as soon as they are written up. Science functions best through open discussion of new results! After some internal discussion, my research group decided to post our new paper on genomic prediction of human height on bioRxiv and arXiv.

But the preprint culture is nascent in many areas of science (e.g., biology), and it seems to me that some journals are not yet fully comfortable with the idea. I was pleasantly surprised to learn, just in the last day or two, that most journals now have official policies that allow online distribution of preprints prior to publication. (This has been the case in theoretical physics since before I entered the field!) Let’s hope that progress continues.

The work presented below applies ideas from compressed sensing, L1 penalized regression, etc. to genomic prediction. We exploit the phase transition behavior of the LASSO algorithm to construct a good genomic predictor for human height. T

… However tempting it may be for some, blaming football for Hernandez’s longtime sociopathy—which culminated in murder and suicide—is even more foolish than futile. This goes beyond Hernandez’s neuroscientifically-challenged attorney, Jose Baez, who blustered to People that Hernandez’s young daughter is “growing up without a father because of the negligence of the NFL,” and that “CTE can explain a lot of his behavior.” It’s from people who should know better.

Those who remember my more than 100 articles in the New York Times on football and brain trauma—the early cases of CTE, youth players imperiled by mishandled concussions, the NFL’s tobacco-industry-like research—might consider me the last person to try to temper response to news like Hernandez. Yet that work was driven by intolerance not for football, but for dangerous illogic—which this weekend cascaded from both sides.

Life on Earth is adapted to the rotation of our planet. For many years we have known that living organisms, including humans, have an internal, biological clock that helps them anticipate and adapt to the regular rhythm of the day. But how does this clock actually work? Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young were able to peek inside our biological clock and elucidate its inner workings. Their discoveries explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth’s revolutions.

Using fruit flies as a model organism, this year’s Nobel laureates isolated a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm. They showed that this gene encodes a protein that accumulates in the cell during the night, and is then degraded during the day. Subsequently, they identified additional protein components of this machinery, exposing the mechanism governing the self-sustaining clockwork inside the cell. We now recognize that biological clocks function by the same principles in cells of other multicellular organisms, including humans.

Southampton have brought in an expert to try and discover why their players are losing so many days to hamstring injuries.

Dr Katie Small from the University of Cumbria has researched the link between the timing of hamstring exercises and the susceptibility to injury. She found that players who did hamstring injury prevention exercises at the end of a training session, when the muscle was fatigued, maintained more strength at the end of each half of a match. These are the times associated with highest susceptibility to injury.

It seems obvious that there would be more injuries, and more serious ones, among high school and college athletes in football or soccer or lacrosse than, say, in running or tennis. But, how many more, and at what economic cost?

Those figures turned out to be hard to come by, researchers at Yale discovered, but, using the best data available, they calculated that if contact sports could be made noncontact — like flag football, for example — there would be 49,600 fewer injuries among male college athletes per year and 601,900 fewer among male high school athletes.

The savings — which include estimates of medical costs and time lost — could be as much as $1.5 billion per year for colleges and $19.2 billion per year for high schools. And that takes into account only the immediate consequences of an injury, a paper by the researchers says, not the long-term effects of concussions or repeated jarring of the brain in collisions. Or the repercussions of ligament tears, which can lead to a greater than 50 percent risk of arthritis a decade later, said Dr. Mininder Kocher, a professor of orthopedics at Harvard Medical School.

… This study shows the clinical consequences of protracted immobilization after a recreational sports injury. Starting rehabilitation 2 days after injury rather than waiting for 9 days shortened the interval from injury to pain-free recovery and return to sports by 3 weeks without any significant increase in the risk of reinjury. The observed difference supports the importance of early loading of injured musculotendinous tissue. Immobilization can swiftly and adversely affect muscle and tendon structure and function and has detrimental effects on connective-tissue cells. The matrix component of muscle–tendon regeneration is substantial and prolonged, which may contribute to the difference in recovery time in our study.

… how exactly do these tears occur? And why do some instances result in more muscle fiber damage than others? Cramer says three major factors contribute to this muscle busting. Muscles that cover two joints, like the hamstring which extends across the hip and knee joints, are at the highest risk. That’s because having both joints moving and stretching the muscle simultaneously adds tension, which can lead to strains.

Muscles are also more likely to strain while they are contracting. At this point, muscles are shortening and lengthening at the same time. During a dumbbell curl, for example, raising the weight up towards the shoulder compresses the bicep, and lowering it back down stretches it back out again. The muscle can create and sustain much more force during the lengthening portion of the activity, says Cramer, which makes it easier for it to strain.

Finally, muscles that have a higher proportion of fast-twitch to slow-twitch fibers strain more readily.

It’s no secret by now that traditional flimsy flip flops are associated with gait alterations that can contribute to more serious issues, but for many patients, flip flops are a hard habit to break. A new generation of “comfort” flip flops offers an alternative, but clinicians remain wary.

The largest ever study of athletic concussions is set to publish its first data soon, providing new information to both doctors and athletic governing bodies that will help ensure athlete’s safety. Thirty universities and service academies, including IU, have collaborated on the study.

“What we’re hoping to do is create the largest infrastructure and largest network of concussion-related data,” Kyle Winters, assistant athletic trainer and research assistant at IU, said. “We’re looking to improve overall health care provided to our student athletes, including overall management and recovery for concussion for our student athletes.”

… several former NFL, college and high school football players and other athletes say they are finding success at a recovery center in Southern California that claims to help rehabilitate brains suffering from the effects of repeated and severe trauma.

“I didn’t think it was something that could be fixed,” Jermichael Finley told USA TODAY Sports. He retired from the Green Bay Packers in 2015 after he says he sustained five concussions in his football career.

… “The premise for [the deal] actually was to allow us to push on our innovation agenda and doing that with basically — this will sound a little off — but, using professional athletes as a part of like our lab,” described Gatorade’s Head of Consumer Engagement, Kenny Mitchell, during Advertising Week – New York. “Almost like lab rats, right?”

What Mitchell is describing is using these G-League players to test Gatorade product formulations, ingredients, services and solutions. Essentially using the partnership as a springboard to discovering greater, more streamlined, hydration and fueling techniques.

“So if we want to showcase a protein-enriched shake, we may test it with the Gatorade developmental league and then we might be launching it with NBA players.”

… At present, the causes of gastrointestinal symptoms are not completely understood. The symptoms are difficult to investigate because they are often specific to race situations and are very difficult to reproduce or simulate in a laboratory. Nevertheless, some laboratory studies have been performed. From these studies, a number of potential causes and contributors have been identified and they can be divided into 3 general categories: mechanical, physiological and nutritional.

… our bodies would not work without salt. Our heart, muscles, nervous system and absorption of food depend on it and, alongside sodium and chloride, these natural salts also contain nutrients such as magnesium, calcium and many other trace elements.

Some of the unrefined rock salt is said to contain up to 84 different minerals and elements. Now that’s a far cry from your ordinary white table stuff.

… Mr. Awaitey first learned about the fried chicken chain on Facebook. The “finger lickin’ good” slogan caught his attention and it has lived up to expectations. “The food is just ——” he said, raising his fingertips to his mouth and smacking his lips. “When you taste it you feel good.”

Ghana, a coastal African country of more than 28 million still etched with pockets of extreme poverty, has enjoyed unprecedented national prosperity in the last decade, buoyed by offshore oil. Though the economy slowed abruptly not long ago, it is rebounding and the signs of new fortune are evident: millions moving to cities for jobs, shopping malls popping up and fast food roaring in to greet people hungry for a contemporary lifestyle.

Over the past few years branched-chain amino acid (BCAA) supplements have become very popular sports nutrition products. Proponents of BCAA supplements claim many benefits related to recovery from intense exercise. These claims range from enhanced muscle protein synthesis (MPS) and decreased muscle protein breakdown (MPB) to protection of the immune system, increased fat oxidation and decreased muscle soreness, among many others. The physiological rationale for these claims, let alone robust evidence from well-controlled human studies, is often weak, if not completely lacking. In the infographic above the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) verdict is listed with each of the claims.

Probably the most common claim for the efficacy of BCAA supplementation is enhanced muscle growth with resistance exercise training. As regular readers of this site will know, the metabolic mechanism for muscle growth is net muscle protein balance.

What’s the one thing Missouri quarterback Drew Lock can’t go without before he takes the field for a day of practice? A purple Jell-O shot.

“I started doing it, put a good practice together. Did it again, and put another good practice together,” Lock said. “It became one of those things where I’m like, ‘Alright, I gotta have a Jell-O shot before I go out to practice. Because if not, it’s going to be a bad day.”

It’s not what you think — promise.

… Heading into 2017, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking Watson’s production would be sorely missed. After all, he averaged 5,218 total yards in his last two seasons at Clemson — 4,351 yards passing and 867 yards running. And as we’ve previously noted, it’s difficult for teams to maintain offensive efficiency the season after losing their starting quarterback. But Clemson hasn’t missed a beat on offense. The Tigers are averaging 37.8 points per game through four games, compared with 39.2 for all of last season, and that includes a 14-6 dogfight with the Auburn Tigers in Week 2. So how has Clemson managed to play so well despite losing their talismanic quarterback?

After more than a decade of four-man defenses dominating the Premier League, suddenly nearly half of the teams in the league have shifted to a three–center back, two-wingback formation. So, what gives?

The numbers don’t lie. Fewer high school students are playing football.The Missouri State High School Activities Association reports that there are nearly two thousand fewer high school football players this year, than just two years ago.

Grandview High in Hillsboro dropped varsity football to rebuild with the J.V. program. Athletic Director Ronda Hubbard is confident the sport will rebound.

“Football has been mainstay in our society and I think it will continue to be. Actually, when speaking specifically about our situation, I’m super encouraged about the direction of our football program,” she says.

The NBA G League is quietly undergoing a crucial era of growth currently. The league has added 10 teams over the last five seasons and with new teams entering the fray, front office and development strategies are slowly climbing the ladder of importance.

Proximity between NBA clubs and their affiliate is all the rage with 23 of the 26 teams in the league being less than 250 miles apart. Miami is an outlier. Sioux Falls is roughly 1,800 miles away from South Beach, but synergy between the two has flourished in spite of their lack of proximity.

… In addition to his overall inability to push the ball downfield, Glennon is far too conservative when a quarterback needs to be at his most daring. Glennon’s third-down passes on average come in 2.6 air yards short of the sticks, putting him dead last among starting quarterbacks. On a night where his team needed him to mount a comeback against its division rival in Green Bay, he still checked in with a minus-1.1 average.

In an offense like the Bears’ with two young and legitimately dynamic running backs, the icing on the cake would be a quarterback who brings some semblance of mobility or a scrambling threat to the table. Unfortunately, Glennon provides anything but. Glennon has attempted just 3.6 percent of his passes from outside of the pocket this season, the second-lowest rate among starting quarterbacks.

… “I understood English football the day I saw one game: Swansea against Crystal Palace,” he said later. “Nine goals. Eight from set pieces. Corners, free kicks, throw-ins. That is English football, and I have to adapt because I have never lived that before.”

What he saw in that game, in other words, was that the defining characteristic of English soccer was chaos. In Guardiola’s conception of the game, it is in those moments — when the ball is lofted high in the air, or swept into the penalty area — that planning and preparation and philosophy go out the window, and random chance takes over.

He knew, at that moment, what his job was. “We have to control that,” he said. That is why he was here.

…

Baseball managers have also been surprisingly forward-looking by making data accessible to everyone. The Pittsburgh Pirates, to take an example that Sawchik’s book, share the metrics managers and coaches use with the entire roster and make sure everyone understands how its collected, applied to make decisions, and can be used by players to improve individual and team performance. The Pirates know that hiring some savant statistician to run the numbers for them won’t automatically produce some sort of magical “moneyball effect.” But they do see the power of data as a tool that, when applied smartly and transparently, can help the whole team build better futures. The strategy paid off, catapulting the Pirates to the playoffs in 2013, 2014, and 2015. Think of if that same strategy were applied to criminal justice. Instead of biased, black-boxed risk algorithms used for sentencing, courts could instead transparently use big data and personal knowledge to help place offenders in the most effective recidivism-reduction programs (job training, short-term housing, mental health, substance treatment, etc.).

In many ways, tech today seems to be stuck where baseball was in the early 2000s: We’re collecting a lot of data, but we have yet to learn how best to use it and how to recognize what can’t be quantified. But now, the stakes are much higher, and the field much more complex, than anything Billy Beane ever faced.

With the NHL season right around the corner, this marks my first ever post on hockey. Clearly hockey is not my sport, but this shows how math and analytics can cast a net over all sports. One of the constant questions in sports is how much of a team’s or player’s success is due to skill and how much is due to luck. Face-offs is a perfect setting in hockey to ask (and answer) this question.

To answer this question I will follow a very elegant approach that originated in the sabermetrics community and was popularized in the book “The Success Equation“, where Mauboussin ordered the four major sports based on the level of luck that they involve. This approach is based on a very simple mathematical equation, which states that for two independent random variables X and Y, the variance of their sum is equal to the sum of their variances, i.e., var(X+Y) = var(X)+var(Y). In our case the independent variables X and Y correspond respectively to the skill and luck associated with the observed face-off win percentages of the players; the sum of these two variables includes everything observed.

Your (new and improved) source for advanced hockey stats and analytics, created by Emmanuel Perry in 2015.

The past week has been a busy one for Sonny Vaccaro. Last Tuesday he was home preparing to visit a family member in his home state of California when, around 6 a.m. he began being bombarded with emails and phone calls about a bit of breaking news that made so many immediately think of him: the arrests of four college basketball assistant coaches and three shoe company executives on bribery and fraud charges. For some five decades Vaccaro has been in touch with reporters, but never has he had a week like the one that followed that news. Just about every day someone has been reaching out to him for his thoughts. He has received calls from people to whom he’s never spoken, and from overseas outlets he’d never imagined would care. He has been reading their coverage too, and has one qualm: Not enough attention has been paid to the root causes of the alleged illicit payments that many feel threaten to bring down, or at least massively disrupt, the sport.

“I don’t think enough of you guys have hit on that,” Vaccaro said by phone this weekend from his home. “They caused it, the universities and shoe companies. They were the start of the whole problem.”

… “I just want to say something to our fans: we apologize for these late games. And I’d also like to reiterate it has nothing to do with us or the administration,” Petersen said. “We want to play at 1 p.m. It hurts us tremendously in terms of national exposure. No one wants to watch our game on the East Coast that late, and we all know it. We haven’t had a kickoff before 5 p.m. this season.

… Oklahoma City has incorporated some of this style, but there’s still a lot of holding the ball. Its half-court offense still slogged as it held the ball for the fourth-longest amount of time per touch, per SportVU. A big part of OKC’s style is a result of its personnel. Westbrook was the centerpiece, and as any good coach should, Donovan adapted to what he has at his disposal. But now the roster is better built to incorporate some of the motion principles, and there’s simply more talent. Times could indeed be changing.

“Energetic, energetic, energetic. That’s the one word I can say about how we’ve played and how we’ve looked,” George said after the Thunder’s second practice. “It’s been a very energetic, fast-paced, fun-watching team right now.” Could the Thunder start attacking more like the Gators? We won’t know for sure until the season gets rolling, and it’ll take time to develop chemistry over the course of the season. But it’s worth noting that Presti suggested Donovan will get more creative this season.

The Oklahoma City Thunder named Rob Hennigan as Vice President of Insight & Foresight and promoted Will Dawkins to Vice President of Identification & Intelligence, it was announced today by Executive Vice President & General Manager Sam Presti.

In his role, Hennigan will oversee key functions that include Strategic Planning, Data Science & Solutions and Information Management & Counsel. Dawkins will lead the Thunder’s Amateur Evaluation and oversee the Pro Evaluation function.

“I couldn’t be more pleased to welcome Rob back to the Thunder. He was here in the earliest stages of the organization in 2008 as we built the foundation for the Thunder that we are continuing to build from as we enter our 10th season in Oklahoma City,” said Presti. “Will has proven to be a true, organic, rising talent within our organization having held several roles and now moving into a vice president and pillar lead position within our executive management team.”

… the bigger issue is that a hard cap on international spending exists in the first place, thus exploiting teenagers in poorer countries who have zero bargaining power.

And more broadly, that both amateur and professional sports organizations stomp on the rights of athletes to enrich those in power.

And that all of us as sports fans aid and abet a corrupt system, and lambast any policy or practice that might interfere with our enjoyment of games, because we believe we’re entitled to drama-free entertainment, any time, all the time.

The votes are in, beginning the waiting game until the middle of November when the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) will announce the winner of this year’s American League Most Valuable Player Award.

This year’s race features four highly distinguished offensive candidates who compiled statistical accomplishments worthy of recognition and honor. Some subscribe to the notion that it is strictly a competition between Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros and Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees. Others strongly believe that Jose Ramirez of the Cleveland Indians catapulted himself into the conversation as the versatile and overlooked driving force of the defending American League champions. Let’s also not forget about Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Even though he missed 39 games because of a torn ligament in his left thumb, Trout once again performed at an elite level and reminded everyone why he is already on a trajectory for a bronze plaque in the hallowed halls of Cooperstown.

… For years, analytically adept observers have been asking why a manager would limit one of his best pitchers to a couple of dozen pitches every two or three games, and no more than 70 innings a year. Top relievers should be used, they argue, as often as possible during those inflection points when the game’s outcome hangs in the balance. Managers have resisted. It isn’t always easy to identify an inflection point, for one thing. And giving your best reliever the lead with one inning to go is seen as the culmination of a plan. “He puts in a closer,” says Trevor Hoffman, who saved 601 games over an 18-year major-league career, “and basically says, ‘My work is done.’ ” Most closers, who are paid far better than other relievers, also aren’t keen to expand their duties. They’re baseball’s equivalent of fighter pilots. Giving up the chance to earn a save is a sacrifice that few are eager to make.

One afternoon this summer, I asked Dave Roberts, who manages the Los Angeles Dodgers, about Showalter’s decision not to use Britton. Roberts is preternaturally polite, yet he couldn’t help rolling his eyes. During his two seasons’ managing the Dodgers, he has come to believe that a team’s most effective relief pitcher should be used not just to finish games but whenever he can have a decisive influence on them. “You can make a strong, strong case to pitch your best reliever in a nonsave situation,” he said. “I’m moving toward that.”

… Here’s an example from Macalester College, where I am president. Our school is fortunate to have as a student a young man (whose name I can’t mention) who has published a book (whose title I can’t cite). The book has nothing whatsoever to do with athletics, but among his many activities at the college, he participates in an intercollegiate sport (which, of course, shall remain unspecified).

Most people not associated with the N.C.A.A. would consider this an impressive diversification of skills and interests. But N.C.A.A. bylaw 12.5.1.3, otherwise denoted as “Modeling and Other Nonathletically Related Promotional Activities,” specifies that, in promoting the book, no reference can be made to the individual’s “involvement in intercollegiate athletics.”

What does this mean in practice? It means that the author’s book biography cannot state that he participates in a college-level sport. It means that, in publicizing the book to students or alumni, the college cannot mention that the author is a student athlete. It even means that the student cannot mention the book on his Facebook page because his Facebook profile shows photos of him engaging in the unspecified sport.

… Yankees general manager Brian Cashman had built his team specifically for a situation like this. With a questionable rotation, the Yankees spent resources on a bullpen that carried them through the season and portends well for Octobers increasingly spent with relief pitchers on the mound. Two decades ago, even as the Yankees rode Mariano Rivera’s arm out of the bullpen to a championship, starters pitched 65.7 percent of postseason innings. It hadn’t changed much a decade later, with 65.3 percent of innings going to starters in the 2006 playoffs. Last year was a different story. Starters threw 357 2/3 innings, relievers 272 1/3. Only 56.8 percent of innings were thrown by starters.

… as the fourth-place U.S. heads into the last two qualifiers, against Panama (Friday, 7 p.m. ET; ESPN/WatchESPN) and Trinidad & Tobago, it finds itself in the position of probably having to win both games to make it to Russia next year.

To get a sense of how the U.S. got to this point and what it will need to qualify, ESPN FC asked a quartet of former U.S. internationals — Marcelo Balboa plus ESPN analysts Kasey Keller, Taylor Twellman and Herculez Gomez — for their perspective.