… Last season, Harden launched more than twice as many unassisted 3s as Kemba Walker, who ranked second in the league with 439 attempts, according to Second Spectrum tracking data. How? It’s all about the isolations.
The numbers are absurd. Harden averaged an incredible 19.8 isos per game. Going back to 2013-14, only two teams have averaged more than 20 isolations per game: Harden’s Rockets in 2017-18 (22.2) and 2018-19 (30.0). Since the NBA adopted tracking stats leaguewide in 2013-14, no player had ever logged more than 900 isolations in a single season — until last season when Harden had a cool 1,548.
We’re watching the reboot of hero ball, folks. And with Harden at the controls, Mike D’Antoni engineering the sets and Daryl Morey tracking the efficiency metrics.
… Despite the record-breaking accomplishment, the 33-year-old said she still has a ways to go. “I’m just grateful to be healthy, to be working my way back. It feels good,” she said.
While she beat one Jamaican runner’s record, Felix praised another: Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who is also a new mom. The athletes took a photo together at the IAAF World Champions and both posted it on Instagram with a poignant caption about motherhood.
Ryan Callahan figured he would visit a specialist and learn how to fix the back issues that plagued him last season.
Instead, two doctor visits brought the diagnosis of degenerative disk disease and the end of his playing career. Once Callahan came to grips with that, he decided he would like to go into management or broadcasting.
There was one problem: Callahan had one year left on his contract and can’t work for a team until it expires next summer. So the 34-year-old signed on to be an NHL Network analyst this season, possibly creating a road map for other players to follow if injuries cut short their on-ice careers.
… “The manager saw me working last year and asked me to step up because he believes in what I do,” Hunter told The Gazette. “Last year, my involvement with the first team was limited because Tony Pulis had a backroom staff.”
Hunter described her job as, “helping prepare training sessions to maximise the fitness of the first-team players and making sure they are ready to perform in the way the manager wants, which obviously is a different way from how they played last year”.
Two MIT professors have found a strong relationship between students’ grades and how much sleep they’re getting. What time students go to bed and the consistency of their sleep habits also make a big difference. And no, getting a good night’s sleep just before a big test is not good enough — it takes several nights in a row of good sleep to make a difference.
Those are among the conclusions from an experiment in which 100 students in an MIT engineering class were given Fitbits, the popular wrist-worn devices that track a person’s activity 24/7, in exchange for the researchers’ access to a semester’s worth of their activity data. The findings — some unsurprising, but some quite unexpected — are reported today in the journal Science of Learning in a paper by MIT postdoc Kana Okano, professors Jeffrey Grossman and John Gabrieli, and two others.
Frontiers in Sports and Active Living journal from
Middle-distance running provides unique complexity where very different physiological and structural/mechanical profiles may achieve similar elite performances. Training and improving the key determinants of performance and applying interventions to athletes within the middle-distance event group are probably much more divergent than many practitioners and researchers appreciate. The addition of maximal sprint speed and other anaerobic and biomechanical based parameters, alongside more commonly captured aerobic characteristics, shows promise to enhance our understanding and analysis within the complexities of middle-distance sport science. For coaches, athlete diversity presents daily training programming challenges in order to best individualize a given stimulus according to the athletes profile and avoid “non-responder” outcomes. It is from this decision making part of the coaching process, that we target this mini-review. First we ask researchers to “question their categories” concerning middle-distance event groupings. Historically broad classifications have been used [from 800 m (~1.5 min) all the way to 5,000 m (~13–15 min)]. Here within we show compelling rationale from physiological and event demand perspectives for narrowing middle-distance to 800 and 1,500 m alone (1.5–5 min duration), considering the diversity of bioenergetics and mechanical constraints within these events. Additionally, we provide elite athlete data showing the large diversity of 800 and 1,500 m athlete profiles, a critical element that is often overlooked in middle-distance research design. Finally, we offer practical recommendations on how researchers, practitioners, and coaches can advance training study designs, scientific interventions, and analysis on middle-distance athletes/participants to provide information for individualized decision making trackside and more favorable and informative study outcomes. [full text]
… BetterNight is a digital tool catered to people with sleep apnea, insomnia, anxiety, jet lag, stress and other sleep conditions. Users are able to access telemedicine and remote patient monitoring through the platform. The platform prompts users to fill out a survey about their sleep. It also includes a cognitive behavioral therapy tool for customers. The tool then gives the customer a report and action plan for their sleep.
University of California-Santa Barbara, The UCSB Current from
Researchers in the lab of UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi have enabled, for the first time, determining whether the person behind a wall is the same individual who appears in given video footage, using only a pair of WiFi transceivers outside.
This novel video-WiFi cross-modal gait-based person identification system, which they refer to as XModal-ID (pronounced Cross-Modal-ID), could have a variety of applications, from surveillance and security to smart homes. For instance, consider a scenario in which law enforcement has a video footage of a robbery. They suspect that the robber is hiding inside a house. Can a pair of WiFi transceivers outside the house determine if the person inside the house is the same as the one in the robbery video? Questions such as this have motivated this new technology.
Biologging is a scientific endeavor that studies the environment and animals within it by outfitting the latter with sensors of their dynamics as they roam freely in their natural habitats. As wearable technologies advance for the monitoring of human health, it may be instructive to reflect on the successes and failures of biologging in field biology over the past few decades. Several lessons may be of value. Physiological sensors can “encode” for a wider number of states than the one explicitly targeted, although the limits of this are debatable. The combination of orthogonal sensors turns out to be critical to delivering a high value data set. Sensor fusion and engineering for longevity are also important for success. This Perspective highlights successful strategies for biologging that hold promise for human health monitoring. [full text]
Ever think about the challenges a team physician goes through? Take a behind the scenes look inside the FC Cincinnati training room in episode two of “Behind the Scenes with Busam”
The utilization of stem cell therapies for augmentation of tissue healing has far outpaced the supporting scientific and clinical data, largely due to aggressive marketing that has led to widespread and often inappropriate use of cell therapy approaches in the United States. Two critical reviews in the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery, published by Elsevier, examine the current status of biologic approaches for common shoulder and elbow problems. The authors discuss areas where the current evidence base is weak or controversial and recommend where further studies are required.
When most people think of Major League Baseball (MLB) and data science, they probably think of Moneyball, Sabermetrics, or Statcast AI — data science applied to action on the field. However, with millions of local and global fans engaging with America’s Pastime every day, and with 30 client organizations (i.e., each MLB Club) each with their own unique business goals, there is also a great deal of action happening off the field. In this post, MLB’s Data Science team will introduce some of the many ways that we pair this off-the-field activity with data science to better serve the League, the Clubs, and most importantly, our fans.
Data Science at the League Level
The broadest way our team touches the League is aiding the Commissioner’s Office in evaluating prospective schedules for upcoming seasons.
All-time great QBs, creative schemes, and advantageous rule changes have all contributed to the NFL’s offensive boom. What’s a defense to do? Adapt or continue to get torched.
Gareth Southgate has stated that there is no “privileged access” for players to the England squad after again making bold changes, leaving out senior internationals Dele Alli, Jesse Lingard, Kyle Walker and Eric Dier.
In come the Chelsea pair of Tammy Abraham and Fikayo Tomori, which, remarkably, means that just 11 of the 23-man squad who reached the semi-finals of the World Cup in Russia are in the 25 who have been selected for the Euro 2020 qualifiers away to the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. “That is quite a big shift,” Southgate conceded.
England can seal their qualification for next summer’s tournament and Southgate is determined to choose players on merit rather than reputation, having called Alli, Dier and others to inform them they had again been left out.