… Over the final days of a chaotic and taxing NBA regular season — a season of often bad, blowout basketball squeezed into five months — players described to The Washington Post an experience packed with a lot of games but little joy. Coronavirus restrictions wiped out most opportunities for players to bond. The crammed schedule after a short offseason — the Memphis Grizzlies and San Antonio Spurs played 11 back-to-backs over the final 10 weeks of the season, according to NBA.com — appeared to lead to usage injuries across the league. And as the season wore on, players spoke openly about mental health concerns, all with the jaded knowledge that the season was designed to maximize revenue amid a stubborn pandemic.
“This season is straight about quantity. It’s not about the quality of play,” said eighth-year veteran Solomon Hill, who plays for the Atlanta Hawks. “It’s kind of like: ‘What are we trying to accomplish here? Are we just trying to finish the season? Are or we really trying to put our best foot forward, our best athletes on the court, and give a quality service to the game?’ And it’s definitely been a lack of that.”
When Dina Asher-Smith takes her place on the starting blocks at the delayed Olympic Games this summer, she is determined to be in peak condition both physically and mentally. The British sprinter has had an extra year to prepare for one of the biggest occasions of her career and she doesn’t want to leave any stone unturned.
During these unprecedented times, Asher-Smith has grown fond of the idea: “If not now, when?” There might never be another chance in her life where she will have the opportunity to learn more about herself, and the 25-year-old has adopted a renewed focus on mental health.
The fastest woman in British history is happy with life but has taken steps to pay more attention to her state of mind because she understands that things can easily take a turn for the worse with the COVID-19 pandemic still looming over the world.
Northwestern Kellogg School of Business, Kellogg Insight from
… In a new study of the video-game industry, King and his coauthors— Balazs Szatmari of the University of Amsterdam, and Dirk Deichmann and Jan van den Ende of Erasmus University—found that a leader’s high status among their peers doesn’t guarantee a positive outcome for the projects they lead. Indeed, it can often be a liability.
Leaders with high status, the research revealed, are prone to extremes—big successes or big flops—while moderate status is associated with the highest average level of project performance.
Why? With status comes everything a leader needs for a project to succeed: resources, support, the faith of executives and team members. But there is peril, too: high-status project leaders are often overburdened. And precisely because of their status, the people around them may not offer honest feedback.
At his end of season availability, Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse discusses Masai Ujiri’s status with the franchise, coaching Team Canada and how involved he’ll be in the Raptors’ draft selections. [video, 37:51]
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Christoph Riedl, Young Ji Kim, Pranav Gupta, Thomas W. Malone, and Anita Williams Woolley from
Collective intelligence (CI) is critical to solving many scientific, business, and other problems, but groups often fail to achieve it. Here, we analyze data on group performance from 22 studies, including 5,279 individuals in 1,356 groups. Our results support the conclusion that a robust CI factor characterizes a group’s ability to work together across a diverse set of tasks. We further show that CI is predicted by the proportion of women in the group, mediated by average social perceptiveness of group members, and that it predicts performance on various out-of-sample criterion tasks. We also find that, overall, group collaboration process is more important in predicting CI than the skill of individual members.
Managing pitchers’ workloads as the schedule returns to a normal 162 games after last year’s 60-game sprint was a primary focus for Stearns, manager Craig Counsell and the coaching staff as spring training got underway.
So far, things have gone according to plan. Thanks to a bevy of off-days over the first few weeks of the season, Counsell has been able to give each of his starters an extra day of rest for all but one turn through the rotation.
From a bullpen perspective, Stearns thinks the workloads have been manageable so far and if there’s a bright side to the team’s recent slump, it’s provided an opportunity for Counsell to rest some of his higher-leverage relievers, who saw significant action during the first month.
CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems from
We present Pose-on-the-Go, a full-body pose estimation system that uses sensors already found in today’s smartphones. This stands in contrast to prior systems, which require worn or external sensors. We achieve this result via extensive sensor fusion, leveraging a phone’s front and rear cameras, the user-facing depth camera, touchscreen, and IMU. Even still, we are missing data about a user’s body (e.g., angle of the elbow joint), and so we use inverse kinematics to estimate and animate probable body poses. We provide a detailed evaluation of our system, benchmarking it against a professional-grade Vicon tracking system. We conclude with a series of demonstration applications that underscore the unique potential of our approach, which could be enabled on many modern smartphones with a simple software update.
An interdisciplinary group of University of Michigan faculty from the School of Kinesiology and the School of Information have come together for a massive open online Sports Analytics Performance Specialization to share the science behind sports analytics.
Working with the Center for Academic Innovation, the team will launch the first three of five courses May 17. The initial courses on the Coursera platform will introduce sports analytics, take a closer look at the Moneyball sabermetrics approach, and show how to use various prediction models with sports data. Included is a discussion about responsible sports gambling.
The fourth course, set to launch in June, will focus on the increased use of sports performance wearable technology—consumer level smart devices like Fitbits and Apple watches to more sophisticated equipment used in sports practice and play. The fifth course scheduled for July is on machine learning. Students will program statistical models that learn from historical data, such as match outcomes and sensor information, in order to predict future results.
MLB Technology Blog; Written by Perry Pierce, Matthew Whitrock, and Stuart Cheshire from
Early in 2019, Major League Baseball announced a partnership with the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball (ALPB) to test new playing rules in order to observe the effects of potential future rule changes and equipment. One of those initiatives was the creation and testing of an automated ball and strike calling system (ABS). The goal of the tests was to validate whether ABS was able to make and consistently communicate the correct call to the umpire quickly enough for the umpire to make the call on the field without introducing a delay.
The results of our work in 2019 confirmed the system was able to work with sufficient consistency, reliability, and responsiveness, which enabled us to look at expanding the system for the 2020 season. Unfortunately these efforts were put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the resumption of the Minor Leagues and the ALPB in 2021, we are ready to start testing again. In this article, we will explain how ABS operates, review the system’s initial design and subsequent iterations, and preview some of the additional ABS changes and improvements slated for 2021.
Burnley have handed trials for their academy to two players this week after the pair were scouted on talent identification platform AiSCOUT using artificial intelligence, the Premier League club said on Monday.
Burnley partnered with AiSCOUT in January in search for prospective academy players.
Interested players above the age of 14 could upload videos of themselves undertaking specific drills to the platform’s mobile app and their performance would be compared against others on the artificial intelligence system.
A “shadow trial” of advanced eye-tracking technology will be conducted in the Super Rugby Trans-Tasman tournament in Australia and New Zealand as part of World Rugby’s bid to tackle head injuries by improving the detection of concussions.
The virtual reality technology, known as NeuroFlex, is set to be used during matches as part of the head injury assessment (HIA) process under a partnership between Rugby Australia, Rugby New Zealand and World Rugby.
NeuroFlex records horizontal and vertical movement of the eyes and head movements and, within seconds, analyzes that data and generates a report which helps medical personnel diagnose and manage concussions. It will also be used as part of the return-to-play process to monitor players’ return from head injuries.
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the participation of females in sport, as well as professionalism of female sport. Sports and exercise medicine (SEM) literature has, however, failed to mirror this progress, as female athletes continue to be on the margins of methodological, theoretical and empirical research. The absence of the female narrative in the scientific literature is even more pervasive for female athletes in Africa, which presents various challenges for athletes and clinicians. This editorial highlights the challenges associated with the scarcity of research on female African athletes.
The NBA issued a memo to its 30 teams informing them of the guidelines and health and safety protocols for the 2021 pre-draft process, according to multiple reports.
A year ago, teams were extremely limited in their ability to meet with and/or work out prospects in person due to the coronavirus pandemic, but those restrictions have been loosened for 2021.
We’ve put together a beginner’s guide to using StatsBomb Data in R, as well as releasing full StatsBomb datasets to work with (ft. Lionel Messi’s ENTIRE La Liga career!)
The NBA playoffs should be entertaining, as they always are.
Just don’t count on the basketball being as good as usual.
Not after a truncated season during which the injuries were too frequent, the practice time too scarce, to allow teams to peak for the postseason.
“It’s been much more devastating to culture and to establishing momentum for sure, for all of us,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “And I definitely think that, I hate to say it but it’s the truth: There’s no way it can be the best basketball for all the teams.”