Understanding Sports Archives - Page 38 of 43

What Does Deuce Mean in Tennis?

Dear Sports Fan,

The scoring at Wimbledon is confusing enough with the weird way they count points but it gets very weird when all of a sudden the score is “deuce.” What does deuce mean in tennis?

Thanks,
Aaron

wimbledon_centre_court_roof_p300609_aeltc1 — As nice as this looks, the fans wouldn’t want to be here forever.

— — —

Dear Aaron,

You’re right! The scoring in tennis is a little unconventional. We explained the basic tennis scoring a couple years ago during Wimbledon in another post:

To win a a game you have to be the first person to 5 points… Just to be confusing instead of counting 0-1-2-3-4-5, games are scored love-15-30-40-game.

The trick is that, like a lot of games we used to play as kids when we didn’t want to go in for dinner, you have to win by two points to win the game. This means that if both players get to 40, the game cannot be won by winning just one more point. Instead of counting up and up (50, 60, 70, 80, etc.) until one player won two points in a row and was therefore 20 points ahead in scoring, tennis switches over to a relative count instead of an absolute count of the score.

So 40-40 is called deuce. Deuce literally means “two” so it’s easy to remember that the score is even between the two players (or teams if you are watching doubles tennis.) At the French open, it’s even easier to remember because instead of saying “deuce” they say “egalite” or equality. From there, the score is relative. When a player scores one point, the score changes to “advantage [that player’s name]. If that player scores again, they will be up by two points and will win the game. If the other player scores, the players will be tied again and the score returns to deuce or egalite and the pattern repeats itself.

Repetition is key because this is one of the few parts of a sports game that could, theoretically, go on FOREVER. A tennis game, once it reaches deuce, could become an infinite loop if the players alternate winning points. Lots of sports have theoretically infinite elements but they usually involve overtime or extra-innings. The only other “normal” element of a sport that I can think of which has the same capacity for going on forever is in baseball. A fouled ball (one hit backwards or sideways out of the field of play) counts against the batter as a strike but cannot create the third and final strike against the batter. Therefore, once a batter has two strikes against him or her, the at bat will continue as long as each pitch is fouled off.

Not to worry though, infinity is a long time and both scenarios are about as unlikely as monkeys randomly composing Hamlet.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Why is the NBA Draft a Big Deal?

Dear Sports Fan,

I know the draft has been televised before but I don’t remember hearing about it as much – has it always been this big a deal?

Thanks,
Terry

CSF-NBADraft2011 — The NBA draft is quite a spectacle

— — —

Dear Terry,

Drafts have become a much bigger spectacle in recent years, particularly in the NFL and NBA – there’s no doubt about it. But for die- hard fans they’ve always been a critical part of the off-season.

That’s because, for lack of a better phrase, it gives the losers hope. Being a fan of a bad team can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Once the season starts it becomes fairly easy to see who the contenders are and fans of other teams have to find other things to get excited about. Before the season starts, though, everyone has hope. That hope may seem completely untethered from reality and can come off as desperate, where fans wildly overestimate the potential of players (and coaches!) who have never amounted to anything in their careers. But before a single game is played to prove them otherwise, long-suffering fans psyche themselves up for every season by convincing themselves that SOMETHING that happened in the off-season will make the next season different.

The draft is perhaps the greatest and cruelest purveyor of off-season hope. Since the worst teams generally have the best picks, they have the best chance of picking a player who might single-handedly turn their franchise around – witness the success last year of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts and Washington Redskin led by rookie quarterbacks Andrew Luck or Robert Griffin III; or, the sustained success of the NBA’s Oklahoma Thunder after they drafted Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.

BUT – and this is a significant but – drafting players is the ultimate hit or miss process. Despite all the time and money teams spend getting to know these players, ultimately there is no real way to tell how they will perform at the next level. Witness Greg Oden, a “can’t miss” center who was drafted first the same year Kevin Durant was drafted second. Oden turned into a complete bust, largely due to the fact that his knees proved shakier than the Greek economy. For every Luck or RGIII in the NFL there are a dozen quarterbacks drafted and proclaimed a team’s savior who don’t pan out – the Cleveland Browns have been victimized by this repeatedly, which is why Browns fans are some of the saddest, if most dedicated, fans in the world.

Even for the oft-burned Browns fans, though, the draft represents hope and is one of the highlights of the off-season. Still, they have become bigger spectacles in recent years. This is primarily because the leagues have become much more focused on sustaining attention on their brand in the off-season – essentially trying to turn their part-time sport into a year-round commodity. Turning the draft into a televised spectacle is a natural part of that evolution. It may not seem like compelling TV but by incorporating clips packages and highlights of previous action and interviews with coaches and other players networks (ESPN) have managed to create a passable product that can help keep a sport relevant in the off-season.

Thanks for the question,
Dean Russell Bell

How Tough Are Hockey Players?

Dear Sports Fan,

I had heard hockey fans were tough but seriously, how tough are hockey players? I saw a guy get hit in the face with a puck last night, get stitched up, and keep playing. Sheesh.

Sincerely,
Sam

— — —

Dear Sam,

They are really tough.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Just kidding — we’ll write a bit more about this while we’re on the subject. As the Marx Brother’s line from Monkey Business goes, “How much tough you want? You pay too much, we too much tough.” Hockey players are too much tough. The guy you saw last night is named Andrew Shaw. This was him before the game:

This was Shaw during the game:

And this was him after the game:

So, yeah, they are tough. One thing that is notable about hockey culture, which we mentioned before in our post on Ken Dryden’s article earlier this playoff season about violence in Hockey, is how completely brutal players are to each other. The ethos of hockey allows for a player to target another player who he knows to be injured without any guilt. As a result of this, hockey teams are notoriously silent about who is injured and how badly. During the playoffs you may have heard the phrase “So and so has a ‘upper body injury'” or a “lower body injury” or even at times a “body injury.” This is a compromise between the league which insists the teams give out some injury information and the teams that don’t want to give any out. After the season is over, when there is no reason to hide anything anymore, the list of injuries that players were playing through is often unbelievable:

On the winning Blackhawks, aside from Shaw, Michael Handzus played with a broken wrist and a torn ligament in his knee and Marian Hossa played with a pinched nerve in his neck that left him unable to feel his right foot. The Bruins were at least as injured. Nathan Horton played with a separated shoulder that is going to require surgery and Tyler Seguin will also need surgery on his hip. Patrice Bergeron who was one of those players said to have had a “body injury” almost made that an accurate statement with his broken ribs, torn cartilage and separated shoulder.

There seems to be equal parts honor and lunacy in playing through these injuries but increasingly the lunacy is outweighing the honor when it comes to concussions. Speculation and euphemism about concussions hovered over some players, Jaromir Jagr and Jonothan Toews primarily, but as of yet no one has admitted to having suffered one. Frankly this is where a lot of hockey fans find the line between being impressed with hockey players’ toughness and being concerned for their health and saddened or disgusted by the sport very tough to identify.

Why are hockey players so tough? Tradition has a lot to do with it — there is so much ritual in hockey from the anthem before the games to the hand-shake line after a series is complete — and a lot of that tradition teaches players how to react to and play through pain. I also speculated in the Why Do People Like Hockey post that the very nature of hockey allows for playing through injuries that would be impossible in other sports because players play for 45 second shifts at a time, making it more psychologically possible for them to convince themselves they can overcome pain one more time and then one more time again.

Hoping your reading experience was pain-free,
Ezra Fischer

How Does Overtime Work in Different Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does overtime work in different sports? I’ve been watching more hockey this year and I know that overtime in the playoffs is different from overtime in the regular season. Are other sports like that too?

Thanks,
Sonja

Dear Sonja,

To quote the great Kanye West in honor of his latest album, “like old folks pissing, it all Depends.” Each sport has its own approach to how to proceed with competition if the score is tied after regulation time has expired. Like you say about hockey, even within each sport it can differ depending on whether the game takes place during the regular season or the playoffs. So while it may seem like I’m getting paid by the number of times I write “sometimes” in this post, that’s just the way overtime works.^[1]

In general, extra time formats in sports (overtime) fall into a few buckets:

Sudden Death: the most exciting two words in sports. This format is so dramatically named because the first team to allow their opponent to score loses the game immediately. This adds a heightened layer of tension that’s pretty much unparalleled. Sudden death doesn’t necessarily mean
Sports: hockey, soccer (sometimes), football (sometimes), baseball (kind of), golf (sometimes).
Extra Period: This is essentially when an extra period of time is added and whoever is leading at the end of that extra period wins. It still involves added tension but doesn’t quite have the audience on a knife’s edge, since a single score doesn’t necessarily dictate the outcome.
Sports: basketball (always), baseball (again kind of. In baseball they play a full inning, so essentially the team that has its turn to hit first in the inning is playing Extra Period but the team that hits second can be in a Sudden Death type situation.)
Shootouts: The ultimate Mano a Mano sports showdown. Each team picks its best payers (five in soccer, three in hockey) and each one gets a chance to score on the opposing team’s goalie. Some dismiss it as a gimmick but – for the viewer – there are few things more dramatic than seeing an athlete alone on the field or rink with the weight of the entire game on their shoulders. Of course if the shootout is tied after the allotted players have shot, you get a sudden death shootout, where the first player to miss costs his or her team the game.
Sports: Hockey, soccer (in both cases this assumes you make it through the extra periods with neither team scoring and in the case of hockey that the game is during the regular season)
None: Although increasingly rare, there are some situations in sport where if a game is tied at the end of regular time the two teams shake hands, walk off the field, and neither team wins. It’s a tie! In the old days in soccer two teams that ended the game in a tie would go home, rest up, and play again in a few days in order to get a result.

You may have noticed that we haven’t covered football at all in this post. That’s because football is so absurdly complicated in its overtime rules that it is deserving of its own post. The college football rules are different than the professional ones… which differ from the regular season to the playoffs.

Thanks for your question and look out for a football overtime post soon,
Dean Russell Bell

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Editor’s note. Mister Bell is not being paid at all for this post.↵

What are the Positions in Basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What are the positions in basketball? I’m watching the Spurs and the Heat in the finals tonight and they mentioned that Lebron can guard any position. I’m more of a football fan and so while I’m sure there are positions in basketball, it all looks pretty fluid and interchangeable to me.

Thanks,
Geneva

Dear Geneva,

There are positions in basketball although like you pointed out, they are more fluid than football positions. In a traditional lineup, each of the five players on the court has their own positional label that corresponds to a general set of skills and a set of responsibilities. Basketball is also in the midst of a shift in the language people use to describe the positions. The older way of referring to positions is by name: Point Guard, Shooting Guard, Small Forward, Power Forward, and Center. The new form is just the numbers from one through five. This shift, aside from making things a little more confusing, matches a general shift in the way basketball is played. We’ll start by describing the positions from Point Guard or One to Center or Five and then talk about the general shift in the game. I’m going to describe these positions for men’s basketball but they hold pretty much just the same for women.

Point Guard or One:

The point guard is generally the smallest, quickest guy on the team. Their responsibility is to take the ball down the court and then pass it to their teammates. The point guard will often be the one to call the play the team runs (yes, there are plays like in football but they are generally more flexible) and responsible for clever improvisation when the play doesn’t work quite as it was diagrammed. The point guard is usually not the best scorer on the team and there is a general ethos of the position that says it is the point guard’s job, even if they might be able to score, to defer to their teammates. The point guard is a facilitator.

Jason Kidd who just retired and Tony Parker are great examples of players who epitomize the point guard position.

Shooting Guard or Two:

The shooting guard is quite the opposite of the point guard. Roughly the same size as the point guard, the shooting guard distinguishes themselves by… you guessed it… shooting the ball! You won’t see them passing up a chance to shoot for a teammate, these guys know what their job on the court is and they are good at it. You’ll usually see shooting guards running around like crazy, using their teammates as obstacles to give them just enough space apart from the person guarding them so that they can get a pass and shoot before the defender catches up. They are often good at shooting three pointers (from behind the colored arc around the basket) and love to lurk in the corner waiting for a pass.

Reggie Miller and Ray Allen are pure examples of the shooting guard position. Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan are great players who played shooting guard with a style more normally associated with small forwards.

Small Forward or Three:

The small forward is the most acrobatic of the players on the court. Right in the middle in terms of height, these players use their athleticism to score however they possibly can. Their combination of speed, power, and skill allows them the versatility to shoot over their defender or run right by him to get to the basket for a lay-up or a dunk. As small forwards get older and start to lose their raw athletic superiority, they generally shift towards becoming more of a shooting specialist or, if they have the size for it, more like the players in our next position.

Paul Pierce and Joe Johnson are great examples of Small Forwards. Lebron James plays the 3 more often than any other position (he can really play all five) but he is such a unique athlete that he’s probably not a very useful example to study.

Power Forward or Four:

The power forward is traditionally an enormous muscly dude. The scariest person on the court, the power forward is capable of throwing down enormously intimidating dunks but is more likely to specialize in setting mean picks for their smaller teammates and rebounding like crazy after a missed shot. In recent years the trend for power forwards has been to include someone who has the skill and predilection for scoring more traditionally found in a small forward or shooting guard but the height traditionally associated with a power forward.

Karl Malone and Tim Duncan are classic power forwards. Dirk Nowitzki is perhaps the best example of the non-traditional or “stretch” four.

Center or Five:

The center is the tallest guy on the court. There’s a saying in basketball that you “can’t teach height.” What this means is that no matter how skilled a smaller player is, a tall player will always have some advantages over them. As a result, there are a surprising number of centers, even in the NBA, who actually aren’t that good at or interested in basketball. They just happened to be the kind of seven-foot people who aren’t able to resist millions of dollars and a celebrity life. The center has undergone a similar trend to the one in power forwards in the past fifteen years but traditionally sets up on offense and defense as the closest person to the basket. On offense they catch the ball with their back to the basket and use their size to bump their defender until they can turn around and place the ball in the basket.

In terms of epitomizing what a center is like, there’s no one better to look to than Shaquille O’Neil although Bill Walton is another great player synonymous with the center position.

Evolution in Style

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve noticed people referring to the positions more and more by number instead of name. I think that this has come with the change in how the bigger positions are played. As mentioned in the description of power forwards and centers, a lot of recent players have the size traditionally associated with these positions but the skill and inclination to play the game more like a shooting guard or a small forward. As the more descriptive terms became less accurate (power forwards that aren’t exactly powerful… centers that play a whole lot at the edges of the court…) it became more popular to use the numbers from one to five to refer to players.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What is "Having the Last Change" in Hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does “having the last change” in hockey mean? Please tell me it has something to do with uniform color…

Thanks,
Bob

Dear Bob,

Hockey is one of a few sports that actually bakes into the rule book a couple of small advantages for the home team. Having the last change is one of those advantages and it means that the home team has more control over who on their team plays against particular players on the other team. Here’s how and when this happens and also a little bit of how a team might use this to its advantage.

Hockey is a completely exhausting game (this is one reason why it’s so exciting, as covered in our earlier post on why people like hockey) and the players can only play for about 45 seconds at a time. Hockey teams are therefore made up of about three to four times the number of players as can be on the ice at any time. Unlike football, there isn’t a break between plays, so when players have hit the end of their 45 second shift they skate to their bench and return to it to catch their breath while another player on their team launches themselves onto the ice to replace them. This process looks incredibly chaotic but is normally pretty controlled (and when it’s not, the team that has messed up their substitution often puts themselves at risk for having a goal scored on them). Periodically there will be a break in the play, usually because either the puck has been shot out of the rink, a goalie covers up the puck, a goal is scored, or a penalty is called. When this happens, both coaches have the opportunity to reflect for a second or two and then choose which players they want on the ice.

Coaches will do anything do gain an advantage, and as we will explain later, you can definitely get an advantage through clever player substitutions. As you would imagine, with no rule in place to legislate such things, both coaches would try to see who the other coach is going to put on the ice and then decide who they choose for their team. As exciting as this would be to watch, the NHL decided to control things with a rule that states:

82.1 Line Change – Following the stoppage of play, the visiting team shall promptly place a line-up on the ice ready for play and no substitution shall be made from that time until play has been resumed. The home team may then make any desired substitution, except in cases following an icing, which does not result in the delay of the game.

The home team will use this rule to their advantage by watching to see when the visiting team puts their best offensive players on the ice and then countering with either their best pair of defensive defense-men or their best unit of defensive “checking” forwards. Conversely some home teams will wait to see when their opponents put their best defensive players on the ice and then scuttle their offensive stars back onto the bench to patiently wait for the visiting team’s players to get tired. Of course a lot of the time a visiting coach will have a pretty good idea who the home coach wants to get on the ice. A lot of it is situational — for instance, if a team is down by a few goals and the puck is going to be dropped near their opponent’s goal, they are definitely going to want some of their better offensive players on the ice. So a visiting coach is pretty safe in putting his best defensive players on the ice — I mean what is the home team going to do? If a match-up is really important to a coach he may be willing to instruct his players to play just until their team gets the puck and then to quickly skate off to be replaced. THEN the other coach might tell his players to do the same. It all has the effect of turning a graceful hockey game into something that looks like this.

If this all sounds a little cowardly or over-complicated to you, you might be right. Home teams in the NHL do win more than away teams (55.7% of the time) but that’s actually not that much compared to the advantage of home teams in other sports like the NBA (60.5%) or even the NFL (57.3%) and neither of those sports have any rules that make life easier for the home team. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe some of the advantages that a home team gets are counter-acted by the simplicity of being the away team and knowing that they cannot dictate who plays against who. There are so many factors that go into the advantage a home team has (emotion, routine, intimidated refs, etc.) that it would be pretty hard to isolate this one… but I’m sure there’s a statistician out there working on it!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

What is a Public Team in Sports Betting?

Dear Sports Fan (and by that I mean Ezra),

Can you please explain the science behind sports bets? Specifically, can you explain why my team falls apart EVERY TIME I have what seems to be a reasonable bet going?

Thanks,
Angela

Dear Angela,

Thanks for your question. And thanks for making the same bet over and over again. I really enjoy the lunches that you’ve taken me to! I’ve taken the liberty of translating your question to “What is a public team in sports betting” for the purposes of the title because I think the answer will be found in that concept. First let’s do a little background on what kind of bet you’re making.

The last few years you, me, and a colleague of ours have made a bet at the start of each hockey season where we bet on our own favorite team. The way this bet works is not the obvious one — we do not bet simply that our team will win more games during the season than our opponents’ teams, we bet that our team will perform more better^[1] than what is expected of it compared to how well the other teams do compared to what is expected of them. That means that if your team is expected to win 40 games and mine is only expected to win 30, I will win the bet if your team wins 39 and mine wins 31. Despite your team winning more games than mine, your team won one fewer game than expected and mine won one more.

In order to set our expectations, we use online sports books that are setting a line for the total number of points (teams get two points for a win, one point if the game is tied at the end of regulation time) a team will get during the season. As we wrote about in the lead up to the Super Bowl this year, lines are optimized not to match exactly what is going to happen but instead to attract an even amount of money on each side. For our purposes, it will mess up our bet if the sports books think they need to inflate or deflate the point total for a team away from what they think is most likely to get an even amount of money bet on both sides.

The most common scenario where this skew happens is when the significant portion of the general betting population likes to bet on a particular team. These teams are called “public” teams. Public teams tend to be very popular, well-known teams that have had a lot of success in recent years. Perhaps they are a little bit older now, or injuries have weakened them, or some other relatively subtle thing is going on, like locker room chemistry issues or contractual problems. The people who work at sports books know this but they also know that most casual bettors are likely to overrate the team’s success in past years and underrate the effect of these other factors.

This sounds a lot like your Vancouver Canucks, doesn’t it? They had come in first place of their division seven out of the last nine seasons. Their average age was in the oldest third of the league and one of their best players, Ryan Kessler, had shoulder surgery and was going to miss the first few months of the season. The team also had some unresolved issues at goalie where the long-standing starter (and star with diva tendencies), Roberto Luongo, had lost his starting job to a younger, cheaper, and better Cory Schneider. Of course, the other two teams in the bet, the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Boston Bruins, are also probably public teams to some extent. My guess is that the complete hockey mania in Canada (for evidence, recall this amazing article about water consumption during the Olympic Hockey finals in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics) is the trump card which convinces sports books to inflate their lines for your team.

Then again, it could just be a coincidence… it’s only been three years in a row and that’s an awfully small sample size. Fourth time’s a charm…

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Yeah, I said more better. Deal with it.↵

Which Baseball Stats are Habitual and Which Have Meaning?

Dear Sports Fan,

Which baseball stats do we track based on tradition and which really matter?

Thanks,
Pat

Dear Pat,

Thanks for the question. You have put your finger on a question that has come to dominate the conversation among baseball experts – both those who play and coach the game, and those who cover it – for the past decade or more.

More than any other sport baseball values its tradition and measures and compares eras by statistics. In today’s data driven world, however, baseball professionals have come to realize that many of the tools they have relied on are overly blunt.

Common statistics hitters were measured by, for example, included:

RBI: Runs Batted In – ie, I hit a ball, and as a result a runner already on base scores
Batting average: the percentage of times a player gets a base hit(successfully reaches base by hitting the ball where it can’t be caught/he can’t be put out)

For pitchers:

ERA: the number of runs a pitcher allows on average (discounting errors by the position players in the field behind him)
Wins: the number of times a pitcher’s team wins a game when that team maintains a lead established after the pitcher has pitched 5 2/3 innings

What we now know is that these statistics do not actually capture an individual player’s true value – in most cases, because they rely on the contributions or efforts of other players. For example, it’s difficult for a player to have a high RBI count if the players who hit before him don’t get on base – thus giving him an opportunity to drive them home.

In addition, batting average counts hits, but it discounts other contributions a batter makes – for example, getting on base by taking a walk or bunting or hitting a ball in such a way as to move a base-runner ahead, even if they themselves make an out. A pitcher could dominate an opponent and still lose a game because his teammates either do not score runs or play bad defense behind him.

As a result, baseball clubs have largely moved beyond these blunt tools and, to varying degrees of complexity, have designed metrics that directly measure how each individual player’s presence makes it more or less likely for their team to win. This phenomenon – which started in baseball and was captured most memorably in the book Moneyball – has spread to virtually every other sport.

One example of this is the Value Over Replacement Player – an advanced statistic that allows teams to compare one of their players to an an average player at the same position. I basically failed math, so I’d be hard pressed to explain in much more detail – but as far as I can tell, the people who were paying attention in algebra have magically figured out a way to calculate how many more runs a player is contributing to his team than that average player would.

Thanks,

Dean Russell Bell

What does "Original Six" mean in Hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What are people talking about when they say “the original six” in hockey? Is this some hockey equivalent of original sin?

Curious in Connecticut

Dear Curious,

The “Original Six” is a phrase used to identify the six teams generally thought to be the founding members of the National Hockey League. It’s actually a little more confusing then that. There were other teams before these six but they all disbanded although some have now been reformed. That said, the Original Six: the Boston Bruins, Chicago Black Hawks, Detroit Red Wings, Montreal Canadians, New York Rangers, and the Toronto Maple Leafs are the only teams in today’s league that have operated consistently since the 1920s. For a period from 1942 to 1967 they were the only teams in the league. In 1967 the league expanded to twelve — six expansion teams joined the original six.

The reason you might be hearing more about the original six now is that two of the four remaining series’ in the playoffs feature two original six teams playing against each other. In the Eastern conference, the New York Rangers are playing the Boston Bruins and in the Western Conference the Detroit Red Wings are playing the Chicago Black Hawks.

These six teams continue to have a luster, an elite atmosphere, a je ne sais pas that divides them from the rest of the teams in the league. They are hockey aristocracy, the blue bloods of the National Hockey League. Even though the Pittsburgh Penguins are this year’s favorite to win the Stanley Cup, their series vs. the Ottawa Senators feels indescribably less important than the ones involving original six teams. And it’s not just me. You can see objective evidence in how the the league and their television network partners schedule the games. This weekend they had four games to schedule and gave both the best slots to matchups of the Original Six. Detroit versus Chicago got the Saturday prime-time Hockey Night in Canada slot. Of the two games on Sunday, the favorable Sunday afternoon slot went to New York versus Boston while the Pittsburgh versus Ottawa game goes up against Mad Men and Game of Thrones on Sunday night.

It’s hard to describe why the concept of the Original Six still has meaning. Perhaps it’s that they’ve won so much. Obviously, when there were only six teams to challenge for the Stanley Cup, it’s natural that some of them would win a lot, but the distance between the Canadiens, with 24 Stanley Cups, and the rest is remarkable. The top non-Original Six team, the Edmonton Oilers, won the cup six times and they needed the great Wayne Gretzky to do that! Maybe it’s because the Original Six have remained so consistent in their look. Most of them have resisted the temptation to fiddle with their uniform, preferring to play off their history rather than sully themselves with seasonally popular fads like teal or v-necks. Compare how little the Maple Leafs have changed their jerseys since 1927 to the radical and constant shifts the Vancouver Canucks seem unable to prevent themselves from making.

The thing that I find most remarkable about the Original Six is that it seems like however they were selected, through design or coincidence, they really are the right six teams. In 2012, the original six teams were the six biggest hockey markets as listed in Forbes magazine. According to Forbes, “the sport’s three most profitable teams–the Maple Leafs ($81.9 million), Rangers ($74 million), Canadiens ($51.6 million)–accounted for 83% of the league’s income.” Compare this success to other “original numbered things,” like the 10 original amendments to the U.S. constitution (the second one is definitely unclear and maybe should be re-written) or the 10 Commandments (at the very least, there is debate over how to number them, although the late George Carlin thought the problems went deeper.)

Hope this answered your question and that we become one of your Original Six blogs!
Ezra Fischer

What does being "on the ropes" mean? What about "rope-a-dope?"

Dear Sports Fan,

What does it mean for someone to be “on the ropes?” I heard it the other day during a hockey game but I think it’s a boxing term. While you’re at it, what is “rope-a-dope” and are they related?

Thanks,
Morgan

Dear Morgan,

You’re right, they are both boxing terms although they get used in the context of other sports as well as just in normal conversation. We’ll define what they mean and how you can use them in this post.

They call boxing the sweet science for a reason: because despite the fact that it may look like two sweaty combatants flailing away at each other – or running away from each other – in reality boxers enter the ring with deliberate strategies and do their best to execute them.

Still at some point in a fight, one boxer may get the upper hand and land a few devastating punches, leaving his opponent senseless and barely able to stay on his feet, let alone defend himself. In such cases, a boxer has two choices to keep himself upright: leaning into and grabbing his opponent (known as “clinching”) or leaning back on the ropes surrounding the ring and using his gloves and arms to cover up as much of his body and head as possible. When a fighter does this, and his opponent pummels him endlessly in search of a knockout, the fighter covering up is said to be “on the ropes.”

But remember – they don’t call it the sweet science for nothing. A boxer who sees his opponent cowering and leaning on the ropes, seemingly defeated and therefore posing no threat, may become overconfident – and in his quest to finish his opponent he may exhaust himself by throwing bunches of punches that don’t actually do damage.

Thus a particularly clever and gutsy boxer may pretend to be more injured than he is, encouraging his opponent to throw too many punches in a vain effort to knock him out – and then, turn the tables and go on the offensive when his opponent has punched himself out (ie, exhausted himself by throwing too many punches).

The most famous example of this strategy being put to use is known as the “rope-a-dope” – when Muhammad Ali lured an aggressive George Foreman into attacking relentlessly for the first seven rounds of the famed “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974. Ali did this not only by seemingly letting Foreman dictate the action, but by taunting Foreman mercilessly. Foreman wore himself out and Ali seized the initiative and knocked his drained opponent out in the eighth round.

Today, the term “rope-a-dope” is just as likely to be used to blithely describe political or business strategy as it is to describe a fighter’s approach in the ring. But it’s worth remembering the original principle: being willing to absorb potentially devastating punishment with the knowledge, or hope, that you ultimately have the ability to outlast your opponent.

Thanks for the question,
Dean Russell Bell