… PFF data scientist Eric Eager has done tremendous work building college-to-pro projections, which are built off the robust college data we’ve collected since 2014 and have been applied to exercises like building an “Analytics” Mock. In this analysis, I’m going to use some of our advanced stats for comparison but primarily rely on traditional stats to go back further to compare the 2021 prospects to draft classes going back to 2006.
Without the NFL Scouting Combine this season, the important measurables like weight and 40-yard dash will be reported through the various pro days that will be taking place over the next few weeks.
Chris Paul says he knows the secret for why he’s still a dominant NBA point guard at an age when most of his peers are getting into coaching or figuring out their next steps in life.
“I told the guys in the locker room I’ve got the easy job,” Paul said grinning. “I just pass it to them.”
The obvious moment when the skill set from Jalen Suggs’ childhood passion collides with his future profession comes when he loops around the perimeter of the basketball court and takes a dribble handoff.
That’s the snapshot of when Larry Suggs, Jalen’s dad and a youth coach in their native Minnesota, sees the flashes of the tantalizing football potential his son showed growing up. Larry Suggs always smiles when he sees his son look as if he’s ready to sprint ahead for a first down.
“When Jalen comes off, his shoulder is always very low so he can always be in the attacking-the-basket mode,” Larry Suggs told Yahoo Sports in a phone interview. “That’s just like taking a handoff in football. You have to stay low like that and that’s something Jalen innately knew since he’s done it so many times on the football field.”
Chris Finch was the first coach the Rockets tabbed to lead the Vipers in 2009. His team tried sending all five guys charging in for offensive rebounds.
“We had some defense where we just sent everybody left, no matter what,” said Daryl Morey, the former Rockets general manager who now is president of basketball operations for the 76ers. “You’d rather send everyone to their weak hand, but we thought maybe the players couldn’t remember who was right- or left-handed always.”
No convention was left unchallenged.
“We saw everything down there as sort of a proving ground,” Morey said. “There was a lot of things to try.”
Most of us know that the job of the first-team manager or head coach is precarious – and that length of tenure can be short for them.
But what about the turnover of coaches working in Academies? There has been little research on this, which is why I – along with four other coach developers (Mick Halsall, Lee Peacock, Bruce Suraci and Rob Williams) decided to try and find out more about the challenges clubs face in recruiting and retaining the best coaches.
ESPN, Women's College Basketball, Mechelle Voepel from
The NCAA has improved its weight-training facilities for the women’s basketball tournament in San Antonio with more equipment having been brought into the convention center where the teams practice.
Teams were working out inside the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center on Saturday morning. Besides nine practice courts, there are expanded weight-training facilities that now have heavier weights, six squat racks, benches, resistance bands and exercise balls, with everything socially distanced. There also are areas alongside the practice courts with exercise bikes, rowing machines, treadmills, yoga mats and upgraded weight equipment.
“It was great. It’s nice. Everything that we needed,” Louisville coach Jeff Walz said. “Our strength coach was pleased, our players were pleased. We appreciate the efforts.”
… In 2019, Kalis Loyd met European basketball trainer Tremaine Dalton, an American who founded The Process Basketball in 2017. The multi-armed company has two branches in Paris, France, and Melbourne, Australia, and Dalton is actively developing domestic programs in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and internationally in Panama, Japan, and China.
The Process Basketball has three key elements: Dalton trains elite-level players wherever they need him; he’s worked in locations as far-flung as Haifa, Israel and Orlando, Florida. His players also hail from countries all over the world, including South Sudan (Emmanuel Malou, who has trained with the Sacramento Kings and the Warriors before moving on to Europe and Iraq) and Estonia (including Kristjan Kitsing and will work with Kregor Hermet later this year). He’s also been recognized as one of the world’s top one-on-one players after winning the Red Bull King of Rock one-on-one contest in 2011 and is one of the few coaches who can combine isolation-style basketball with European playsets.
Illinois residents may proceed with a lawsuit alleging that Amazon and Microsoft violated a state biometric privacy law by amassing a database of fingerprints, a federal judge has ruled.
Carnegie Mellon University, Soft Machines Lab from
New paper in Nature Electronics by SML members Yunsik Ohm, Chengfeng Pan, Michael Ford, and Sean Huang on a novel silver-hydrogel composite. This composite has a unique combination of high electrical conductivity and extreme, gel-like softness and stretchability.
Yun and his team show that this gel can be used as a bioelectrode for wireless neuromuscular stimulation of the arm and leg.
Recurrent tears after surgical tendon repair remain common. Repair failures can be partly attributed to the use of sutures not designed for the tendon cellular niche nor designed for the promotion of repair processes. Synthetic electrospun materials can mechanically support the tendon while providing topographical cues that regulate cell behavior. Here, a novel electrospun suture made from twisted polydioxanone (PDO) polymer filaments is compared to PDS II, a clinically used PDO suture currently utilized in tendon repair. We evaluated the ability of these sutures to support the attachment and proliferation of human tendon‐derived stromal cells using PrestoBlue and scanning electron microscopy. Suture surface chemistry was analyzed using x‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Bulk RNA‐Seq interrogated the transcriptional response of primary tendon‐derived stromal cells to sutures after 14 days. Electrospun suture showed increased initial cell attachment and a stronger transcriptional response compared with PDS II, with relative enrichment of pathways including mTorc1 signaling and depletion of epithelial‐to‐mesenchymal transition. Neither suture induced transcriptional upregulation of inflammatory pathways compared to baseline. Twisted electrospun sutures therefore show promise in improving outcomes in surgical tendon repair by allowing increased cell attachment while maintaining an appropriate tissue response. [full text]
American Scientist; Philip A. Rea, Peter Yin, Ryan Zahalka from
… White adipose tissue (or, in nontechnical terms, fat), the main culprit in weight gain, tends to accumulate under the skin and as visceral deposits around internal organs. By contrast, brown adipose tissue usually appears as deposits in the neck area and between the shoulders. Medical researchers first described brown fat in hibernating mammals and, among our own species, in newborn babies.
Until recently, brown fat was thought to exist in humans for only a short time after birth to serve as a stopgap for the maintenance of body temperature, in lieu of the shivering reflex that develops later in life. It was not until 2002, with the large-scale adoption of positron emission tomography (PET) scans, that areas resembling brown fat were recognized in the medical images of adults as well. However, the discoveries related to fat did not end there. The complex biology of adipose tissue continues to yield surprises, including the insight that a newly characterized type of body fat could ultimately play a major role in fighting obesity.
Computational psychiatry brings quantitative tools to bear on the way mental illness is studied, classified and treated. A common aim across different cultures of computational psychiatry is to provide a set of features that, when inferred over time at the individual level, can predict both symptom outcomes, and the effect of different therapeutic interventions. The underlying assumption is that various behavioral and neurophysiological measures (e.g. choices, reaction times, speech patterns, gaze trajectories, etc.) can be summarized as individual data points in a useful feature space. The hope is that the structure of this space will map onto a diagnostic taxonomy; that process models can bridge the gap between behavior and its biological determinants; and that the dynamics of data points in this space can inform therapeutic interventions.
A question I always come back to when thinking about my own work in this area is, how can a computational approach account for the heterogeneity of biological and environmental factors specific to each individual’s individual story and subjective experience? Engaging with this question in a precise way is quite challenging, as it would require a record of a person’s significant past experiences, psychosocial context, subjective interpretation, and so on. Together, these form a personal narrative, and are often key pieces of information in clinical assessments.
I love talking about coaches: their ideas, approaches, philosophies. One of my favourite things is assessing a team’s early performances and trying to predict whether the coach will succeed long-term. At some point, I even stopped following teams and started following coaches. You’ll find me wherever the good coaching is. But what exactly is “good coaching”? How can we tell that the coaching is “good”?
I always felt like there was not enough attention paid to coaches in the public space so I decided to take matters into my own hands. Guided by the vague memory of Tom Worville’s search for the next Manchester City manager, I attempted to develop an objective method for profiling coaches with data in a way that could support recruitment processes.
Fundamentally, I wanted to create a model that looked behind the scoreline and, as much as possible, ignored the quality of available players.