Michael Porter Jr. often reminded himself to remain patient as the Denver Nuggets gradually eased him back onto the court.
Being patient, though, hasn’t always been his forte. He’s a 21-year-old highly touted rookie eager to show how he can contribute. He’s feeling good these days, too, after sitting out all of last season following back surgery.
Recently, more and more playing time has arrived for the player dubbed “MPJ” — a trend that figures only to go up and up. Porter completely understands why coach Michael Malone is carefully integrating him into an already deep lineup. A
… Ionescu, who has an NCAA-record 22 triple-doubles in her college career, is focused on trying to lead the sixth-ranked Ducks — who host No. 3 Stanford on Thursday (ESPN/ESPN App, 9 p.m. ET) — back to the Women’s Final Four. But what makes her so good, and what will make her so valuable at the next level?
We asked Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi, two of the best guards in the world, Oregon coach Kelly Graves and WNBA scouts.
The San Francisco Giants made a historic hire on Thursday, adding former Sacramento State softball star Alyssa Nakken to their major league coaching staff. While women have begun serving on coaching staffs in the NFL and NBA, and the New York Yankees recently hired Rachel Balkovec to be a minor league hitting coach, Nakken is believed to be the first woman named to a big league coaching staff.
Nakken, 29, is considered to be one of the best softball players to suit up at Sacramento State. She was a three-time All Conference player, played first, and also excelled in the classroom. In her senior year in 2012, Nakken was named Scholar Athlete of the Year in her conference.
Nakken wants to wait to do interviews until she has settled into her job. But her boss – Giants manager Gabe Kapler – said by phone from Arizona that Nakken will be working with Giants players on base running. She will throw batting practice. She will work with all the coaches on the technical aspects of the game while also working to help create unity and cohesion on a team full of new faces.
… Sowers’ journey to the NFL involves a heavy dose of talent with a side of happenstance. She grew up in Hesston, Kansas, and was a gifted athlete from a young age. Despite the fact that nobody else in the family played football, Sowers and her twin sister, Liz, were drawn to the sport. Sowers loved the Dallas Cowboys but not in the typical way. She didn’t care about the win-loss record or rivalries. Sowers wanted to don pads and wreak havoc as a Cowboy.
The brilliant Luke Kuechly gave us a searing image of brain trauma
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The twins played the sport nonstop. In high school, Katie chatted with the varsity football coach about joining the team. She decided against it only because she excelled at volleyball and wanted a chance of a college scholarship. Football wasn’t going to be it.
It was actually basketball that turned out to be her meal ticket.
Manager Eddie Howe revealed how his injury-hit players had “benefitted massively” from visits to Qatar during their respective rehabilitation periods.
The likes of Adam Smith, Lloyd Kelly and Arnaut Danjuma all last month visited Aspetar, a world-renowned orthopaedic and sports medicine hospital in Doha – to help aid their respective recoveries.
The 49ers won’t be missing any players due to injuries in Sunday’s NFC Championship Game.
Tight end George Kittle, who missed Wednesday’s practice with a sore ankle, and defensive end Dee Ford, who’s been handled carefully while working back from a hamstring injury, are expected to be available against the Green Bay Packers.
Various measures of the internal and external loads on athletes, as well as parameters related to their health are now being provided to a greater and greater extent by wearable sensors (wearables) (Düking et al., 2018a,b,c). These devices, including sensors and software embedded in e.g., textiles, watches and patches located on or in proximity to the body, collect, transmit, and analyse a range of physiological and biomechanical data designed to improve performance, recovery, and/or other aspects of health (Düking et al., 2018a). However, it is still unclear to what extent wearables are actually useful for monitoring load in connection with different sports and settings. [full text]
As interest in orthobiologics continues to grow, Matthew T. Provencher, MD, noted in a Facebook Live event hosted at Orthopedics Today Hawaii that orthopedists need to be cognizant of the exact definition of orthobiologics and where it fits within the specialty.
Although animal and basic science studies have shown promising results for re-growing cartilage, Provencher said the findings have not yet been proven in humans.
“If we have good stuff from [a patient’s] body but then we put it with a carrier, we put it in a bioreactor, … then we are able to put that back into the knee to help replace the cartilage,” Provencher said. “But to just squirt something into the knee right now or into the hip or the ankle, we are not there yet to be able to regrow cartilage.”
… “What is crazy frustrating is that there is absolutely nothing you can do,” [Dianna] Sager said. “I’ve had a physical therapist come to our school and walk my players through several preventative exercises for warmup and cool-down. We lift weights year-round and do specific lifts to strengthen our players’ quads and hamstrings. For the last two years, we have spent the first 15 minutes of practice stretching and warming up. I honestly do not have an answer for these injuries.”
Season-ending torn ACLs are occurring at an alarming rate as players rupture one of the key ligaments that helps stabilize the knee joint. Females are at least two to three times more prone to injure their ACL than males, and not enough teams are utilizing injury prevention programs, Dallas Wings team doctor Jit Mookerjee said.
A SportsDay survey found that 28 Dallas-area girls basketball players tore their ACL this summer or school year.
… “The ability of fast food commercials to prime these brain systems, potentially outside of the conscious awareness, may make it particularly challenging for adolescents to defend themselves against the negative effects of food marketing,” says lead author Ashley Gearhardt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
“Teens are a major advertising target for the food industry and they receive little protection. Our results suggest that fast food restaurants adding more advertisements for healthier foods is unlikely to protect adolescents. Reducing the overall amount of food advertising viewed by teens is an important target for improving health.”
… In my view, though, the best use of Strava is not bragging about your own training and racing but following the training of highly successful athletes. As long as you do so in an intelligent way (not a monkey-see-monkey-do way), observing how the best athletes approach fitness development can serve as a useful source of information to guide your approach to same. This is especially true if you follow a number of such athletes, as clear patterns will emerge (e.g., adherence to the 80/20 principle of intensity balance). Most of the best endurance athletes do most things right in their training, so you can trust that these patterns represent true best practices in endurance training.
For some time now I’ve wished that there existed a dietary analog to Strava. I think it could help athletes in a way that’s similar to what I just described on the training side. Just as most athletes fail to follow best practices in their training, most athletes also fail to eat optimally.
… “It’s against my nature to trade good football players, it really is, for future considerations as we did because that is not in my nature at all, so it was difficult,” Elway said at season’s end. “But looking at the big picture of where we were, where Emmanuel was, what was going on with our football team, the future considerations that we ended up getting, it made it all worthwhile. At that point in time, maybe losing a good football player was the best thing for our football.”
The Sanders trade was the start of a slightly different approach for the Broncos’ front office as it tries to return to the playoffs for the first time since the 2015 season. There are many in the league, as well as others who have known Elway throughout his career, who say the losing has pushed Elway in recent weeks to solicit opinions from those he respects.
… RB Leipzig is Europe’s equivalent of an American expansion team. Before 2009, it simply didn’t exist. Then Red Bull — already the owner of soccer clubs in Salzburg and New York as well as Formula 1 racing teams and other sports entities — took control of SSV Markranstadt, which had been puttering along in the German fifth division. It changed the team’s name and Red Bull’d its colors and logo. It bought a 10-year lease on the city’s 43,000-seat stadium, broke ground on a palatial training facility and began its journey to the top of German football.
In just eight seasons, RB Leipzig reached the Bundesliga. By the 10th, 2018-19, it was competing in the Champions League. Fielding Germany’s youngest squad, it deploys a high-octane style; this season, no team in the league has scored as many goals. As the Bundesliga resumes this week after its holiday break, Leipzig is well positioned to depose mighty Bayern, which has won seven titles in succession but currently sits four points behind Leipzig in the table. That’s big news for a competition that has crowned just two different champions — Bayern and Borussia Dortmund — in the past decade and only four this century.
You would assume the emergence of a new contender would be celebrated. It isn’t.