Basketball
drorzel | January 9, 2016When schedules permit, I like to take the kids to home basketball games at Union. This works out well for everyone, as almost nobody goes to the games, so the kids can rampage all over the gym and get good and tired without upsetting anyone, and we add somewhat to the crowd supporting the home team.
(I'm not sure what the players made of The Pip yelling "DAAAAAAAD! You can't tickle me when I'm way up here!" from the very top of the bleachers, though...)
This also gives me a chance to shoot some different subjects, in keeping with the general goal of this photo-a-day business. Thus, a couple…
drorzel | August 12, 2015Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It's an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields:
And that raises and interesting question, since aside from the science section (and not even all of that), all of these apply to any other performance or production. So how do those people master all of those things? The short answer is that they don’t. Almost any production that requires a long, and more importantly disparate, set of…
drorzel | March 15, 2015It's the absolute peak of college basketball season, and it still seems weird to be almost completely disconnected from the game. This is not, by the way, the result of any principled objection to the manifest hypocrisies of the NCAA, or anything like that, but a practical effect of having kids. If the tv is on, it's either showing one of their cartoon shows or drowned out by the pleading for cartoon shows. And by the time they're asleep at night, I'm generally too wiped out to watch anything.
But as a long-time fan, though, I feel I would be remiss if I didn't say something about what's been…
drorzel | March 1, 2015Back on Thursday when I was waiting to be annoyed by a speech, one of the ways I passed time was reading stuff on my phone, which included This Grantland piece about Charles Barkley and "advanced stats". In it, Bryan Curtis makes the argument that while Barkley's recent comments disparaging statistical tools seem at first like just the same old innumeracy, it's really a question of ownership.
But Barkley was firing a shot in a second war. Let’s call it Moneyball II. This clash doesn’t pit a blogger versus a newspaperman in a debate over the value of PER. It pits media versus athletes in a…
drorzel | August 28, 2013I've been revising a chapter on collaboration in science for the book-in-progress, making an analogy to team sports. And it occurred to me as I was trying to find a way to procrastinate, that while science is a highly collaborative endeavor, most of the popular stories that get told about science are not. There's no Hoosiers of science out there.
Now, admittedly, the sample of great pop-culture stories about science period is pretty small. But what does exist mostly concerns individual struggles-- the lone genius who can revolutionize science by just thinking about it in isolation, but who…
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which I get a little ranty about basketball.
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Over at Slate, Matt Yglesias has a column about why everybody ignores the Spurs.:
America—at least in its own imagination—stands for certain things. For the idea that hard work and sound judgment bring success, and that success deserves celebration. That winners should be celebrated as long as they play by the rules. That teamwork, leadership, loyalty, and excellence all count for something. And that’s why the San Antonio Spurs, currently riding a stupendous run of 19 straight victories, are America’s favorite professional basketball…
drorzel | April 3, 2012While in the past, I've written a bunch about basketball here, I've been unusually silent on the subject this year, confining my commentary to the occasional Links Dump item from Grantland and other sites. This isn't because the past season was not noteworthy-- indeed, it was a rather eventful year for Syracuse basketball, with the best record in school history, but a good deal of turmoil off the court. It's just that I've been too busy to watch basketball, let alone blog about it. I did manage to catch all or part of several Syracuse games, though not as many as I would've liked, because…
drorzel | January 11, 2012Jonah Lehrer has a big article at Grantland on concussions in high school football that paints a fairly bleak picture:
The sickness will be rooted in football's tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.)…
drorzel | May 9, 2011A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don't want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical evidence of "hot" shooting-- a player who had made his previous couple of shots was, if anything, slightly less likely to make the next one. Lehrer writes:
Why, then, do we believe in the hot hand? Confirmation bias is to blame. Once a player makes two shots in a row - an utterly unremarkable event…
drorzel | May 6, 2011Maryland head basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement suddenly yesterday. He was a player at Maryland back in the 60's, and has been the coach there for 22 years, now. As I didn't start rooting for the Terps until I went there for graduate school in 1993, he's the only coach I've really seen them have (though I am, of course, aware of the Lefty Driesell years).
This comes as a surprise, but then, he is 66, and has been doing this for a long time. And in recent years there have been a number of stories about his distaste for the AAU system that has become such a shady and…
drorzel | April 4, 2011This past weekend, I ended up hearing sports-radio pinheads holding forth proudly about their ignorance of college basketball. The justification for this is that "the regular season doesn't matter," since the NCAA tournament is single-elimination, and lesser-known teams keep ending up making big runs in the tournament. Since there's apparently no way in their world to keep tabs on anything outside the AP Top 25, they couldn't possibly know anything about the teams that end up being important, so there's no reason to pay any attention until the conference tournaments start.
Of course, by that…
drorzel | March 27, 2011I'm old enough to remember when the three-point shot was a new addition to college basketball, and it was not without controversy. It's been part of the game for better than twenty years now, and you'll still hear people talking about how it's revolutionized the game, generally in a positive way. The case for this is usually based on the idea that a great three-point shooting team can hang with and even beat teams that would trounce them if they only shot twos. Another common argument is that it adds drama, giving teams that are trailing a way to claw back in the final minute.
Overall, I tend…
drorzel | March 21, 2011I've been watching a lot of basketball lately, and between the channel-flipping and occasional single-game windows, it has not been possible to use the DVR to avoid seeing commercials. Which means I've seen a lot of the current paradigm of advertising in America, which seems to consist of two main modes:
Smug and "dickish": The main exemplar of this is the Fidelity commercial in which a smug Fidelity customer at a cafe sneers at another customer for not knowing the wonders of his commercial invetment advice provider, but really, just about any investment commercial would do. Sam Waterston for…
drorzel | March 18, 2011This year's NCAA tournament is being spread over four tv networks, so that every game is shown in its entirety. Previously, you got whatever game was deemed to hold the most interest for your region of the country, plus occasional looks in at games elsewhere, that usually managed to miss the most exciting bits. For a hoops junkie like me, this was fantastic, with the only problem being how to manage to overload. I eventually settled on switching channels every time whatever game I was watching went to a commercial, so I got to see a bit of everything.
I was struck, though, but just how often…
drorzel | March 18, 2011There was a lot of great basketball yesterday, but I want to talk quickly about one small thing at the end of the Kentucky-Princeton game, that I think is kind of the basketball equivalent of the oft-debated punt on fourth-and-short in the opponents' end in football. That is, it's the wrong play, but also the play that is dictated by conventional wisdom, so even people who ought to know better slip up.
The situation was this: Princeton scored to tie the game with 37 second left. Kentucky couldn't quite hold for the last shot, so the Tigers were guaranteed a last possession with 2 seconds to…
drorzel | March 17, 2011The 2011 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship officially started Tuesday, with the first of the "First Four" games, formerly known as the "play-in" game. It gets going in earnest today, though, which means that once this posts, I'll be shutting the Internet down and working like crazy for a few hours, so I can justify moving everything into the living room and working at a slower pace through a long, glorious afternoon of hoops overload. I may or may not post periodic updates on Twitter (mirrored to Facebook), so if you want live-ish sort-of-blogging follow me there.
As always, the run-up to…
drorzel | March 15, 2011It's NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they've been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities in graduation rates in major college baskeball:
An annual report by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found a 2 percent overall graduation rate increase to 66 percent for Division I players, but showed the rates…
drorzel | March 14, 2011Even though the really important Final Four has already been decided, the Division 1 NCAA basketball championship starts this week, which means it's time to fill out your championship brackets. And so, as usual, I present the guaranteed-can't-miss-sure-thing method of picking the winner based on the rankings of Ph.D. programs in physics (excerpt displayed; click for the full bracket):
OK, maybe there are a few bugs yet to be worked out with this method...
drorzel | March 12, 2011I stayed up way too late last night, watching televised basketball and reading Steven Erikson (about which more later). It wasn't a good night for my teams, with both Syracuse and Maryland losing, but this is the most hoops I've watched all season, and I have a few miscellaneous comments:
-- How about that Big East? Two hard-fought games in the semifinals, both going to overtime, with a spectacular individual performance by Kemba Walker. Sadly, both Syracuse and Notre Dame lost in large part due to grievous lapses in judgement, with players who ought to know better rushing three-pointers when…
drorzel | March 3, 2011Brigham Young University dismissed one of its best post players, Brandon Davies, from the basketball team for violations of the university's honor code. Reportedly, this was for sex, which is one of many enjoyable things forbidden by the school's rules, which stem from the principles of the LDS church.
This really kind of sucks, as it further sets up the inevitable Jimmer Fredette backlash, and I really like Fredette, who is a local legend as well as a great player. In their first game without Davies, BYU lost to New Mexico, a team with a fairly mediocre record, and this bodes ill for them in…