Few players will hit the floor in 2020-21 under as much scrutiny as budding Toronto Raptors superstar Pascal Siakam.
Fresh off a tumultuous year and a half that saw Siakam become a champion, put together the finest season of his career, and ultimately come up well short of expectations in the peculiar bubble-ball post-season, the 26-year-old heads into the coming NBA campaign looking to clarify where he stands among the game’s best.
Siakam provided a glimpse into the work he’s putting in to return to form this coming season, launching a new YouTube series, Humble Hustle, documenting his off-season training in California.
… “I never will forget that game,” said Pugh of that night vs. the Eagles, who he and the Arizona Cardinals play Sunday (4:05 p.m., Fox). “That game is the low of my New York Giants’ career.
“I was devastated. I was like, ‘This is the beginning of the end.’ And we fought back. We fought back. We overcame. And I couldn’t be prouder of how I handled it and where I’m at now in my career. It’s something that made me who I am so I’m thankful for it.”
Pugh turned to a life coach, Beth Weissenberger of the Handel Group in New York, to help get through it. It’s not something that is commonly talked about in the NFL and Pugh expects a reaction to opening up about seeing Weissenberger. Players like Seattle’s Russell Wilson and Minnesota’s Adam Thielen have mental conditioning coaches, and the NFLPA offers mental health clinicians through teams. But a life coach is something different.
… Brandon is still precocious. He turned pro in 2019 after one year at the University of Virginia and reached the quarterfinals at Delray Beach, Fla., earlier this year as a wild-card entry in his Assn. of Tennis Professionals tour debut. He recorded his first Grand Slam match victory with a first-round win at the U.S. Open before he lost to eventual runner-up Sascha Zverev in four sets.
He’s the youngest American man in the year-end top 200, having moved up from 367 at the end of 2019, a remarkable climb during a year in which COVID-19 turned the world upside down and wiped out much of the pro tennis schedule. His game is evolving nicely. He has a potent backhand, a strategically sound return game and an improving serve. His poise on the court, another distinct asset, allows him to stay focused. As he matures he can add power and muscle. He’s already someone to watch in the seemingly endless search for the next standout American male tennis player.
Dr. Marcus Elliott is the Stephen Hawking of applied sports science. When I wrote an article about sports injury prevention many years ago, this guy’s name kept coming up. Now he was sitting in front of me and I had questions. Dr. Elliott had the answers. And then some…
Ten years ago, when he was living and training at the Houston Astros’ Dominican academy in Santo Domingo, Teoscar Hernandez was just another teenaged ballplayer trying to hit his way off the island.
He went through it all. The tryout process, signing for a $20,000 bonus, moving away from his family, learning English, fighting to stand out in Dominican Summer League games. He made it to the United States in 2012 to play rookie-ball, made it to MLB four years later as a promising outfield prospect, and now, after a .919 OPS season that earned him down-ballot MVP votes, is finally making it as a big-league star at 28.
Soon, he’ll have his first trophy to show for it — a 2020 Silver Slugger recognizing him as one of the American League’s three best offensive outfielders this season. And the morning after he won that award, Hernandez was recounting his long journey for a group of young players from the Toronto B
… Last month USA Cycling rolled out its Olympic Development Academy, a bold new model for talent identification and youth development that officials believe will bring a wider swath of riders under the federation’s development umbrella. Only now, the cost of developing the stars of tomorrow will be paid by the riders themselves.
“It’s going to get more kids in the pipeline,” said Rob DeMartini, USA Cycling’s CEO. “We haven’t been reaching that deep — [riders] have needed to come out of other programs, like Durango Devo or Bear Development [Team].”
Researchers found that basketball players score more during their time playing in the NBA bubble — possibly because the players’ circadian rhythms weren’t disrupted by travel across time zones. [audio, 2:29]
A new molecular probe from Stanford University could help reveal how our brains think and remember. This tool, called Fast Light and Calcium-Regulated Expression or FLiCRE (pronounced “flicker”), can be sent inside any cell to perform a variety of research tasks, including tagging, recording and controlling cellular functions.
“This work gets at a central goal of neuroscience: How do you find the system of neurons that underlie a thought or cognitive process? Neuroscientists have been wanting this type of tool for a long time,” said Alice Ting, professor of genetics in the Stanford School of Medicine and of biology in the School of Humanities and sciences, whose team co-led this work with the lab of Stanford psychiatrist and bioengineer, Karl Deisseroth.
Researchers at the University of Oslo in collaboration with researchers at the University of Cincinnati has uncovered mechanisms governing the regulation of muscle cell size. The findings are important for understanding the possibilities and limitations in building muscle mass, and for the basic understanding of the relationship between cell size and DNA content.
Scientists studying the way athletes sweat have come up with a skin patch that can measure your rate of fluid and electrolyte loss in real time, potentially allowing you to fine tune your hydration plan during a race.
The current version is a bit smaller than a credit card and requires the user to scan it with a smartphone camera and use an app to interpret the results. That design makes it more a research and training tool than something that can conveniently be used in races — though it might be useful for events like the pentathlon, or for sports like tennis, basketball, and football, where the action is punctuated by breaks long enough to grab a phone and take a scan.
But the current version is just a prototype. Ultimately, the patch might be reduced to the size of a quarter and wired by Bluetooth to a sports watch or other wearable monitor.
The goal, says John Rogers, a biomedical engineer and co-author of a paper in today’s issue of Science Advances (sister publication to the better-known journal Science) is to get the information to athletes, including runners, in easily usable form.
Interest rates are at historically low levels. The current 10-year U.S. Treasury rate is under 1%. Because the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB maintain low limits on the amount of debt that owners can place against the value of their franchises, teams will continue to be able to access the capital markets to manage their balance sheets during the remainder of this difficult period, said well-respected sports banker Rob Tilliss (CEO, Inner Circle Sports). “Despite the costs of funds rising for banks during the pandemic, benchmark rates remain so low that teams in many instances can borrow at a lower all-in cost than five years ago,” he explained.
The 60th Monthly Report presents the methodology of the CIES Football Observatory for the comparison of the technical performance of players in a statistically objective manner and applies it to footballers in 35 domestic leagues of UEFA member associations. The data used was produced by the company InStat. It refers to the 2020/21 season (or 2020 for the summer championships).
172 games were played in the Orland bubble, 89 seeding, and 83 playoff games. We analyzed the first 89 games of each of the past 5 seasons (corresponding with 89 bubble seeding games), along with 5 previous playoffs.
We counted the total number of games NBA players missed due to injury during this period and compared the bubble with “outside”.
Younger siblings have a significantly higher chance of becoming elite athletes, according to a new book titled, “The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made.”
What they’re saying: “Playing with older siblings is better for skill acquisition because athletes learn at a faster rate when they fail regularly,” co-author Tim Wigmore tells Axios. “Younger siblings can’t use physical advantages so they need skills, tactics and resilience to compete.”
Case study No. 1: In a study of USWNT candidates, 75% had an older sibling, 20% were the oldest child and just 5% were only children.
USA Today Sports; Tom Schad, Steve Berkowitz and Dian Zhang from
… This year, for the first time, USA TODAY Sports reviewed assistant coaches’ pay by position and title as part of its annual analysis of coaches’ compensation. The findings show that offensive line coaches at the 51 public schools in the Power Five are making more money, on average, than coaches at any other position. And it’s not particularly close.