After a huge game last night in game 3 of the NBA Finals, a buddy pointed me to some video blogs "created by" Sasha Vujacic. Nicknamed 'The Machine', Vujacic scored 20 points on 7-of-10 shooting to help lead the Lakers to victory over the Boston Celtics. So far there are three entries in the Sasha Vujacic video blog saga, and I can't wait for an entry talking about last night's performance.
Sasha Vujacic Video Blog 1
You'll find the rest of the videos after the jump.
Curt Schilling managed to score some choice tickets for Game 2 of the NBA Finals, allowing him to sit within earshot of the Laker bench. By his own admission, Curt had never sat so close to an NBA game and this fantastic view gave him new insight into the sport. What he saw surprised him, from the intense physicality to Kobe's ranting and bitching during timeouts.
Curt documented all of his observations at his blog, where you'll find a pretty lengthy and interesting post. Granted, you won't find much Laker love here, which may have a lot to do with the Celtic jersey Curt wore to the game.
5) Kobe. This one stunned me a little bit. Who doesn’t know Kobe Bryant right? I only know what I have heard, starting awhile back with the entire Shaq debacle. I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other on or about him other than to know that people feel he might be one of the 4-5 greatest players to ever lace it up. What I do know is what I got to see up close and hear, was unexpected. From the first tip until about 4 minutes left in the game I saw and heard this guy bitch at his teammates. Every TO he came to the bench pissed, and a few of them he went to other guys and yelled about something they weren’t doing, or something they did wrong. No dialog about “hey let’s go, let’s get after it” or whatever. He spent the better part of 3.5 quarters pissed off and ranting at the non-execution or lack of, of his team. Then when they made what almost was a historic run in the 4th, during a TO, he got down on the floor and basically said ‘Let’s f’ing go, right now, right here” or something to that affect. I am not making this observation in a good or bad way, I have no idea how the guys in the NBA play or do things like this, but I thought it was a fascinating bit of insight for me to watch someone in another sport who is in the position of a team leader and how he interacted with his team and teammates. Watching the other 11 guys, every time out it was high fives and “Hey nice work, let’s get after it” or something to that affect. He walked off the floor, obligatory skin contact on the high five, and sat on the bench stone faced or pissed off, the whole game. Just weird to see another sport and how it all works. I would assume that’s his style and how he plays and what works for him because when I saw the leader board for scoring in the post season his name sat up top at 31+ a game, can’t argue with that. But as a fan I was watching the whole thing, Kobe, his teammates and then the after effects of conversations. He’d yell at someone, make a point, or send a message, turn and walk away, and more than once the person on the other end would roll eyes or give a ‘whatever dude’ look.
Ever wanted an NBA championship ring without going through all the trouble of actually playing for a winning team? Today's your lucky day then, as an authentic championship ring from the Los Angeles Lakers 1999-2000 season has popped up on eBay, for the small starting sum of $22,500. Keep reading for more information on the auction and photos of the ring.
Inside the NBA is one of my favorite programs, and I love when the NBA playoffs roll around and we get more Chuck, Ernie, and Kenny than we can handle. Most of the time, Inside the NBA is actually more entertaining than the games they're covering, so I end up watching even on nights when my teams aren't playing. This week, Ernie played a great prank on poor Charles Barkley that had me nearly dying of laughter.
Poor Chuck. I hope these guys are around covering the NBA for many more years. Hit the jump for more of my favorite Inside the NBA moments.
I realize this is now a couple of months old, but I must have missed it the first time around. I found it linked on one of my favorite forums earlier today, and it made me laugh so hard that I had to share it. It just makes me glad that my Lakers don't have a mascot, unless you count Jack Nicholson.
Kids, don't aspire to be a mascot when you grow up.
John Rawls is considered one of the great American political philosophers of the 20th century, having penned several notable books including Justice as Fairness, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, as well as serving as a political professor at Harvard University. John passed away in 2002, but Owen Fiss at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard has unearthed an interesting letter Mr. Rawls wrote in 1981, wherein he discusses the superiority of baseball as a sport.
Third: the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.; per contra soccer where you can’t touch the ball. It calls upon speed, accuracy of throw, gifts of sight for batting, shrewdness for pitchers and catchers, etc. And there are all kinds of strategies.
Fourth: all plays of the game are open to view: the spectators and the players can see what is going on. Per contra football where it is hard to know what is happening in the battlefront along the line. Even the umpires can’t see it all, so there is lots of cheating etc. And in basketball, it is hard to know when to call a foul. There are close calls in baseball too, but the umps do very well on the whole, and these close calls arise from the marvelous timing built into the game and not from trying to police cheaters etc.
The 409-page Mitchell Report painted a startling picture of Major League Baseball when it was released at the end of 2007. Documenting an almost two year investigation into the illegal use of anabolic steroids by professional baseball players, the report names almost 90 individuals who are alleged to have used banned substances. Besides the black eye that the sport received, it begs the question of 'how have these illegal drugs affected the sport?'
As both a math and sports junkie, I found a recently released paper by Boston University students to provide a fascinating look at how steroids have changed baseball. Here's a snippet of the introduction:
Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and establishing their historical legacy. However, the concept of records and benchmarks assumes that that level of competition in baseball is stationary in time. Here we show that power-law probability density functions, a hallmark of many complex systems that are driven by competition, govern career longevity in baseball. We also find universal power laws in the distributions of all major performance metrics for pitchers and batters...We find statistical evidence of performance enhancement in the analysis of home runs hit by players in the last 25 years.
Keep reading for the full number-crunching details.
I guess I've been out of it, as I had no idea pen spinning was a talent, let alone a sport that merits an association. Nor did I know that a Pen Spinning champ is crowned every year, with the latest king being Ryuki Omura, a 16-year-old Japanese high school student.
From Reuters:
According to the Pen Spinning Association's Web site, spinning tricks range from "normal" -- resting the pen on the side of the middle finger, then flicking it to writing mode -- to "sonic" -- holding the pen between the middle and ring fingers, and twirling it so it rests between the middle and index fingers.
There's a video of Ryuki in action at the official site, though I can't seem to figure out where it is, as my Japanese isn't up to snuff this morning. However, I did find an amazing video that spotlights what this craze is all about.
As a Laker fan (don't hate), I've seen Kobe go from ice-cold to red-hot more times than I can count. All of us have no doubt seen our favorite player enter some ethereal state of mind that finds them incapable of missing a basket. Well, research reveals that the notion of a hot-streak is nothing more than an illusion.
The illusory nature of basketball shooting streaks was first demonstrated by Amos Tversky and Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell. They began the investigation by sifting through years of Philadelphia 76er statistics. They looked at every single shot taken by ever single player, and recorded whether or not that shot had been preceded by a string of hits or misses. If "the hot hand" was a real phenomenon, then players should have a higher field goal percentage after making several previous shots. The streak should elevate their game.
So what did the scientists find? There was absolutely no evidence of "the hot hand". A player's chance of making a shot was not affected by whether or not their previous shots had gone in. Each field goal attempt was its own independent event. The short runs experienced by the 76ers were no different than the short runs that naturally emerge from any random process. Taking a jumper was like flipping a coin. The streaks were a figment of our imagination.
Jim Kerstetter of C|Net has written an essay demanding the abolishment of Boss Buttons. What's a Boss Button? Usually it's a simple press on your keyboard that immediately hides whatever you're gazing at on the monitor and replaces the image with something work-related.
The reason this subject is coming up is because millions of people are watching the NCAA tournament via video stream while at work.
Come every March, thanks to office pools on the NCAA college basketball tournament, boss buttons are as common on desktop computers as personal e-mails and photos of your friends: They're probably not supposed to be there, but we all have them. NCAA.com has even provided a helpful boss button on its Web site.
Jim argues that it's time we finally abolish this illusion and remove the shackles from office-workers to watch what they want to watch.
Here's a thought: Let's stop all the silly shenanigans and make boss buttons a thing of the past. Get it out in the open and let people keep track of the office pools without worrying about getting into trouble. The average American is spending more time in the office than ever. And the average tech worker spends even more time than that. There's a reason all those Silicon Valley companies offer free food, subsidized child care, laundry, auto-detailing, and swanky gyms: So you never have an excuse to go home.
If I were in a position to employ people at an old-school, tangible location, I'd probably have a television set up for people to watch and just nip it in the bud. Besides, all that video-streaming has to be killing the corporate bandwidth.
Barry Bonds is not quitting, despite what most fans may wish for.
The steroidal slugger told MLB.com that he wants to win a championship or fall down trying. Good old Barry may want to worry about finding a team first, as he is yet unsigned to any team in either league.
Personally, I can't see any team bringing in the PR nightmare that is Bonds, especially while he still faces those perjury charges stemming from his steroid case.
But desperate times have produced stranger results, and some teams come April may feel the burning need for Bonds sooner rather than later.
Well, Billy Crystal's first at-bat as a one-day member of the NY Yankees went pretty much as expected: he struck out. On the bright-side, he did manage to foul off one pitch, which is probably better than I would have done. Of course, he was facing the Pirates, which is barely above Little League. Zing!
If you're like me and are frequently at the office, in class, or otherwise away from a TV when your favorite program is on but always have a laptop with you, then www.channelsurfing.net is about to become your new best friend. They provide daily feeds of most sporting events, as well as some of the most popular television shows like The Office, Lost, and Celebrity Apprentice. As long as you've got a computer and an internet connection you can keep up on your TV from where ever you may be. Some of the streams only work in Internet Explorer, and others might require third party software, but for the most part many will play as-is in Windows Media Player. I won't go into the copyright issue, but be sure to read their Terms of Use as I get the feeling their services would be considered less than legal in some places.
Now you can enjoy March Madness from the comfort of your...er...desk.
