Game 4 between Utah and L.A. last night provides an interesting data point in considering the usefulness of +/- as a basketball stat. We’ve all seen instances where a player who contributes very little statistically ends up with a phenomenally high +/- rating, while the team’s stars are rated as having played poorly. Occasionally, this [...]
Archive for the 'Sports' Category
Statistics and basketball
28Mar09I hate how people are trying to apply statistics to basketball, like it’s some voodoo that could potentially unlock all sorts of answers and reduce the sport to a science. It’s a ridiculous, depressing and self-defeating (for sports fans, anyway) thing to do. The pompous proponents of this mentality are correct in arguing that there [...]
Thoughts on Kobe
05Jul08A certain someone isn’t going to stop badgering me until I say something about the Lakers’ recent loss in the NBA finals, so here goes. I’ve been defending Kobe more or less since 2000 now. I’ve never been a full-on fanboy, but in a sport populated by egotistical megalomaniacs, I admired his rabid desire to win, [...]
I don’t like sports writers. I don’t like the contrived soundbites they convey, the cliched storylines they create, the false drama they so carefully cultivate. I don’t like the fact that most of them have no real qualifications, but a few years on the circuit gives them the title of ‘expert’ and, for example, allows [...]
Get LeBron a real coach. Please.
28May07Is it just me or is Mike Brown, head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the worst coach in the entire NBA? The Sports Guy likes to complain about Doc Rivers and Mo Cheeks and Sam Mitchell (before his Coach-of-the-Year-thanks-to-Colangelo-being-a-total-pimp award) generally figure in the conversation as well, but believe me, it isn’t even close. It’s probably [...]
The very latest. The post I put up earlier about this is here. Someone should get fired for this.
There’s something seriously fishy going on. First of all, although we’ve been told categorically that Woolmer was murdered, police have been vacillating over how the crime was perpetrated, with everything from diabetes drugs to strangling to snake venom to weedkillers to strangling-with-a-towel suggested. This is despite an autopsy and several pathology reports. The police have [...]
Are you kidding me?
30Mar07This just in: Nasim Ashraf, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, has had his resignation rejected by General Musharraf. Ashraf, you recall, is completely incompetent and clueless, not to mention unqualified, and his appointment was based on the fact that he is a friend of General Musharraf. Infuriating. It would be simplistic to blame Pakistan’s [...]
Ooh, I might be able to make a series out of these :) Charley Rosen, basketball analyst and grumpy old man, explains in his latest mailbag why Rasheed Wallace isn’t a superstar on the scale of Kevin Garnett or Tim Duncan. His analysis is pithy and hard to argue with: Besides talent, there’s a huge difference between [...]
Roland Lazenby, Lakers in-the-know guy, wrote this great piece about Kobe Bryant. For those who don’t know, Kobe has just scored 50 or more points in 4 consecutive game, a feat matched only by Wilt Chamberlain (who did it in 7 straight games and averaged 50 over the season). That’s just plain ridiculous, given the [...]
Another entrant into the pantheon of incredibly stupid sports articles: Mukul Kesavan’s Subedar Major Haq and a Company of Sepoys, printed today on Cricinfo. The run up to the World Cup is obviously a quiet period for writers, which is why we get subjected to tripe like this, which tells us: In this the150th anniversary year [...]
I feel sorry for sports writers sometimes. In most professional sports, there are days when there isn’t a game on (in some, cricket being a prime example, those days comprise most of the year), and when coaches/GMs haven’t said anything stupid, and when players haven’t gotten into brawls. I hate those days, because they inevitably [...]
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