As more and more injuries pile up throughout the playoffs — the latest coming in the form of a feared ACL injury for Kawhi Leonard — LeBron James sounded off on the league’s condensed schedule this season on Twitter on Wednesday.
James said that the increase in injuries players are facing aren’t just “part of the game,” but rather due to lack of rest.
… The most impressive stat of the day is minutes played – you’ll find 48 next to Kevin Durant’s name. Almost exactly two years ago, Kevin Durant had the worst injury in basketball. Last night he never subbed out from jump ball. With the pace of today’s game and the opponent they faced in the Bucks, this was truly impressive and reminded us of the last player to accomplish such a feat.
In a spate of exceptionally disappointing early-morning NBA news, two playoff teams were hit with the worst type of reports when The Athletic broke that Chris Paul was entering COVID protocol and then when ESPN broke that Kawhi Leonard seriously hurt his knee against the Utah Jazz in Game 4. Both are out indefinitely. Shams Charania later reported Leonard suffered a right knee sprain.
… The NBA’s COVID shutdown in the spring of 2020 led for everything to be condensed into a smaller calendar. And with the 2021 playoffs going into mid-July, but the 2021-22 regular season set to begin as it usually would in mid-October, this offseason will be briefer than normal, as well.
Which begs a simple question: Why would any NBA player compete in this summer’s Olympic Games, which will run from July 23-Aug. 9 in Tokyo?
On Wednesday, league MVP Nikola Jokic announced he won’t play for Serbia this summer. The Denver Nuggets have to be thrilled. The last thing that franchise wants is to have its 26-year-old big man push through tired legs and risk injury during the Olympics or even increase the probability of breaking down next season.
A new billboard near the Boston Celtics’ practice facility reads, “Hey Brad, it’s time to shake it up. Hire Kara or Becky!”
That’s in reference to the open Celtics head coaching job and former Celtics assistant coach Kara Lawson and San Antonio Spurs assistant coach Becky Hammon.
Who will shake it up? Which NBA team will become the first to hire a woman as head coach? Boston? Portland? Indiana? Orlando?
Jack Marucci, LSU’s athletic training director for 25 years, is moving within the athletic department to a new position that oversees the university’s sports science team.
Marucci’s move to Director of Performance Innovation, officially announced by LSU on Wednesday, ends an era in which Marucci led the school’s athletic training operations in all sports for a quarter-century.
Marucci, 57, was on the sidelines for three football national championships and managed a training staff that was involved in 17 other national titles across the university’s sports. He was a highly respected trainer whose push for research and development produced innovations in sports medicine. He was a confidante and advisor to coaches and players.
To be clear, Marucci’s time at LSU is not over. His new role allows him an isolated focus on leading the athletic department’s research in sports medicine.
The fancy word for it is “entitativity,” and it’s produced when people act and feel together in close proximity. We need it more, but we’re getting it less.
… Treat the outcome and quality of a decision separately. You can make a great decision on a bet and still lose the hand. So I’ve developed 4 exercises to help you make better bets.
… We’ve already established that the basics of fitness are simple. But people still like to talk about fitness, and they need something to say besides “consistency is good” and “hey kids, let’s all lift heavy.”
So there’s a lot of attention paid to the smallest minutiae. A few studies found slightly lower strength gains in people who did more cardio, so some lifters refuse to do any cardio. (That’s not an appropriate response to that information, by the way; the “cardio kills your gains” effect is more myth than fact.)
This is the same attitude that leads people to obsess over which supplements are best without first getting an extremely basic handle on their nutrition, or to ask whether this or that curl variation is more effective instead of going into the gym and actually doing some curls.
They used to look like quagmires, ice rinks or dustbowls, depending on the time of year. But as big money entered football, pristine pitches became crucial to the sport’s image – and groundskeepers became stars
SI.com, Fan Nation, Dawgs Daily blog, Harrison Reno from
… Aside from showing recruits and their families around campus, this is a time for the staff to work out these players at their camps. With hundreds of recruits on campus throughout the week, the coaching staff can see if what they’ve seen on tape over the last year holds true when they get on the field.
According to a source, one of the ways Georgia is evaluating these prospects is through technology.
A University of Colorado at Colorado Springs professor has launched a program designed to help startups in sports and health grow from adolescence to adulthood.
Called the El Pomar Institute of Innovation and Commercialization (EPIIC) Venture Attractor, the program is designed to attract startups to Colorado Springs by helping them grow from an entrepreneur’s idea to a point where they are generating revenue, hiring employees and are ready for outside investors. The program began last month with eight companies, including six from the Springs area. EPIIC is a UCCS initiative that helps entrepreneurs and organizations develop new ideas and products.
… A research team, led by Associate Professor Jerald Yoo from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the N.1 Institute for Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS), has developed a solution to these problems. Their technology enables a single device, such as a mobile phone placed in the pocket, to wirelessly power other wearable devices on a user’s body, using the human body as a medium for power transmission. The team’s novel system has an added advantage – it can harvest unused energy from electronics in a typical home or office environment to power the wearables.
This is a fun soccer graphic by Karim Douïeb. It shows 882,536 passes from 890 matches across various leagues and seasons. It looks cool as a static point cloud, but be sure to check out the animated, interactive version which lets you isolate the view to specific parts of the field.
In 2019, Liverpool FC dominated the Champions League, the most prestigious cup in club football. Almost everything seemed to go their way: a clever and capable coach, a talented and driven team, and a few tricks that kicked in at just the right time. At first glance, it seemed that luck was shining on the team — but this was not luck. Liverpool was leveraging the power of big data and artificial intelligence.