Sports
stcynic | February 22, 2006Isiah Thomas, intent on breaking the all-time record for stupidity by an NBA general manager (currently a tie between Chris Wallace, Scott Layden and the whiz kid who put together the Trail Blazers from 2000 on), has just made a trade to acquire Steve Francis from the Orlando Magic. This gives them the perfect storm of underachieving NBA backcourts, with Francis, Stephon Marbury and Jamal Crawford all being shoot-first point guards whose leadership skills, if they do exist, have never been detected by man or machine.
It's gotten so bad that it's starting to resemble the terrible movie Eddie…
evolgen | February 16, 2006Apparently, you can fall down in figure skating and still win a silver medal. Imagine if this happened in a real sport. Say, for example, one of the Italian hockey players falls to the ice and a Canadian player scores a goal. Does the Italian team get a do over? I don't know what I hate more, figure skating or tape delay.
My favorite drunk skier, Bode Miller, was DQ'd after straddling a post. I'm guessing that post won't be the only think straddled in the Olympic village. My second favorite drunk skier is this guy. I'm especially fond of this description of his experiment on drunk…
evolgen | February 16, 2006Fans of the American version of The Office know that the show glorifies the intersection of I-81 and I-84, also known as Scranton, PA. They also know that Jim Halpert moonlights as the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, but that's for another day. What they may not know is that Scranton has been named the worst city for asthma in the United States. This does not mean that asthma has a difficult time living in Scranton (I hear he likes it quite a bit there), but that if you have asthma you do not want to live in Scranton. Can we blame this on Michael?
stcynic | February 12, 2006Adam Packer at In the Agora has addressed an entire post to me because I am a Duke fan (the contributors to that site are almost all Indiana fans) and we've had some go-rounds in the past on the subject. Adam writes:
Attention Ed Brayton: Sportsline writer Gregg Doyel dressed down Duke University men's hoops coach Mike Krzyzewski in a recent column, and in doing so, put into the mainstream the thoughts and snickers many college basketball fans (including some right here at ITA) have circulated amongst themselves for years. The thesis: Coach K works and berates the refs all game, and by the…
evolgen | February 12, 2006Do you know of any sporting event, besides the Olympics, that is not shown live? This is not 1975. We have the internet and 24 hour sports news channels -- you can't turn on the TV, surf the net, or walk out your front door without hearing the results of any of the major events. Even though NBC has multiple networks telecasting the games, they still insist on showing almost anything anyone would be interested in watching on a ridiculous tape delay. If ESPN/ABC had the rights, everything would be available live on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPNU, and ESPN Classic, with all of the major events…
drorzel | February 12, 2006My Terrapins lost to the hated Dukies yesterday, 96-88. I'd be more down, but they actually played pretty well-- they just aren't that good a team this year, and Duke is better than they are. They gave a great effort, though, and might've had a chance if they'd had more than half of the right game plan.
On offense, they had exactly the right idea of how to attack Duke. Nik Caner-Medley came out and went right at JJ Redick, who isn't a great on-ball defender, and Maryland concentrated on scoring inside, which is Duke's weakness year in and year out (generic office pool tip: When you're filling…
evolgen | February 9, 2006If you like sports (specifically hockey) and you like statistics, two posts from Tom Benjamin's NHL Blog are must reads (available here and here). With help from Dave Savit, a math professor at the University of Arizona, Tom describes how hockey can be modeled using a Poisson distribution. There are also Poisson Standings for the NHL season. Some have called this Moneyball for hockey. More stuff below the fold.
The idea of the model is that goals can be considered Poisson random variables. You can calculate the expected number of goals scored by a team in a single game using the number…
stcynic | February 8, 2006Well, last night's game had everything you could want. You have to take your hat off to the Tar Heels. They were clearly undermatched and could easily have folded when Duke took a 17 point lead in the second half, but they fought back hard and took a 5 point lead with about 4 minutes to go. Then it was Duke's turn to make a comeback and, naturally, JJ Redick put the team on this back. He hit two tough three pointers with a man in his face and all of his free throws to finish with a now-routine 35 points on over 50% shooting.
Anyone still not convinced that we are watching one of the great…
drorzel | February 8, 2006I'm a bad basketball fan.
Duke played North Carolina last night, and I didn't watch. The Blue Devils are the #2 ranked team in the nation, the Tar Heels are the defending national champions, it was a back-and-forth game that went down to the wire, and I didn't watch any of it, other than a short stretch of the first half, to get the Maryland score from the crawl on the bottom of the screen.
There are lots of reasons I could give for this-- yesterday was a particularly difficult day at work, I'm still behind on grading from a couple of weeks ago when I was sick, I'm in the middle of a very…
stcynic | February 7, 2006The greatest rivalry in sports resumes at 9 pm tonight on ESPN when Duke visits North Carolina for the first of their two regular season meetings this year. It may look like a mismatch on paper, with Duke ranked #2 and Carolina on the edge of the top 25, but forget about records in this game. Duke hasn't played well lately, allowing Boston College to come back on them after being up almost 20 points and then having to go to overtime to beat Florida State at home, and this is a young and talented Tar Heel team that is capable of beating anyone on any given night. This game could be a 25 point…
stcynic | February 6, 2006The Sports Guy has a running diary of last night's Super Bowl with all of the great lines you would expect from him. He thinks that the MVP trophy should have gone to the refs. Ouch. He also wondered the same thing I did when they were introducing the former Super Bowl MVPs before the game - what if OJ Simpson had been one of them? I actually wasn't sure if he'd ever been one, but there's no way they sould have invited him if he had.
Speaking of MVPs, ESPN is reporting that Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana were not among the MVPs introduced because they demanded that they be paid, to the tune…
drorzel | February 6, 2006The Steelers won the super Bowl last night, in a game that didn't hold any rooting interest for me. As a result, I spent most of it doing other things-- making gourmet fried stuff (about which more later), marking a big stack of homework assignments, and writing today's lecture (solutions of the time-independent Schroedinger equation! Whee!).
Happily, Scott Eric Kaufman has a recap, and Fred Clark has the halftime show covered. Oh, and if you want football talk, Jim Henley has a partisan take.
stcynic | February 5, 2006It's almost 1 pm and I think we're into hour 14 of the Super Bowl Pregame Show, which lasts so long that they might as well have Jerry Lewis host it. The game supposedly starts at 6, but the kickoff probably won't be until next Thursday so they can squeeze in a few more bad commercials and human interest stories about the backup weak safety for one of the teams whose third cousin was traumatized by the death of a pet hamster, giving him a "unique perspective" on the importance of the game after his harrowing brush with death.
So after all this nonsense, and for all four sports fans who read…
stcynic | February 5, 2006So I'm flipping channels last night and I come across TBN, the Christian TV network, where they're interviewing members of the two Super Bowl teams who are Christians to get their witness. And Jeff Hartings, center for the Steelers, makes this statement:
I know that God didn't bring me to the Super Bowl one year before I was ready for it, he brought me here right when I was prepared.
It's just baffling to me how people can believe something like that. Do they put any thought into it at all, or are they just passive recipients of this nonsense and just repeat it by rote? In order for that…
stcynic | February 2, 2006Here's an incredible story. A female high school basketball player from New York scored 113 points in a game on Wednesday. That breaks the record of 105 held by Cheryl Miller (Reggie's sister). But that's not the most amazing achievement in women's basketball. The most amazing achievement was Lisa Leslie scoring 101 points in the first half of a game in high school. The other team refused to play the second half, so she didn't get to set a record no one would break.
drorzel | January 28, 2006Possibly the hardest thing to understand about the game of basketball is that it's really a very simple game. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you watch too much of the NBA, or sloppy college teams, or "Street Ball" on ESPN2 in the wee hours of the morning, you can get confused, and start to think it's a complicated game. It's not. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense.
My best game is really as a post player, where I depend on other people to get me the ball, so I confront this a…
stcynic | January 21, 2006Well, my Blue Devils just lost their first game, to Georgetown on the road by 3. What made this a fascinating game is what it tells us, both good and bad, about this Duke team. This game simultaneously showed why this Duke team will have a difficult time winning the national championship this year, and why they still have a good shot of doing so. I thought I'd analyze both of those statements for the 3 sports fans who read this page.
1. Why Duke will have a difficult time winning the national championship this year.
Because they have no "tweeners". This Duke team is loaded with guards (…
stcynic | January 20, 2006Okay, my first sports post at the new place and this one is really funny. Isiah Thomas has actually threatened The Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, on a radio show.
Well, now I have a new career highlight: During a New York radio interview Monday, Isiah Thomas threatened to make trouble for me. Talking to Stephen A. Smith he said, "I'm gonna tell ya...if I see this guy Bill Simmons, oh, it's gonna be a problem with me and him...". I thought it was ironic he threatened me on Martin Luther King Jr. Day - I'm sure MLK would have been proud. Given that this was the same guy who sucker-punched his best…
stcynic | January 5, 2006In my predictions for 2006 last week, I projected that the NCAA Final Four would be Duke, UConn, Villanova and Michigan State. So today I look at ESPN.com and they have 8 experts predicting the final four as well - and 6 of the 8 experts predict the exact same final four. Doug Gottlieb bizarrely replaces MSU with Arizona, a team not even in the top 25 at this point, and Andy Glockner (who?) has Duke, Illinois, Villanova and Indiana. 6 of 8 also have Duke winning it all, while I have UConn (grudgingly) winning it all.
stcynic | January 5, 2006First of all, if you're a sports fan (I know many of my readers aren't) and you didn't watch the national championship game last night, you missed a lot. Rarely does a game live up to the kind of hype we've heard over the last few weeks, but this one did. You want big time performances? How about Matt Leinart completing 72% of his passes for 365 yards and a touchdown. Or Reggie Bush racking up the quietest 275 total yards in history, and a touchdown. Or LenDale White (who is almost as good an NFL prospect as Bush) rushing for 124 yards and 3 touchdowns.
But the star of the night was Vince…