… Which brings us to Oscar Klefbom, who has never made anyone’s universal list — even though he has been Edmonton’s No. 1 for some time now. He leads the NHL in time on ice per game (25:56), is ninth among defencemen in points (17), quarterbacks the NHL’s leading powerplay and anchors the league’s second-best penalty-killing unit.
Yet, you might ask 20 NHL general managers if he’s a legit No. 1 and not get a single “Yes.”
“Is that fair?” we asked Klefbom after a practice in Las Vegas.
“For sure, it’s a fair question,” responded the handsome Swede, completely unoffended by the question. “You look at a guy like Drew Doughty — he’s been playing 27 minutes for I don’t know how many years now. He’s been consistent for many, many years. Victor Hedman, plays a lot of minutes, a lot of responsibility for so many years.
When Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Tyler Lockett suffered a serious shin bruise in his team’s overtime win over the San Francisco 49ers, it necessitated a two-night stay in a local hospital. It was the safe approach, rather than have him fly home immediately. Fast forward two weeks and Lockett is expected to play Sunday against the Eagles.
How did he make it back on the field so quickly?
Lockett got an assist from an unlikely source: The rival 49ers.
In the hospital after the game, sources say Lockett wanted to know if medical personnel had a Game Ready device — a new-age, high-end compression therapy unit used to accelerate recovery. The hospital did not have the device, which is used almost exclusively in athletics.
… Some two years later, Alex Carpenter has no regrets or hold any lingering resentment over being left off a team that would go on to win its second gold medal and first since 1998.
“I don’t think it’s worth being bitter about. It was outside of my control,” said Carpenter, who had helped the U.S. win four previous world championships and a silver medal at the 2014 Sochi Games. “It was decisions they made and I can’t do anything about it now.”
What matters is U.S. college hockey’s top women’s player in 2015 is back on the national team after helping the U.S. win its fifth consecutive world championship and ninth overall in April.
Ryan O'Hanlon, No Grass in the Clouds newsletter from
… When it comes to this Hull team I mainly remember Liverpool losing to them, 2-0. And I also remember Harry Maguire, a kind of husky, dribble-happy center back I’d never seen before. Maguire, of course, went on to play for England at the World Cup, and he’s now back together with Phelan at Manchester United. One thing I do not remember: the presence of a 22-year-old Andy Robertson, who has since become one of the best left backs on the planet for Liverpool.
Liverpool signed Robertson for £8 million after the 2016-17 season, and as far as I can tell, the move didn’t even warrant its own Guardian article and was instead covered in a transfer-roundup piece that mentioned a couple other deals for players like Lucas Leiva and Bruno Martins Indi. Given the small fee and the lack of media coverage around the deal, I don’t think anyone expected Robertson to be this good, and I’m not sure many people were even convinced that he would become a starter at Liverpool.
University of Oregon, Daily Emerald student newspaper, Noah Noteboom from
… Feld’s main duty on the field and in the weight room is to prepare his players for the next week. The team’s offensive line and running backs are the ones who benefit the most from Feld’s knowledge. In the beginning of the season, Oregon relied heavily on the running game with transfers and injuries to its receiving corps.
Oregon’s running game has been elevated this season, thanks to its talented and experienced offensive line. All of the starters stand over 6 foot 2 and weigh over 295 pounds. In an attempt to reshape their players, the strength and conditioning staff has been working closely with the offensive line especially.
… Lauren Fleshman is right to call for greater scrutiny of girls’ running.
I’ve written about high school running for decades and covered the 1998 championship event in which Ms. Fleshman competed. Five years earlier, I wrote a front-page story in The New York Times (“Girls Cross Country Taking a Heavy Toll, Study Shows”) that brought national attention to the issues involving the intersection of girls’ training, eating habits and adolescent growth patterns. The study in my article found that among 60,000 athletes surveyed, girls’ cross-country had the highest incidence of injury of any sport.
What happens at the molecular level after exercise? Scientists, physicians and clinical exercise specialists from across the country are embarking on a landmark National Institutes of Health effort to find out.
The Center for Exercise Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is one of 11 clinical sites nationwide participating in the study.
The goal of the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium, known as MoTrPAC, is to create a comprehensive map of the molecular responses to exercise and its relation to health.
… Proof of our inability to deal constructively with our emotional lives is all around us. In 2015, in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Born This Way Foundation (founded by Lady Gaga and her mother, Cynthia Germanotta), we conducted a large-scale survey of twenty-two thousand teenagers from across the United States and asked them to describe how they feel while in school. Three- quarters of the words they used were negative, with “tired,” “bored,” and “stressed” topping the list. This wasn’t surprising given that around 30 percent of elementary and middle school students now experience adjustment problems severe enough to require regular counseling. In economically disadvantaged schools, this runs as high as 60 percent.
American youths now rank in the bottom quarter among developed nations in well- being and life satisfaction, according to a report by UNICEF. Research shows that our youths have stress levels that surpass those of adults. Our teenagers are now world leaders in violence, binge drinking, marijuana use, and obesity. More than half of college students experience overwhelming anxiety, and a third report intense depression. And over the last two decades, there has been a 28-percent increase in our suicide rate.
What’s the best way to get people to change their behavior? In this funny, information-packed talk, psychologist Dan Ariely explores why we make bad decisions even when we know we shouldn’t — and discusses a couple tricks that could get us to do the right thing (even if it’s for the wrong reason).
Stress. Anxiety. Burnout. It’s a given that most of us are pretty worn out—from the pressures of work and personal finances, to social injustices and partisan politics. We now live in a world in which a stressful life is considered a normal life. And with the prevalence of smartphones and social media, anxiety triggers are right at our fingertips. So how do we fix this problem? In the first part of our new series, Confessions From Our Anxious World, we spoke with a mom who works as a public defender and with a psychologist about the harmful effects of stress and their strategies of coping with burnout.
Turns out that we’re often pretty terrible at reporting on our own habits — how much we’re exercising, when we’re sleeping and feel rested. But what we are good at is engaging with a wide variety of technology 24/7.
“Walking around with our smartphones and wearable devices, the devices actually generate massive digital traces of our behavior in the real world,” said Tim Althoff, an assistant professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.
Althoff and his team are tapping into this data in some unexpected ways in order to tease out a better understanding of human health, including insights into sleep and performance, exercise and health inequality, and mental health and counseling.
A decade before he led Virginia Commonwealth to the Final Four, Shaka Smart was a low-level member of Dayton’s staff who had been handed a frustrating task by his boss, coach Oliver Purnell. Smart’s mission: Buy every brand of basketball the Flyers might be forced to use on the road that season.
“I just remember walking into the store, going from aisle to aisle and hoping to find all the different basketballs,” said Smart, now the head coach at Texas. “I remember that.”
Former Wisconsin power forward Nigel Hayes remembers when his coach, Bo Ryan, took advantage of the NCAA rules and used a basketball made by a small company in Puyallup, Washington, called Sterling. No other major conference team used it, perhaps giving the Badgers a psychological edge.
“I struggle with putting these limitations on things: ‘don’t play in big stadiums,’ ‘don’t pay women too much’. Why? Why do we have these conversations? We should be aiming for the fucking top of the sky because you know what? If the product grows, so will the rest of it. Don’t limit it. In fact, invest more.”
Emma Hayes oozes passion for women’s football from every pore. A week after the Chelsea manager pulled off one of the biggest transfers in the history of women’s football, with the Australian striker Sam Kerr joining in January, she is sitting in the building at the back of the club’s Cobham training ground that the women’s team has gradually taken over, bursting with energy.
“What’s to sell? Seriously, look at this place … what’s to sell?” she exclaims gesturing around their home when asked whether it was hard to convince Kerr to leave Australia’s W-League and the US’s NWSL (which many play back-to-back).
The NBA is engaged in serious discussions with the National Basketball Players Association and broadcast partners on sweeping, dramatic changes to the league calendar that would include a reseeding of the four conference finalists, a 30-team in-season tournament and a postseason play-in, league sources told ESPN.
These scenarios would come with the shortening of the regular season to a minimum of 78 games, league sources said.