Nathan Chen spoke to NBCSports.com/figure-skating before skating in the Stars on Ice show in Providence on Saturday. The two-time world champion and three-time U.S. Champion is participating in some of the shows on tour this year while studying for final exams.
He noted that this year, he learned a lot both inside and outside of the classroom, and on and off the ice. He’ll use all of that to have an even better season next year, where he plans to compete on the Grand Prix circuit and juggle his sophomore year at Yale University.
… at its essence, this role is about overseeing the different performance departments at a club – sports science, medical, strength and conditioning, nutrition and analytics – and ensuring that as many players are fit and able to deal with the demands of the game as possible.
Being able to interpret what the Head Coach wants and then translating it for your performance staff – and vice versa – is essential.
… The pros may have certain genes we lack and may be able to handle more miles than we can, but they’re still human, and in general the same methods that work best for them work best for us—although many amateurs fall into less effective training patterns. Following are five key features of the training of Flanagan, Ritz, and Ward that you’ll want to emulate in your pursuit of personal bests.
… “We are extremely thankful to Aaron for his contributions to the Phoenix Suns over the last 26 years, including the care he provided to hundreds of Suns players along the way,” Suns general manager James Jones said. “We are excited for Aaron as he pursues the next step in his career and wish Aaron, Jessica and their family nothing but the best.”
The Suns’ training staff has long been considered one of the best in all of basketball, and Nelson is a huge reason why. He has held the head athletic trainer position with the Suns for 19 seasons and was named the NBA Athletic Trainer of the Year in 2009.
Gary Neville, Alex Scott and Graeme Souness question Romelu Lukaku and the rest of the Manchester United squad’s fitness levels after they were held to a 1-1 draw at home to Chelsea.
When we daydream about being at the Olympics or the Academy Awards, we usually picture ourselves as the winners — standing there tearfully while we’re given a gold medal or golden statuette — and not as one of the stoic, stunned also-rans.
But maybe we should imagine ourselves as a runner-up. That’s because, according to Monica Wadhwa, marketing professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business in Philadelphia, “not winning is, in fact, more powerful than winning,”
She has spent nearly a decade researching this seemingly paradoxical idea, motivated by her childhood experiences. “When I was growing up in India, there was a time when I was addicted to lotteries,” says Wadhwa. What intrigued her were those moments in which she’d buy a ticket, get five out of six winning numbers, and find herself more fired up than ever to play again. She recalls, “I should have been giving up, but it was just the opposite.”
… We’re quickly moving toward a world where AI will more seamlessly help to power our human intelligence and interactions.
Consider AlterEgo, a project originating from the MIT Media Lab — an intelligence amplification device that uses silent speech recognition, also known as internal articulation, to measure the electrical signals the brain sends to the internal speech organs. AlterEgo is a non-invasive device that’s worn over the ear and along the jawline. The signals it measures are part of the voluntary nervous system, meaning users must intentionally think of speaking words to trigger the device — a feature that sets it apart from other brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that are capable of receiving signals directly from the brain. The AlterEgo device translates these silent user signals into commands to control other systems, such as IoT devices, and query information, say from a Google search. A user controls the device without opening their mouth, and without any externally observable movements. They simply have to think about the words they would have asked Siri or a smart speaker out loud. Information is then relayed back to the user through audio. (AlterEgo uses bone-conduction audio to respond back to users, which completes the discreet information loop silently.) The entire interaction is completely internal to the user — almost like speaking to oneself. AlterEgo’s creators hope that this silent information loop will make people’s interactions with the technology both unobtrusive and discreet.
Muscle injuries make up more than 30% of sports injuries. It occurs that a professional football team can expect to suffer an average of 15 incidents related to muscle injuries per season, losing more than 200 days of training and competition. In addition to working on prevention, it is also essential to establish a correct diagnosis in order to minimise repercussions. This diagnosis determines the severity and the best treatment and also provides guidance on the recovery period and risk of re-injury.
Useful tools for this process are imaging tests such as ultrasound and magnetic resonance, which is more precise and decisive. In recent years, three different classifications of muscle injuries have been proposed: the Munich classification, the British system and the more recent F.C.
In order to better evaluate these classifications, a team of F.C. Barcelona doctors and radiologists analysed their usefulness for assessing the prognosis and recovery time of the injured players from the Club’s first division football team over the course of one year. They published their results and conclusions in the magazine healthmanagement.org.
“Seventy-five percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated,” Seth Berger, Managing Director of the Sixers Innovation Lab Crafted by Kimball, told The Sports Biz. “They told me about the problem — and I found out I was in that 75% — I put Hydrant in my morning water and my morning headache went away. And I thought, ‘this product works!’”
Berger is referencing the product Hydrant and its co-founders, John Sherwin and Jai Jung Kim, who initially met Berger through a mutual friend. Incubating in Philadelphia since November 2018, the Innovation Lab announced Hydrant as the latest addition to its roster of startups on Thursday, May 2.
Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, the parent company of the Innovation Lab, stated that Hydrant is “the most effective, best electrolyte hydration solution on the market today.” The powder-based mix contains 80% less sugar and four times the electrolytes of Gatorade, which continues to dominate market share with 77% of the U.S. sports drink market.
New York Magazine, Intelligencer, Will Leitch from
… The Warriors think they’re getting screwed, and the Rockets think they’re getting screwed. This makes them like every other sports team since the beginning of time. The difference now is that they both truly, profoundly believe — and have their own statistical, analytical arguments, boosted by exhaustive research and empirical evidence — that the truth is on their side, and that they can prove it. They are trying to solve sports. But you can’t solve sports.
The Vegas Golden Knights announced a passing of the torch on Thursday, as Kelly McCrimmon becomes GM, while George McPhee is no longer GM, but sticks around as president of hockey operations.
It’s a move that echoes Steve Yzerman giving way to Julien BriseBois in Tampa Bay: like the Lightning with BriseBois, the Golden Knights didn’t want to lose a respected executive in McCrimmon. There are also parallels in the job McCrimmon is transitioning into. Much like the Lightning, the Golden Knights boast a talent-rich roster, and while Vegas features some Lightning-like bargains, the bottom line is that a cap crunch hovers over all of that luxurious skill.
The Pudding; Owen Phillips, Russell Goldenberg, and Jan Diehm from
The NBA introduced the defensive three seconds rule during the 2001-02 season. The rule was implemented to improve the watchability of the game by unclogging the paint and giving offensive players a better chance to make explosive plays at the rim. However, a close examination of the NBA’s play-by-play data reveals that defensive three seconds is the NBA’s least consistently called rule.
Jarmo Kekalainen doesn’t always make the exciting choice. On the day his Columbus Blue Jackets were finally set to learn who their second-round opponent would be after nearly a week off, Kekalainen was meeting up with his management group to watch some hockey. The object of their attention, though, was not Game 7 between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Boston Bruins, which would determine whether they flew north or east the next day. Rather, Kekalainen and his crew gathered in the late afternoon to make the two-hour drive to Cleveland to watch the Jackets’ American Hockey League affiliate, the Monsters, try to close out their first-round series against a Syracuse Crunch squad whose parent club — wouldn’t you know it? — is the very same record-chasing Tampa Bay Lighting team Columbus dispatched in four straight games.
Winding his vehicle toward the designated meetup spot, Kekalainen acknowledged that watching the Leafs and Bruins would be the juicier viewing option. “But for my job’s sake, I think that I [have] to watch our farm team play,” he said over the occasional click of his turn signal. “We’ve got some good prospects there that, who knows, might even be able to help us this spring.”
Every year, NBA players take about 200,000 shots. Each season, 30 teams combine to play 1,230 games, and at the end of the regular season, you can bet the sum total of shots taken will be very close to 200,000. In the hands of a cartographer, a season’s worth of this shooting data is a veritable treasure trove of information. But here’s the thing: In the first decade of this century, there weren’t many cartographers working in the NBA league office or for analytics departments in any of the team front offices.
Back then, basketball analytics was still in its infancy; it was all about spreadsheets and linear regression, not spatial and visual reasoning. Still, whether the league knew it or not, by adding these little spatial references to their game data, basketball analytics was about to become a lot more than spreadsheets. Things like data visualization and spatial analyses were going to be very important.
Unfortunately, there weren’t many folks with those skills working in pro basketball, and even though countless analysts had access to all the data the league was collecting — including all of the shot data — nobody was applying a spatial treatment. Nobody was mapping the NBA.
