Category: Understanding Sports

What is a trade in fantasy football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a trade in fantasy football? And why do people who play fantasy football get so excited about trading?

Thanks,
Noah

Dear Noah,

We’ve written a few posts on how fantasy football, two of which are good preparatory reading in order to understand trades: How does fantasy football work? and What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football? In those posts, you’ll learn how fantasy football teams are constructed (by selecting real world football players in a fantasy draft) and then evaluated each week (by the statistics that a select group of the starting players on each team accumulate.) After the initial selection of players onto teams, the only way improve your team’s fortunes is through swapping players with the “bank” of players that have not been selected by any team — this is called adding/dropping a player — or by swapping players with another team. This is called trading.

Every fantasy trade is the product of negotiation between players. Two fantasy owners get together in person or over the internet and go back and forth suggesting different ways of swapping players until they both agree. At this point, they can enter the trade into the website used to run the fantasy league. Every fantasy league is a little different, but there is often some kind of review period so that the rest of the fantasy league or the person who runs it can confirm that this was a “good” trade where both people think they’re getting the better deal. It’s important to avoid trades based on collusion (you trade me your good player for my bad one and I’ll buy you a pony) because it subverts the honesty of the competition.

Fantasy football is almost but not quite a closed system. In a true closed system, we’d be able to simply add up all the points from the players involved in a trade at the end of the season and whichever person ended up with the players with more cumulative points would have “won” the trade. In fantasy football though, there are positional requirements that make things more complicated. Each week, a team’s starting lineup has to consist of (for example) one quarterback, two running backs, and three wide receivers. If my team has two good quarterbacks but no good running backs, I will benefit from a trade that moves my good quarterback for your decent running back even if the quarterback will end the season having scored more points than your running back. There are a wide variety of reasons to make trades and looking for a trade partner, assessing their team, deciding which type of trade to approach them with, and then working back and forth with them to make it is great fun. All of this makes trading one of the most enjoyable parts of fantasy football. Here are some of the most common types of trades:

  • One position for another trade — this is the scenario we just talked about. If I’m rich at one position but poor at another, I’ll look for teams in the opposite position and talk to them about making a deal.
  • Two or three for one trade — this is a common trade made between one team at the top of the standings and another team towards the bottom or middle. If one team is so strong that they can give up two or three good players for another team’s great player, both teams can profit. The good team just got better by adding a great player to their roster and the not-so-good team improves in several different spots. The risk for the better team is that they’re putting more of their eggs in one basket and as we all know, an NFL player is an egg basket that frequently gets injured and breaks.
  • Dissatisfied like for like trade — the ultimate grass-is-greener logic. I’m annoyed at the performance of my tight end and you’re annoyed at the performance of yours, so we just swap them. This is relatively rare because in order to do it, both people need to think they’re winning the deal. This type of trade truly is zero sum.
  • Bye week trade — bye weeks (read the post on what a bye week is here) can hit fantasy football teams hard. On some weeks there can be up to six real NFL teams that don’t play. If you see that a team in your league is stuck with a lot of their players not playing that week, you may be able to induce them to trade you some of them for players who actually have games. Using this logic, you might be able to get slightly better players in the deal just because you’re willing to wait a week to use their statistics.
  • Keeper league trade — some fantasy leagues allow fantasy owners to retain players from year to year. By the time the middle of the season comes around, teams at the bottom of the league may be willing to give away good players this year for players that are more attractive candidates for next year. This type of trade may seem like collusion because it is intentionally imbalanced in terms of how good the players are but if you think of fantasy football as a multi-year instead of a single year competition, it makes sense.

Trading in fantasy football is an art and a skill. It involves analysis, negotiation, and risk taking. If you’re in a fantasy league, give it a shot. If you’re just around people who are in the midst of making fantasy trades, ask them what type of trade it was.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Why are sports teams from locations?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are sports teams from locations? I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but it’s not like the players or the coaches are from there. What’s the point of having a team from New York or Tennessee if you let people from all over play on it?

Thanks,
Jesse

Dear Jesse,

This is one of those questions that makes complete logical sense but, because it challenges a foundational aspect of the sports world in our country, is difficult for a fan to understand and answer. The fact that teams are tied to locations and that they represent the city, state, or region they’re from seems like an unassailable truth of sports. It’s not though. After doing some research on the topic, I’ve found an interesting example of one league that works completely differently. Let’s start with a little history, move on to the way things work now, and then look at an interesting exception that may be a harbinger of things to come.

From the very beginning of organized athletic competitions, sports have been a way for competing political groups to safely play out conflict. The ancient Olympics were dominated by individual events like running, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing. Nonetheless, the competitors were there to represent the city-states they came from. Wikipedia’s article on the ancient Olympics states that the “Olympic Games were established in [a] political context and served as a venue for representatives of the city-states to peacefully compete against each other.” In the United Kingdom, some medieval soccer-like traditions survive and are still played. The Ashbourne game is a two-day epic played over 16 hours and two days each year that pits the Up’Ards against the Down’Ards. Instead of being the instantiation of a international or inter-city conflict, this game is a (at this point) relatively friendly version of a rivalry between city neighborhoods. There’s a natural human tendency to define oneself by splitting the world into “us” and “other” and where you live or where you come from is the obvious way to do this. Sports has always provided an outlet for group identity and simulated conflict.

Much of the early history of sport in the Americas is a history of college athletics. College sports, by their nature, are tied to a location and (however inappropriately) to an institution. The identification of teams with cities has also been present in American professional sports from the beginning. In baseball, the first professional team was the Cincinatti Red Stockings in 1869. The first professional hockey team was the Canadian Soo from Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, Canada. Confusingly enough, the Canadian Soo played its first game in 1904 against the American Soo Indians from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, United States of America. Wha?? Football has an interesting professional history in the United States. For over forty years, there were professional players but no professional teams. Individual players were being paid to play on teams that were nominally amateur teams. It wasn’t until 1920 that the first professional football league came into being. The American Professional Football Association had teams from Akron, Buffalo, Muncie, Rochester, and Dayton. Basketball is a much newer professional sport. Its first game was played between teams representing Toronto and New York in 1946.

Even early on, teams were not made up of players from the team’s location. One reason is that some areas simply produce more top-level talent in some sports than others. It’s not financially smart for a league to only have teams in the core player producing areas, so instead, the players themselves travel and become ambassadors for spreading the game. For example, every single player on the 1940 Stanley Cup hockey champion New York Rangers team was from Canada. The 1949 Minneapolis Lakers may have had a slight over-representation of players who went to college in Minnesota with three, but the rest of their players went to schools around the country in California and Utah and Indiana. The famous 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only National Football League team to go undefeated throughout the regular season and playoffs, only had two Floridians in a roster of 50+ players. Aside from some areas just growing better athletes in some sports, the implementation of player drafts to balance the selection of players by professional teams and eventually free-agency to allow players some say in where they play serve to scatter players throughout the country.

As the big four American sports have spread throughout the world and our professional leagues have simultaneously gotten better at finding talented international players, the division of players from team location has become even more obvious. The NHL and NBA wouldn’t be half as good without players mostly from Europe, nor would Major League Baseball be as compelling without its (mostly) Central American and Japanese imports. While some teams have specialized in finding players from a particular region — think the 1990s Detroit Red Wings and Russia or the current Red Wings and Sweeden —  international players have played anywhere and everywhere.

The idea of having teams made up of only players from the city or region they represent is a fun one and there are many counter-factual thought experiments around the internet in this vein. Yahoo recently posted a ranking of NBA teams if made up of only players from the team’s area. Max Preps published a map showing current NFL players by home state. It’s clear from the map that California, Florida, and Texas rule supreme, but I’d like to see the stats controlled by population to see which state is most efficient at producing NFL players. Quant Hockey has two interesting visuals about where NHL players come from. The first is a history of NHL players by home country, showing the increasing internationalization of the game and league. The second is an interactive map where you can look up the home towns of all your favorite (and least favorite for that matter) NHL players. The official NBA site has a similar map for NBA players. That the league itself bothered to put this together is an example of how important it feels the international nature of its sport is.

Sports teams aren’t all tied to locations. If we take a brief detour to the basketball crazy country of the Philippines, we find one of the most unique sports leagues out there, the Philippine Basketball Association. This league is made up of twelve teams. Team names are made up of three parts — a “company name, then [a] product, then a nickname – usually connected to the business of the company.” My favorite example is the six time champion Rain or Shine Elasto Painters owned by Asian Coatings Philippines, Inc. Teams are completely divorced from regional affiliation and play in whatever region the league rents for them to play in. This may seem like it’s completely crazy to those of us who are used to leagues in the United States, but it could be the future. Consider the increasing visibility of corporate sponsorships. In all leagues here, we have stadiums that are named after companies. The Los Angeles Lakers share the Staples Center with the Los Angeles Clippers and hockey’s Kings. The Carolina Panthers in the NFL play in the Bank of America Stadium. This isn’t a new fangled thing, remember that baseball’s historic stadium in Chicago, Wrigley field bears the name of the chewing gum its owner in the 1920s sold. The next likely step in the process is having corporate sponsorships show up on the jerseys of sports teams. This has already happened for most soccer leagues. Scott Allen wrote a nice history of this process for Mental Floss. The process has taken a long time, from the first corporate jersey in Uruguay in the 1950s to the final capitulation of the famous Barcelona football club in 2006. Allen provides several funny sponsorship stories, including my favorite, about the soccer team West Bromwich Albion:

From 1984 to 1986, the West Midlands Health Authority paid to have the universal No Smoking sign placed on the front of West Bromwich Albion’s jerseys. The campaign featured the slogan, “Be like Albion – kick the smoking habit.”

While the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have resisted giving up their jerseys to their sponsors, speculation is out there that they soon will. Total Pro Sports has even designed a series of NBA jerseys with each team’s corporate sponsor on the front in anticipation.

Will the future be a complete takeover of teams from their old regional identities to new corporate ones? Or will we remain in an uneasy compromise between location and corporation?

We’ll find out together,
Ezra Fischer

Hockey goalie masks: individuality in sports

Jerry Seinfeld famously joked that “loyalty to any one sports team” is a curious thing because, if you accept that the players move from one team to another and eventually retire, rooting for one team must be nothing more than “rooting for laundry.” It’s a clever joke, mostly because it creates such an amusing scenario. What if we did root for literal laundry? “GO TUMBLE-DRY ONLY SHIRTS!!” As with all good observational humor, there’s a deeper truth lurking beneath. Team sports, particularly professional team sports, demand a subordination of the individual to the team that goes far beyond what most of us experience in our professions. The darkest aspect of this subordination is played out in the eagerness of athletes to play through injuries that would sideline most people and should sideline them for the sake of their future health. Professional athletes have few opportunities to express their individuality, which is why the ones they do have — touchdown dances in football and walk-up music in baseball being two clear examples — are so important to them and noticeable to fans. In all of sports there may be no cooler way (except maybe these skeleton helmets) for athletes to express their individuality than hockey goalie masks.

It seems completely crazy now but hockey goalies didn’t wear masks or helmets until 1959. It took only another decade or so for the first goalie to decorate with his mask. According to a fairly comprehensive history of hockey goalie mask designs on NHL.com, Gerry Cheevers drew a simple stitch onto his otherwise undecorated mask in protest against his coach who ordered him back on the ice after taking a shot to the face. That the beginning of what has become an amazingly diverse artistic endeavor was the action of an athlete asserting his individuality is fitting. Since then the battle between subordination to the team and assertion of the individual has played itself out in the aesthetic of goalie masks.

Goalies like Ed Belfour and Felix Potvin successfully branded themselves with their masks. Belfour always had an eagle design and Potvin always had a cat. These identities and nicknames followed them from team to team and allowed their fans to root for them regardless of what laundry they were wearing. A contemporary of theirs, Ron Hextall believes that a goalie should choose to align his identity with his team’s:

“If you want to tie yourself in there somehow, fine, but I always preferred the team logo rather than something about you,” said Hextall, citing the masks worn by Dryden and Martin Brodeur as easy-to-recognize and iconic. “I still believe a goalie mask should be tied to the organization, the city or the logo rather than to the goalie himself.”

I wonder what he would think of the New York Rangers backup goalie, Cam Talbot, who recently debuted his latest ode to his favorite movie, Ghostbusters? Talbot calls it the “GoalBuster.” Ha!

If you want to get in on the goalie mask game yourself, you can do it with this NHL Mini Goalie Mask Standings Board. You can use these tiny helmets to involve yourself in the NHL by keeping daily standings of divisional or conference standings. Note though, that the masks here are not the masks of individual goalies, they are simply painted in team colors. Sure, you might say, this is easier and safer to do because you never know when a goalie will get traded or injured and his mask design could become obsolete. The cynics among us would note though, that inevitable obsolescence is often a good plan for products like this because it encourages you to buy it again next season. Is it possible that the makers of these helmets are taking a stance against the individuality of athletes so that we sports fans continue to root for laundry?

What is a bye in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a bye in sports? I’ve heard that word in a bunch of different contexts but I’m not totally sure what it means.

Thanks,
Samuel

 

Dear Samuel,

In sports, a bye refers to a period when a team or player would normally compete but for one reason or another does not have to in this case. In mainstream sports like football, soccer, baseball, or basketball, it has two common uses. The first is a scheduled week off in sports where teams play weekly. The second is in the context of a playoffs or a tournament, when a team or player is rewarded for earlier success by getting a free pass into a later round. We’ll take a quick look at each meaning in this post and then spend a moment on the word’s history and derivation.

In leagues where teams play weekly, like professional and college football in the United States and soccer in most European leagues, teams sometimes have a week off. In the NFL, each team has one week off during a seventeen week schedule during which they play sixteen games. This is a great thing for players and coaches to rest up in the midst of a very physically and mentally challenging season. An unintended but intriguing consequence of this is that it wreaks havoc of fantasy football owners whose start/sit decisions are made a thousand times harder on weeks when important members of their team aren’t playing. When organized this way, a bye week is an equitable way of rewarding all teams with the same amount of rest.

In tournaments and playoffs, a bye week rewards a team or player by guaranteeing entry to a future round of play. Let’s take a single elimination tournament, like the NFL playoffs or a tennis tournament. If you wanted to design a tournament or playoff without byes, you would start at the finals (two teams) and go back: semifinals (four teams,) quarterfinals (eight teams,) the round before that (sixteen teams), and again (thirty-two,) once more (sixty-four.) Choose a number from those and you can have everyone play the same number of rounds. If, instead of four teams, you want to start with six, one easy way of handling it is to have two games (four teams) while two teams wait to play the winners of those games in the next round. This gives you two rounds of four teams each, followed by a final with two teams. It’s not “fair” because it gives a significant advantage to the teams who don’t have to play in the first round, so instead of selecting these teams or players at random, the reward of the bye goes to teams or players who have performed better in previous tournaments or in a regular season. Using byes in this way is one strategy the organizers of a sport have for balancing the excitement of an inclusive tournament with the goal of getting the two best teams or players into the finals so they can play each other.

The word “by” has lots of meanings in English but the one that I think most clearly represents its current use in a sports context is as an adverb, meaning “so as to go past” as in, “the reindeer ran by the puzzled pig.” This fits the use of the word in sports fairly well, even if the word has shifted from being used as an adverb to a noun: “The Dolphins have their bye week this week” or “Serena Williams has a first round bye in an upcoming tournament.” Another possibility, called out in this Yahoo answers post, is that the word is used because it means “something secondary.” This is supported by a great discussion of byes on Stackexchange’s English language site, where a person named Hugo points out that the first use of byes (and how they still work in some throw-back competitions like dog racing) were an attempt to make competition more fair, not less. When a dog (or human athlete) could not compete in a tournament, their opponent would have to complete a bye or a secondary form of the game. Advancement to the next round of the playoffs was guaranteed but, in order to keep things fair, the athlete would have to tire themselves out as much as they would have if they had had to play. In the case of dog racing, the dog would have to run the course anyway. In human sports, I’m guessing a substitute was brought in to compete just as a workout partner.

Hope this shed some light on what byes are,
Ezra Fischer

What is a kicker in football?

Kickers are the resident aliens of a football team — and when I say alien, I don’t mean an immigrant in the process of becoming a naturalized citizen, I mean a green, bug-eyed Martian living amongst us Earthlings. Kickers play a very important role on every football team but that doesn’t mean they fit in.

Football teams have a lot of players on them. NFL teams can carry 53 players for a game and college teams can have 85 players! Only 11 players can be on the field at one time, so the large rosters leave room to have a lot of specialists. Offensive players don’t play on defense. Defensive players only play on offense every once in a while. There are players who specialize in playing in certain situations, like when a team is on defense and knows it’s opponent is going to throw the ball. Then there are the most specialized of all players, the kickers. Kickers are a group apart. They don’t engage in any of the activities that are seen as truly core to football. They don’t hit or get hit, they don’t throw, they don’t catch, they don’t block. They don’t usually look like football players. They’re not bulked-up behemoths, they don’t wear scary looking shields on their face-masks. More frequently than other positions, they don’t share a common background with other football players. They didn’t grow up playing Pee Wee Football, being the best athlete in their schools. They grew up playing soccer or rugby and then switched over later in life. Sometimes they didn’t even grow up in the United States.

What kickers do is kick the football. You might say they put the “foot” in “football” but then you’d be ignoring all the incredible footwork that offensive linemen do in unison to block defenders, that quarterbacks to do slide away from threats in the pocket, that running backs do to juke people out of their shoes, and that cornerbacks do running backwards at full speed. You’d certainly be forgetting about the amazing balletic footwork of wide receivers to make a catch while falling out of bounds. There are two types of kickers on a football team. Here’s who they are and what they do.

What is a kicker in football?

I know what you’re probably thinking. How can we have a subset of an article called “What is a kicker in football?” called “What is a kicker in football?” I agree, it’s strange. but here’s the thing: one of the two kicking positions on a football team is called “kicker.” The kicker is the one who kicks field goals and extra points. A field goal is the one long-distance way to score points in football. At any point in the game, a team can decide to attempt a field goal. When this happens, the kicker runs on the field, accompanied by his key accomplices, the long-snapper and a holder. The long-snapper snaps the football seven yards back where the holder catches it, places it on the ground vertically, and then the kicker kicks it. If the kick goes through the goal-posts and above the upright (football goal posts are shaped like a U sitting on top of an I. A successful field goal has to fly within the U part of the goal.) If the field goal is good, the team gets three points. An extra point is just a specialized field goal that happens after a touchdown. It’s from very close to the goal-line and it’s worth one point. Good kickers almost never miss extra points. As for field goals, a good NFL kicker should always make a field goal from less than 40 yards. 40 to 50 yard field goals are difficult but are usually made. Over 50 yards is a real crap-shoot.

Three points is a significant number and many, many games are decided by a field goal. The difference between a good kicker and a great kicker may be how calmly he can perform under pressure. Close games often end with a long-distance field goal attempt. Kickers who make these are heroes… until the next time, at least.

What is a punter in football?

The punter doesn’t get the glory (or the blame) that a kicker gets but the position is at least as important. Football is said to be a game of field position. This means that if a team can control where it and its opponent starts each possession with the ball and manipulate it so that their opponent has to consistently travel farther than them to score a touchdown, they have a good shot at winning. The punter is the key player in this stratagem. When a team is going to give the ball up to the other team, instead of giving the ball to them wherever it starts the play, they can punt the ball down the field and give it to their opponent there. I recently wrote a whole post about how punts work in football and why are punts exciting? I love the punt, so I recommend reading those posts.

What is a kickoff specialist?

The only other time a football gets kicked during the game (on purpose, at least,) is at the start of each half and following any score, when one team kicks the ball to the other. Even with 53 people on a team, most NFL teams don’t employ a separate kicker just to kick kickoffs. It’s a relative luxury that in 2014 only the Buffalo Bills gave themselves. On most teams, the kicker kicks the kickoffs but there are a few punters who do it too.

Why can't pitchers pitch more than once every five days?

Dear Sports Fan,

I watched the World Series last night. The announcers kept saying how unusual it was for Madison Bumgarner to be pitching so well and so much after starting a game a few days ago. What’s up with that? Why can’t pitchers pitch more than once every five days?

Thanks,
Lucy

 

Dear Lucy,

Last night, San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner pitched five scoreless innings to drag his team to a World Series Championship. His performance is being lauded far and wide as the best thing since sliced bread and the bravest thing since Charles Sullenberger landed his plane safely in the Hudson River. Just check out some of what people are writing about Bumgarner’s performance last night:

“What Madison Bumgarner just did is supposed to be impossible.” – Deadspin

“He’s not human. We gotta do something about this guy. We gotta take him to the doctor, I guess. I don’t know. It seems like he is a robot.” – teammate Gregor Blanco, as told to Sports Illustrated

“I’ve seen a lot of great pitching performances. What Madison Bumgarner did over the last 72 hours is unlike anything I’ve seen. Incredible.” – sports columnist Jeff Passan on Twitter

It was clear, even to a novice baseball fan, that Bumgarner pitched wonderfully last night, but what isn’t as clear is why his performance was seen as being so inhuman and heroic. This is because starting pitchers normally can’t pitch more than once every five days. In order to properly appreciate Bumgarner’s performance, it’s useful to understand a little bit about why that is. It seems like throwing a ball shouldn’t be something you can only do once every five days, but that seems to be the case. Why is that?

Here’s the important thing to understand. Pitchers don’t throw the ball. That’s what you or I do. Pitchers throw their arms. This is why it’s so damaging to their bodies that they can only safely and successfully do it once every five days. Pitchers don’t generate force with their arms, they generate force with their legs and hips and torsos and use their arm as a lever and guiding mechanism. This means that their arms are subjected to however much force their bodies can generate. Bodies can generate a lot of force. Way more than arms can. Arms however, aren’t really evolved to handle that much force. What ends up happening is a little bit like what happens if you try to use a plastic knife to open a can of paint instead of one of those little metal keys or, if you’re like me, a screw driver. Here are a couple facts about the force pitchers generate from a Popular Mechanics article on the topic by Jeremy Repanich:

When a pitcher cocks his arm, where it is turned back to the point where the palm is facing toward the sky, there’s about 100 Newton-meters of torque on the arm, which subjects the arm to the same amount of stress as if the pitcher had a 60-pound weight hanging from his hand in that position… From that cocked position, the arm snaps forward to its release point in 0.03 seconds, and at its peak speed, an elite pitcher’s arm rotates at upward of 8500 degrees per second.

A baseball team uses its pitchers like medieval armies used those rock flinging machines, the trebuchets. Seriously. Compare the motion of these two hurling entities.

First, Madison Bumgarner:

Next, the Trebuchet:

Trebuchetanimation

It’s impressive but also a little scary. Going back to Repanich’s article, here’s what he has to say about pitchers who pitch close to 100 miles per hour:

The amount of torque needed to throw in excess of the century mark is greater than the amount of force the ulnar collateral ligament (the elbow ligament Strasburg tore) can withstand before giving out, according to tests Fleisig has done on cadavers.

Indeed, pitchers injure themselves frequently. The amount of force they use in their pitching motion tears things in their elbows and shoulders. Every pitch they throw strains their arms a little more, pulling and stretching ligaments to their limits and beyond. The more they pitch, the more likely they are to injure themselves. Starting pitchers may pitch up to around 120 times in a game. After a game, they do everything they can to heal the damage done during the game. They ice, they rest, and they wrap, they probably do all sorts of other stuff too that we don’t know about and maybe don’t really want to know about.

What Madison Bumgarner did by pitching perfectly on two days rest was prove that he could will his body to perform when it shouldn’t have been able to or prove that his body is unlike everyone else’s. Either way, it was pretty impressive.

Hope this makes more sense now,
Ezra Fischer

Why are game sevens so great?

If you’re a sports fan, there is nothing better than a game seven. If you’re a fan of the team in the game seven, it’s the most dramatic, heart-wrenching, nerve-wracking, squeal inducing sports situation your team can possibly be in. If you’re simply a fan of sports but don’t have a rooting interest one way or another, game seven is a joy. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about and why game sevens are so great, read on.

Sports has developed a wide variety of ways to decide which team or person is the best. The most common ways of doing this are round-robin tournaments, single-elimination tournaments, multiple-elimination tournaments, and three, five, or seven game series. Sometimes a combination of these approaches are used. There is something to be said for each form of playoff but the one we are concerned with today is a seven game series. In a single elimination tournament, like March Madness in college basketball, a team that loses once is eliminated forever. In a double-elimination tournament, a team that loses twice is eliminated forever. This could go on to infinity if you wanted it to. In a quadruple elimination tournament, a team that lost four times would be out. In an undecuple (yes) elimination tournament, a team that loses eleven times would be eliminated from the tournament. The seven game series is a version of a quadruple elimination tournament where two teams play each other in successive games until one team has won (and the other team has lost) four games.

Just reaching game seven in a seven game series tells you so many things about the series. For one thing, both teams have won (and lost) three games. The two teams are close to even in skill and determination, otherwise one would have been eliminated before then. There have been lots of ups and downs during the series. There’s been enough time for the players on the opposing teams to get to know each other and (usually) develop an explosive mixture of begrudging respect and bubbling disdain. This is magnified in sports like hockey where so much physicality is allowed during the game. It’s also magnified the farther you go in the playoffs. A first round game seven is not as dramatic as a second round game seven. Some sports, like baseball, recognize this and save the seven game series for later rounds, using shorter series earlier on. A game seven in the Stanley Cup finals, the NBA finals, or the World Series is the absolute pinnacle of sporting drama. The team that wins these game sevens are achieving life-long dreams and reaching the highest professional success possible.

Even if you put all the other factors aside, game sevens are still really cool because of their emotional resonance for the players. One common complaint about professional sports is that the fans care more about the teams than the players do; that the players are mercenaries who do it just for the money. In a game seven, you know that every player who steps on the pitchers mound or the batting box, every player who vaults over the boards onto the ice, every player who grabs a rebound or makes a layup, somewhere, in the back of their heads is thinking “Game seven, World Series/Stanley Cup final/NBA final…” just like they did when they were nine years-old in their backyards playing with a friend or two. Game sevens have a way of reducing sports back down to their essentials. Box out. Dump the puck. Make contact. Keep your eye on the ball.

Tonight the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants play in game seven of the World Series. Let’s enjoy it.

What is a blitz in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a blitz in football? I get that it’s something the defense does to attack the quarterback but I’m not sure exactly what it is.

Thanks,
Lee

Dear Lee,

This is an easy question! A blintz is a thin rolled pancake filled with fruit or cream and then cooked. What? Oh, a blitz, not a blintz? Shucks, that one isn’t so easy. Blitz is a word that football took from military history, where it meant a rapid attack. The German bombing of London during World War Two is called The Blitz. Despite being an incredibly common football term, the word blitz is hard to define. It’s been used and reused in so many different ways that its actual meaning has been blurred almost completely. I think it’s safe to say that a blitz is a defensive strategy that relies on speed and surprise to attack the quarterback that aims to tackle him before he can throw the ball or, failing that, to disrupt him enough that his throw is unsuccessful. That’s a more general meaning than most of the definitions that are given but most of the specific definitions given are contradictory. Let’s run through some of them:

  • A blitz happens when someone other than a defensive lineman rushes the passer. This doesn’t make sense because in a 3-4 defense with three linemen and four linebackers, there’s almost always at least one linebacker rushing the passer.
  • A blitz is when the defense rushes the passer with more players than are protecting the passer. Possible but it makes the blitz dependent on the offense. I always thought that defenses could “call” a blitz play but if a play is only a blitz under these circumstances, the defense wouldn’t really be in control of what is or isn’t a blitz.
  • A blitz is when you send more than four defensive players to get the quarterback. Okay, this solves the problem of our first definition, but it doesn’t cover zone blitzes. Zone blitzes are when a defense tries to trick the offense by sending one or more linebackers at the quarterback while dropping one or more linemen into pass coverage. This allows for having only four people rushing the quarterback during a play described as a blitz. 
  • A blitz is just a descriptive term for the act of rushing the quarterback. Anyone who tries to sack the quarterback is blitzing. This one is nice and simple but it fails because it doesn’t provide for a distinction between blitz plays and non-blitz plays. There’s always someone rushing the quarterback but a defense is not always blitzing.

Eventually, if you probe a football fan deep enough, he or she will probably say something like, “quit bothering me, I know a blitz when I see it.” I suspect that there is a technical definition of blitz used within football teams that still has a very specific meaning although it could be used differently from team to team. I also think there probably was once, at the start of the use of the term, a specific definition. The Wikipedia article on the blitz claims that the term was originally used to refer only to a team rushing seven men at the quarterback. Rushing six was called a “red-dog” after a linebacker named Donald Nesbit “Red Dog” Ettinger who played for the University of Kansas, the New York Giants, and in the Canadian Football League. Great nickname! This has the ring of truth to me. It fits most of our descriptions. If you rush seven men, you’re absolutely using a player who is not a defensive lineman because there are at most five of those, you’re likely to be blitzing with more men than are protecting the quarterback, and you’re by definition sending more than four rushers.

So, if you want to be a stickler the next time you’re watching football with a bunch of friends, correct them when they shout about their team blitzing. Tell them that wasn’t a blitz, it was a red-dog! Then duck the plate of hot wings that’s inevitably going to come flying at your face.

Wish I could be more definitive, but this is what I’ve got,
Ezra Fischer

Why do people like basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like basketball?

Thanks,
Henry

Dear Henry,

Basketball is a wonderful mixture of finesse and strength, style and substance, offense, offense, offense, and defense. People like basketball for so many different reasons. Here is a list of my top reasons for why people like basketball.

  • Grace and power in the air — No athletes in any sport fly with the power and grace of basketball players. Oh, sure, you could pull out ski jumping to argue with me if you wanted, but in a pure, unassisted way, basketball players fly like no one else. They jump and hang in the air in a way that seems totally inhuman and impossible to people like you and me. A powerful slam dunk jolts the viewer out of her chair with its power and audacity. Watched in slow motion, you can appreciate the incredible control basketball players have over their bodies. They’re able to twist and turn, to aim, adjust, and re-aim in mid-air. Basketball players leap with the beauty of a ballet dancer and the strength of a lion springing at its prey.
  • Personalities abound – Basketball players are the most personally accessible of all the major sports. On most teams, there are six or seven players who play most of the game. Wearing nothing more than sneakers, shorts, and a tank-top, it’s easy to see them sweat and grimace and scream and celebrate and try. Compare that with football players who are obscured by full helmets and a league that seems determined to dehumanize them or baseball with its culture that punishes emotional expression on the field or hockey where players play for 45 seconds only to be replaced by another swarming over the bench. When you watch basketball, you really get to know the players you’re watching.
  • Never more than one player away from contending – Another function of basketball’s smaller number of players on the court, is that a single player can make an enormous difference to a team’s fortunes. Even the worst teams are never more than one player away from being legitimately good. This means the fire of hope in a basketball fan’s heart may be banked for a season or two or three but it’s always ready to come back, burning stronger than ever.
  • Teamwork has its say – Basketball is dominated by super-star players with strong personalities and even stronger play. You almost never see a championship won in college or the NBA without one truly great player on the winning team. At the same time, even the greatest players can’t do it without being a part of a cohesive team. Basketball punishes teams who rely too heavily on the personal greatness of one player and rewards teams that play as a unit, moving the ball around the court until they find an open shot or a mismatch in size or skill to exploit.
  • Basketball is pop culture – More than any other sport, basketball is tied thoroughly into pop culture. From the Notorious B.I.G. rapping about having an affair with the girlfriend of a New York Knick, to Jay-Z using basketball players’ numbers as code words for the going price of wholesale drugs, to Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s wonderful cameos in Airplane, to the gobs of celebrities that sit court side at NBA games, basketball is pop culture and pop culture is basketball. There’s a particular parallel that fans love to draw between basketball and black music. It’s easy to see the improvisation of jazz and the brashness of hip-hop in basketball play.
  • Trading, drafting, and signing intrigue – If teams are only ever one player away, then player movement becomes a fascinating topic for fans to obsess over. We’ve all lived through and enjoyed (to some extent) the where-is-LeBron-going intrigue over the bast several years. LeBron is an extreme example, but every team has its dramas every year. Will this player re-sign with the team? Who will they draft? Will the draft pick be as good as hoped? One wrinkle that the NBA has as a league, which makes player movement even more fascinating to obsess over, is a salary cap structure which leads teams to make all sorts of trades for financial reasons in addition or instead of basketball reasons.
  • March Madness is awesome – March Madness, the annual college basketball championship tournament, is many people’s favorite sporting event of the year. It’s hard for anything to match its first few days when 64 teams play each other in single elimination games. If you’re a college basketball fan, you start figuring out how to wrangle watching those day-time games weeks in advance. March Madness is so great, we wrote a post just about it.
  • Players can be good in a variety of ways – Basketball is a versatile sport. There are so many different ways to be great in basketball. If you’re small (relatively) you can become a great passer like or you can throw yourself recklessly at the bigger players or you can be a great shooter. If you’re medium-sized, you can dominate with athletic dunks or shut-down defense or by facilitating other people’s play. If you’re a giant among giants, you still have options. You can develop great moves close to the basket, scoring in a variety of ways, or you might have an excellent outside shot, or you can specialize in the grittier aspects of play, setting picks and getting rebounds. There’s so many ways to be a great basketball player and they’re all represented by players in college and the NBA.
  • A supported women’s league – The NBA is one of the more enlightened leagues when it comes to many social issues, including the support of women’s sport. The WNBA is owned and operated (and subsidized) by the NBA. I know it’s not required by Title IX because professional leagues don’t take federal money but I think every men’s professional league should do what the NBA has done to support women in the same sport.

Those are my top reasons. What are yours?

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Let's get ready for basketball season

Let’s get ready for basketball season together. The National Basketball Association (NBA) season starts tomorrow. To help get excited AND prepared for the new season, here is a collection of our best writing about basketball:

The basics

Even the least familiar person with basketball knows a few things about the game: it’s played by teams of five who try to shoot a round ball into a metal hoop which hangs ten feet up in the air off of a plexiglass backboard. Beyond that though, things can get pretty fuzzy, pretty fast. That’s why we’ve covered a few of the next level questions in these basic posts about basketball.

What are the positions in basketball?

In this post, I run through how all the basketball positions work in this post as well as how they’ve evolved over the last twenty years. Basketball has generally transformed in that time to have more interchangeable parts. There’s less differentiation between positions than ever. This change has been reflected by a shift from referring to positions by name (power forward, shooting guard, etc.) to number.

How long is an NBA basketball game?

Talk about the basics, this post covers how long an NBA game is. Spoiler alert, it’s 48 minutes, divided into four quarters of 12 minutes each. There’s a multiples of four motif throughout basketball —  the shot clock is 24 seconds and teams have eight seconds to get the ball across half court. In the past month, the NBA experimented with reducing the

Are basketball fouls really arbitrary?

They certainly seem arbitrary, don’t they? Of all the sports, basketball fouls are probably the hardest to identify and the most open to interpretation. Well, all the major televised sports anyhow, water-polo, for instance seems to have almost constantly confusing foul calls. The truth is that the more you know about a sport and its rules, the less the rules and the foul calls that follow from them seem arbitrary. This post helps explain some of the most common foul calls.

Vocabulary

All sports, basketball included, have their own technical terms. Understanding the technical and expressive elements of basketball language is essential to enjoying the game.

What does it mean to have a foul to give?

Having a “foul to give” is something you’ll hear basketball announcers say about a team at least a few times a game but none of them ever stop to explain what that means to casual or beginner fans. Luckily, this post has you covered.

What does “and one” mean in basketball?

At any given moment, the cry of “and one” is indignantly echoing around a gym somewhere in the country, shouted by someone who feels righteous and over-confident at that moment. My colleague, Dean Russell Bell took this question and turned his answer into an opus well worth reading.

What does “ball don’t lie” mean in basketball?

Seldom has a piece of sports slang been so tied in association to a single player as “ball don’t lie” is to Rasheed Wallace. Find out why and what it means in this post.

The NBA season begins on Tuesday with three games, two of which are televised on TNT. The games are the Orlando Magic at the New Orleans Pelicans at 8 p.m. ET, the Dallas Mavericks at the defending champion San Antonio Spurs at 8 p.m ET on TNT, and the Houston Rockets at the Los Angeles Lakers at 10:30 p.m. ET on TNT. That’s just the first three of 1,230 games this season. I hope these posts help you enjoy at least one of them a little bit more than you otherwise would.