Tag: basketball

How a Basketball Team is Like Inigo Montoya

Spurs Heat
Will the Spurs take their revenge on the Heat this year?

The San Antonio Spurs are like Inigo Montoya three-quarters of the way through the Princess Bride. I know what you’re thinking… have I finally and forever lost my mind? The Spurs are an NBA basketball team and Inigo Montoya is a fictional Spanish sword-fighter.  You are technically correct but bear with me and I’ll tell you why they are similar.

In the Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya is single-mindedly obsessed with finding the man who killed his father and defeating him. The death of his father at the hands of a distinctive, six-fingered man, so haunted and infuriated Montoya that he trained harder and smarter than anyone and became one of the greatest fencers in the world. So armed, he pursued his enemy with unequalled intensity and focus until he could say to him, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Last year, the San Antonio Spurs faced the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals. The Finals are a best four-out-of-seven series and after five games the Spurs led 3-2. They needed to win only one more game to win the championship. In the sixth game, they led by five points with 28 seconds left in the game. They were so close to winning the finals that the rope used to keep spectators off the court had already been deployed. Then the unthinkable (or at least the very unlikely) happened and the Heat came from behind to win in overtime. In game seven, the Spurs were behind by only two points with less than a minute. They had the ball. Then the unthinkable happened again. Tim Duncan, one of the greatest and most reliable players of all time, missed a shot he’s made a thousand times. Watch the video. Pay close attention to Duncan’s reaction a few seconds after missing the shot and then again a few seconds after that when the Heat call time-out. If there’s a sports equivalent of witnessing your father being murdered, it’s what happened to the Spurs last year in the finals against the Heat.

This year, instead of under-playing the factor of revenge, as teams often do following losses, the Spurs this year have been single-minded and open about their goal — to get back to the finals and beat the Heat. It’s almost as if they’ve been repeating at every practice, during every game, and at every press-conference, “We are the San Antonio Spurs, you beat us in the Finals. Prepare to be defeated.”

We’re almost there. The Heat are up three games to one against the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals and the Spurs are up two games to one against the Oklahoma City Thunder. We still have a little ways to go but if the Spurs make it to play the Heat in the finals, my money (or at least my heart,) is on Montoya to beat the six-fingered man one last time.

What Does "Ball Don't Lie" Mean?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does “ball don’t lie” mean? I’ve heard the phrase used in basketball but I’m not exactly sure what it means.

Thanks,
Dot

ball don't lie
Rasheed Wallace, the most devoted follower of the “ball don’t lie” way.

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Dear Dot,

“Ball don’t lie” is a great basketball phrase that means roughly “you get what you deserve.” Its meaning is similar to other common phrases like “karma is a bitch” or to saying someone got their “just deserts.” While it’s true that basically every human endeavor can be interpreted through the lens of karma or just deserts, sports, because they set up high pressure situations and then resolve them with a high degree of luck involved, are uniquely suited to being interpreted through this lens. Of all the sports, basketball is the most well suited to embracing this philosophy.

Basketball is the highest scoring major sport, so if you’re looking to confirm a theory, you’re more likely to find evidence for it in a basketball game than any other sport — there’s just more stuff happening! Of all the major sports it also has perhaps the most subjective (or arbitrary) foul calls. This leads to players and fans on both sides feeling righteously indignant about the calls that went against them. They express it by screaming, “BALL DON’T LIE” and then, no matter which way the next play goes, one side will feel vindicated and consequentially have their belief in the existence of just basketball gods verified.

As one of basketball’s signature phrases, “Ball don’t lie” pops up in unexpected places. Yahoo’s NBA blog is called Ball Don’t Lie and there was a selling novel by that name by Matt de la Pena which was turned into a movie. Retired basketball player Rasheed Wallace was the world’s foremost proponent of “ball don’t lie” as a way of life. Before he retired, he left behind this exemplum of the phrase’s use. Someone put together a six and a half minute compilation of Wallace yelling “ball don’t lie” and more or less acting like a total lunatic goofball basketball yogi. There’s even a t-shirt of the phrase with Wallace’s likeness on it. My favorite example though comes from Hedo Turkoglu in an often misunderstood post-game interview from 2010. During the interview the sideline reporter asks him what he did differently that night that lead to him having such a good game (usually the best player in the game is chosen to do the on-court post-game interview) and Turkoglu responds simply, “ball.” The reporter tries to interpret this mysterious comment as best he can, but I like to think it was more mystical than mysterious — Turkoglu felt that he had worked hard or been unjustly slighted in a previous game and that according to the basketball principle of “ball don’t lie,” the basketball gods owed him one.

Now that you know what it means, you should feel free to shout “ball don’t lie” as much as you can. Watch out for those wonderful moments when the person who cut you off on the sidewalk while texting bumps into a light-post or when that guy who keeps moving your laundry from the washer mistakenly dyes his underwear pink. Ball don’t lie!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra

A One Word March Madness Bracket Guide — 2014

As many of you know, the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Championship tournament begins this week. This event bleeds far over the normal sports-fan border because of the omnipresent BRACKET. March Madness brackets are a fun and usually low-stakes form of gambling that asks people to predict the outcome of all games in the tournament before it even starts. This is harder than it sounds because a mistake in an early round can compound throughout the tournament. As such, winning is often more about luck than anything else.

To help you win your bracket, my colleague Brendan Gilfillan and I created a Dear Sports Fan March Madness Bracket with each team described in a single word. So, instead of wracking your brain picking between Oklahoma and North Dakota St., choose between Fast and Large. My favorite match-ups are between Streaky and Happy and Zone and Butter.

Enjoy!

What is Selection Sunday?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is Selection Sunday?

Thanks,
Siobhan

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Teams get together with fans to see if their team gets selected for March Madness.

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Dear Siobhan,

Selection Sunday is the day that the 68 teams who have qualified for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament (March Madness) are announced. It’s also today, so let’s get down to the business of explaining how it works.

Like another facet of college, the admissions process, not all 68 open spots are open to every team equally. In college admissions, some spots (a majority at some schools, I believe) are reserved for the children of University employees, legacies whose parent attended the school, or star athletes. In the case of Selection Sunday, 32 of the 68 teams are reserved for conference champions. There are so many schools in the top division of college basketball with teams that they can’t all play each other in the regular season. Instead, their schedules are largely driven by what conference they are in. Conferences are federations of schools who agree to play with and against each other — one day soon we will write a post all about conferences. In the week leading up to Selection Sunday all but one of these conferences hold championship tournaments of their own. These conference championships are miniature versions of March Madness — single elimination tournaments that end in a championship game. The one exception is the Ivy League who disdains tournaments and simply declares the team with the best regular season record to be their champion. Each of the 32 conference winners are guaranteed a spot in the field of 68 teams that make it into the NCAA tournament. These 32 spots are called automatic bids.

The other 36 spots in the 68 team field are called at-large bids and are chosen by a selection committee. The selection committee is made up of ten college athletic directors or conference commissioners and functions just like committees everywhere. It creates controversy. According to a post about March Madness on howstuffworks.com the committee selects based on the following factors:

  • Rating Percentage Index (RPI) (For more information on RPI, go to CollegeRPI.com.)
  • Ranking in national polls
  • Conference record
  • Road record
  • Wins versus ranked opponents
  • The way a team finishes the regular season

Also, I would add, just like the college admissions process, the factors of instinct based on having watched the team during the year, luck, and how much coffee the committee member has had in the last half hour.

Conference is one of the most visible factors in the selection process. There’s a few conferences like the Big 12, Pac-12, Big Ten, and Atlantic 10 that are likely to get five or more teams into the tournament, then there’s a small middle of conferences that will get two or three teams, and a long tail of conferences where only the winner of their conference championship tournament will make the NCAA tournament. These three groups of conferences can colloquially be referred to as power conferences, mid-major conferences, and one-and-done conferences. Traditionally the overall winner of March Madness has almost always come from a power conference but the mid-majors are getting stronger every year. This year a mid-major, Wichita State, won every game throughout the regular season and conference championship and is thought to have a good shot to win the big tournament. The one-and-done conferences are called that because they usually only get one team into March Madness and that team usually loses in its first game.

The excitement of Selection Sunday is mostly about the ten or so teams that realistically don’t know whether they will be selected for the tournament or not. These teams are called bubble teams or are said to be on the bubble which is a nice visual. In addition to the secret whims of the selection committee these teams are effected by the outcomes of the conference championships. This is because of the automatic bids that conference champions receive. In most conferences, the team (or teams depending on what type of conference this is) with the best regular season performance are pretty much locks to get into the NCAAs. If a team outside of this group surprises everyone and wins the conference tournament, they will get the automatic bid, and, if the selection committee doesn’t subtract one of the teams from that conference from their selection, then all of the teams from that conference that were going to get in will get at-large bids, the under-dog upstart will get the automatic bid, and there will be one fewer at-large bid for the bubble teams to fight over. An example of this happened last night in the Big East when Providence upset Creighton. Creighton is still likely to make the tournament but as an at-large team. Providence, which wasn’t likely to qualify, now will on an automatic bid. And a bubble team like Minnesota or Xavier, as The Big Lead supposes, will not qualify as a result.

The selection will be announced on CBS around 6 p.m. ET after the conclusion of the SEC championship game. Enjoy!

Why is March Madness the Best?

As one of my oldest sports-watching-friends and a big college basketball fan, I thought Brendan Gilfillan could help me answer the question, “why is March Madness the best?” What follows is a rambling email exchange between the two of us marginally focused on that question. My writing is in italics, Brendan’s in plain text.

typing— — —

Obviously it’s hard to objectively say what sporting event is the best to watch but people who love college basketball are often quite passionate in arguing that the men’s college basketball postseason tournament commonly known as March Madness, is the absolute greatest sports experience of the year. Why do you think that is?

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The first four days: no matter when you turn on a TV, you’ll see hundreds of 18-22 year-olds put under an incredible amount of pressure. Needless to say, that results in some pretty incredible stuff: heartbreaking, skull-thumping mistakes, once-in-a-lifetime performances, and absolute unparalleled chaos. Because of the format, it’s the sporting playoff where sheer unpredictability reigns most supreme (the NFL comes closest, in my opinion). There are other, lesser reasons: unlike the NBA most players aren’t talented enough to score consistently, which forces coaches to use some diverse and creative offenses; and for a lot of these players, this is the end of their athletic career, which adds an additional sense of desperation.

But for me, the central reason is the sheer nuttiness that ensues when you put kids under the spotlight in a single elimination tournament many of them have been looking forward to their entire lives. It’s kind of like why the Olympics are so intense, but magnified because the sport is more accessible and easier to follow/invest in over the course of a season.

— — —

The question of unpredictability is a good one — I think we had a post answering the question “are predictable sports more popular” but I don’t think we came to any real conclusion. The NBA is known as the most predictable sport. Funny that basketball can be the most and the least predictable just at different levels. The difference has something to do with the skill and ability to withstand pressure of the players but there are some important format differences too. The college game is shorter (forty minutes instead of forty-eight,) and the shot clock is longer (35 seconds instead of 24.) This leads to lower scoring games with fewer possessions and therefore more chance for an on-average weaker team to come out victorious. The format of the playoffs (single elimination instead of a seven game series) is also a big factor in making college basketball less predictable. How do you rationalize the obsession of sports fans with determining who the best team is with an enjoyment of unpredictability which inevitably leads to a less conclusive champion?

You’re absolutely right about the first four days though. They are so exciting. The first four days of the tournament winnows the field from 64 teams to 32 and then to 16. So that’s… 40 games in four days. I remember a time when I was at work… but keeping an eye on the games on one side of my monitor… and a colleague of mine on the opposite end of the office and I let out a yell at the same time when someone hit a buzzer-beating shot to win a game. Classic moment in lost productivity. How do you think the advent of streaming games on computers and tablets has changed how people consume the tournament, especially those hectic first four days?

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Do you think sports fans are obsessed with determining who the best team is? I guess every fan is after something different in sports. I’m in it for the experiences and moments, not for justice.

Although I’d argue that the best team is the team that performs best when it matters most. This is an age-old argument, but I don’t understand how you can have the best team if you lose when the stakes are the highest (even in the event of injury, horrific officiating – great teams overcome!). You may have the most talented collection of players, but whatever thing you need to put you over the top when there’s no margin for error is what makes a team the “best.” Do you (or fans you know) end up disappointed when the “wrong” team wins, assuming they don’t have a direct rooting interest in that team? I guess I can understand that…it’s just not how I experience sports.

re: streaming games – I don’t how much it’s changed it for the diehards, cause they are more likely to skip work altogether, buy a case of beer and a family-size bag of Doritos and camp out on the couch in a tee-shirt, tube socks and sweatpants(if they’re wearing pants at all), moving only to perform the most urgent bodily functions. There’s nothing nastier than the smell of an NCAA-tourney diehard on that first Sunday night. But more fans watching more games early on means they’ll be more invested in those teams as they advance. They get invested in individual players, know their stories, and ultimately end up feeling genuine disappointment/elation at their performance – feelings that are completely out of proportion to any actual impact on their own lives.

Another thing on college sports (in my experience, basketball) in general: the fun of college basketball isn’t in seeing the guys who are just stopping over on their way to the pros. The fun is in seeing a guy like Markel Starks – Georgetown’s starting point guard. I remember watching him in person his freshman year, when he only got in during garbage time. I somehow ended up sitting next to some of his friends/family – they were cheering for everything he did despite the fact that it had no impact on the outcome of the game. And he wasn’t very good then – he sat behind better players for most of his career, and spent his time getting a little better each year, without any guarantee other than his coach’s word that it’d work out.

Watching him progress over those four years – and then watching him this year, when he’s all Big East first team, when he was amazing on senior night in an upset win over Creighton that we absolutely had to have – is what college sports is all about. There’s usually guys like that on every team – guys who may or may not go pro, here or abroad – and this is their time in the spotlight.

— — —

I do think there’s some serious interest in at least the appearance of determining who the actual best team is. For evidence of this, look at the enormous mess that has been made of college football in the past twenty years in an attempt to create a post-season format that better determines the national champion. Not to pour salt in a very old wound but if the NBA was a single elimination tournament, your 76ers would have beaten the Lakers in the 2001 finals and the lasting image would have been Allen Iverson stepping over Tyrone Lue. Instead, the Lakers won the seven game series decisively 4-1. There’s truth to the narrative about players and teams playing their best when it counts but there’s a whole lot of luck involved too.

Technology has definitely changed the way even die-hard fans consume March Madness. Even the earliest streaming websites and apps allowed for the consumer to choose which game to watch. On TV, the games were only on one channel, and someone at the station would decide who saw what game and when to switch from a less competitive game to a closer one. Now I believe that every game is televised in full by CBS Sports taking over a bunch of networks in their… network. This puts the onus on the viewer just like in a streaming type situation. I have to say, I miss the more curated experience of watching whatever was on CBS the whole weekend. What do you think? Has technology made the viewing experience better or worse for you?

Great point about feeling a connection with the players. That’s something that’s more difficult to do with professional sports because the life of a millionaire professional athlete is so far from identifiable for most of us, unfortunately. Not that the life of a stud college athlete is all that different but at least many of us went to college and can identify with some of the elements (exams, hormone-driven obsession with romance, weekend drinking, etc.) of their lives. You can also identify with Starks because you went to Georgetown but for people like me whose colleges don’t have top-level basketball programs, there’s always a team to latch on to during the tournament whether it’s an exciting Cinderella story, a regional team, a friend’s alma mater, or just a team we favor for our bracket.

— — —

Red herrings, all! I think the issue with college football is that the champion is too frequently not being determined on the field, which means there can’t be any sort of justice. I also think the Lakers/Sixers argument is flawed, as much as I enjoy picturing that step-over (top 3 highlight of my sports fan existence…picturing now…that little head nod where he almost looked down, then seemed to decide Lue didn’t even warrant it). The question those teams were trying to answer was who would be best over a seven game series, not in a single elimination game. Everyone’s approach to that game changes if it’s winner take all. And as much as I love AI, I don’t think he’s able to drag that team over the hump when both Kobe and Shaq know it’s all or nothing.

The streaming thing has been net positive for me – I think anything that gives fans more agency is better. What non-fans/more casual fans need in a world with that many teams and games is help sorting through where to watch and what to watch for…not only in the beginning but potentially in real time.

Your favorite playoffs – at least I think – are the Stanley Cup playoffs, right? Is it cause the familiarity built up over seven games yields such intense/high-level play?

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Hey now, “what non-fans/more casual fans need in a world with that many teams and games is help sorting through where to watch and what to watch for…” That sounds like something Dear Sports Fan should be doing! Maybe we can do that this year.

You’re right, my favorite playoffs are ones based on seven game series. It’s not so much that they are better at determining which team is better (although they are dramatically better at that) it’s more about the drama that they produce. Seven games is an eternity for two teams to play against each other at the highest level with elimination at stake. Invariably, players start to hate each other; a dirty hit in game one will be retaliated for in game five. The tactics that worked one game will be countered the following game. There’s so much more depth to watching a series than a single game. And in terms of raw excitement, every series ends with an elimination game — sometimes, in the case of game sevens — for both teams. That’s really the perfect mix, a single elimination game with six games of history before it.

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Well but just as often the elimination game comes at 3-0 or 3-1 or something – there’s no guarantee of a game 7, whereas with the NCAA it’s all elimination games. I do think the seven game series is uniquely suited for hockey – it’s kind of a grind in baseball, where the strategic changes are much less interesting and teams’ retaliation is limited to pointless milling about in each other’s vicinity. Basketball is closer but you don’t necessarily see the intensity you do in hockey – or, that you saw in the NBA 30 years ago. Everyone’s competitive but you don’t get the sense that there’s a lot of hatred there.

What about Olympic hockey, though? Did you enjoy that less than the NHL playoffs cause of the format?

[some time elapses]

And now I’ve tasted my own mutton…how do I like the taste? Georgetown lost a single-elimination game in the Big East tournament to a “lesser team,” meaning they will definitely not go on to the NCAA tournament. It’s pretty disheartening. Georgetown is clearly “better” than DePaul – they’ve played and beaten better teams, have a better record, have more talent. But when it came down to a single game with real stakes, DePaul flat-out outplayed them. No excuse, no fluke, they were the better team last night.

So justice was done. The same things that plagued Georgetown all year – and put us in the position of needing this win – did us in last night. No front-line scoring cause of the suspension of Josh Smith, who was clearly way too integral to our plans for a transfer with a shaky past; offensive droughts and the occasional, incredibly poorly timed defensive lapse; and generally playing down to the level of our competition. How else to explain a season sweep to Seton Hall? A loss to Northeastern?

Sigh.

— — —

I think we’ve come full circle here. I’m sure you’ll still be able to enjoy watching March Madness starting next week. Maybe even more now that the excitement and unpredictability can’t harm your rooting interests any further.

When is a Conference Not a Conference? A Sports Theseus Paradox

This Wednesday, March 12, the Big East Men’s College Basketball Tournament starts at Madison Square Garden in New York City as it has every year since 1983. This year though, the tournament is different enough that it has many sports fans asking the question, “is this the same tournament?” Similar questions about the consistency of existence have been asked throughout history in the form of a paradox called the Theseus Paradox.

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Syracuse and Pitt, who faced each other in the 2006 finals, are both gone from the Big East.

The Theseus Paradox, first posed by Plutarch in his first century Life of Theseus, asks whether Theseus’ ship, having been preserved by replacing one by one, every single board, is truly the same ship? This question is also commonly asked about “my grandfather’s ax”: This is my grandfather’s ax. My father replaced the head and I replaced the shaft. (As an aside, this is one of the many quotations on my father’s classroom wall. I guess the tree doesn’t grow far from where the apple falls…) The question the paradox asks is about the nature of existence — in the case of a sports conference, what makes the Big East the Big East? Is it the conference name, the location of its tournament, or the teams that play in it?

The Big East was formed in 1980 as a collection of schools, many Catholic, mostly in the Northeast of the country, whose priority when it came to sports was basketball. It quickly became a powerhouse college basketball conference in part because of its television contract with an up and coming network called ESPN. For almost two decades, it drove college basketball and was driven by college basketball but then the rise of college football as the big money-maker for college athletics caught up to it. From the mid-1990s the economics of college sports forced the Big East to start making moves to improve its standing in College Football even at the expense of its basketball history. It added schools like Miami, West Virginia, and Virginia Tech which were not only far from being in the Northeast but were also primarily football schools. This emphasis on football mixed with the Big East’s tendency to be stronger in basketball than football despite its best attempt to conform eventually led, starting in 2004, to the slow but steady flight of football-strong schools from the conference. One of my favorite sports writers, Michael Wilbon, wrote a good article about this in 2011. The conflict came to a head last year when seven of the original members of the Big East (all Catholic and all primarily basketball schools) petitioned the league to break away from the remaining schools and form their own league. They succeeded in seceding and because they represented a majority of the remaining charter members, were able to take the Big East name with them.

This year’s Big East consists of those seven teams plus three more they poached from other leagues. It’s this league that will be having their postseason tournament in Madison Square Garden this week but its unclear how much the new tournament will “feel” like the old one. It will be missing most of its biggest teams and rivalries. Syracuse, UConn, Louisville, and Pitt are gone and with them seventeen of the thirty four Big East historic championship teams. The last remaining historic powerhouse, Georgetown, is robbed of its main rivals and having an unusually weak year. According to Forbes, ticket sales are down 11%. The New York Post argues that what the current tournament has “lost in star power” it has “made up in drama.”

Coming back to the metaphor of the ax, the parallel to the paradox is not complete. Seven of the ten schools in this iteration of the Big East were charter members of the original Big East. So, while the head of the ax may have been changed, at least the shaft is the same piece of wood. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes added a question to the paradox using the metaphor of a ship — what, he posed, if the original planks had been collected on their way out of the ship, and assembled back into another ship? Which would be the “real” ship? Luckily we don’t have to answer this question about basketball because the teams that have left the Big East have mostly scattered into other conferences.

What’s the answer? Is the Big East still the Big East? Perhaps there’s a clue to be found in (the all-knowing, all-powerful,) Wikipedia having two seperate entries for the Big East, one pre-2013, one post? Perhaps there is no answer? Perhaps the only way to know will be to tune in and watch the tournament…

What Does it Mean to be Mathematically Eliminated?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does it mean to be “mathematically eliminated” from something?

Thanks,
Will

There’s nothing worse as a fan than having your team mathematically elminated

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Dear Will,

“Mathematically eliminated” is one of those phrases that you hear often in sports but not in too many other contexts. A team or player that is mathematically eliminated cannot win or qualify for something in any of the possible permutations of future outcomes. This can happen within a game, within a season, or within a tournament or playoffs. You’re probably hearing it a lot now because the NFL season is in its 16th of 17 weeks and teams are being mathematically eliminated left and right. Let’s explore some of the common forms of mathematical elimination.

Mathematically eliminated from qualifying for the playoffs

A team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs when no possible permutation of wins and losses in all the remaining games in a season result in them qualifying for the playoffs. This is a surprisingly high bar. For instance, with only two games remaining, the 6-8 Pittsburgh Steelers are still alive for a playoff spot according to CBS. What would have to happen for them to qualify? According to the Altoona Mirror, the Steelers need “about 10 things to happen” and the chances of them all happening are around 100 to 10. They detail all of the necessary dominoes here. Stranger things have happened, for sure, but it certainly stretches the imagination to think that all ten of the items are going to happen just the way the Steelers need them to to make the playoffs. One could say they have been plausibly eliminated but as long as there is a single path for them to make the playoffs, the team and their fans will keep hoping.

Other forms of mathematical elimination — shootout edition

Although the phrase “mathematically eliminated” is almost only ever used about the playoffs, as explained above, there are other types of mathematical elimination in sports. A shootout is one example. In many hockey and soccer leagues, if a game is tied the teams play timed overtime periods. If it is still tied after that, the game is decided by a series of one-on-one contests between a player and a goalie. This is called a shootout. The shootout is arranged like you or I would play odds-and-evens or rock-paper-scissors. In the NHL it is a best of three, in Major League Soccer and international soccer, it is a best of five. Both of these contests work in frames — first one team goes, then the other, repeat. This leaves the door open for mathematical elimination within the shootout. If a team has scored more goals than the other team has remaining shots (in hockey, a team would have to score the first two with the other team missing the first two. In the longer soccer shootout, there are more ways for this to happen,) it’s impossible for that second team to win. In this case, the game is over. The final shots cannot possibly have an effect on the outcome of the game, so they aren’t taken.

Other forms of mathematical elimination — playoff edition

The same logic found in the shootout is also used during the best out of five or seven game series found in the NHL, NBA, and MLB playoffs. Earlier this year, we answered the question, “what is a sweep?” A sweep is when a team wins the first three games of a five game playoff series or the first four in a seven game series. In either case, this is a decisive victory because the winless team doesn’t have enough games in the series left to have any chance of winning the majority of games. They are mathematically eliminated from the playoff series. Like the shootout, the final games of the playoff series are not played because they could not possibly have any affect on the outcome.

Other forms of mathematical elimination — end of game edition

Mathematical elimination can also happen during a game in some sports. Baseball games and tennis matches are organized like little miniature playoff series or shootouts. Tennis matches are organized into best-of-three or five set contests. Each set is organized into best of thirteen game contests. In each of these layers, if a player mathematically eliminates their opponent by winning seven games or two or three sets, the theoretical remainder of the set or match is not played. Baseball is roughly the same. The contest is divided into innings that each have a first half (or top as it’s called) and second half (bottom.) The away team bats in the top of the inning and the home team in the bottom. In the ninth and final inning, if the home team is winning at the end of the top of the inning, the game is over. There is no way for the road team to score any runs in the half of the inning when they are in the field, so there is no reason for that half-inning to be played. They are mathematically eliminated from the game.

Football is perhaps the most curious sport when it comes to in-game mathematical elimination. Football isn’t organized into innings or frames or sets and matches. It’s one continuous game but a wrinkle in the rules makes it possible for a team to (more or less) be mathematically eliminated. In football, the clock either runs or doesn’t run between plays based on the outcome of the play. If there is an incomplete pass, a player runs out of bounds with the ball, or there is a penalty, the clock stops. When a player is tackled with the ball within the boundaries of the field, the clock keeps running, and only a time-out can stop it. If a team is winning AND they have the ball AND the opposing team has no time-outs left, the team with the ball can simulate being tackled on the field by snapping the ball to the quarterback and having him kneel down. This keeps the clock running for up to 40 seconds between each play and a team with the ball can do this three times consecutively. Teams use this strategy as a form of mathematical elimination. If there is less time left in the game (40 x 3 = 2:00) than a team can waste by kneeling, the game is effectively over.

This is really only an almost mathematical elimination because the team with the ball could mistakenly fumble the ball during the snap and if the other team picked it up, they could have a chance of winning. Teams on the losing side of the football game almost never even try to make this happen because it’s so unlikely that it seems lacking in common and professional courtesy to shoot for it. In my memory, the only coach to instruct his team to go for this was former Rutgers head coach, Greg Schiano. Trust my alma mater to foster this type of radical (and rude) thinking! All jokes aside, mathematical elimination is a tricky thing for sports leagues to figure out because it undermines a basic motivation for teams and players: once you have been mathematically eliminated, what is the purpose of continuing to try? This problem is most common when teams have been eliminated from the playoffs during a season and, because the order they get to draft players for next season in is set in inverse (or roughly inverse) order of their record in this season, they have an incentive to lose as many games as possible. This is called tanking and is a scourge to the sports world roughly equal to the flu in the normal world or sarcoidosis on House.

It’s a scourge for another post though, so until then, happy holidays!
Ezra Fischer

Why do Some Sports Play Through Bad Weather and Others Don't?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do I always hear about baseball games being delayed or rescheduled due to a light rain and yet soccer games continue around the world in a downpour?

Thanks,
Jesse

Sport, baseball. Hardest material, a wooden bat. Plays through rain? No.

— — —

Dear Jesse,

Thanks for the question! It’s true that sports react differently to the elements. I’m tempted to try to explain this culturally. I’m not the biggest fan of baseball, so it would be fun to bash them for not playing in the rain. A more fair explanation would probably explain that weather affects the trajectory of balls and that this is much more dangerous with a small, hard ball traveling at 95 miles per hour than a big soft ball flying at 35 miles per hour. What is most interesting to me is trying to explain the general phenomenon of why some sports play through bad weather and others don’t and if possible, coming up with a rubric that explains why.

There seem to be two or three simple rules that we can abstract to to explain how each sport deals with weather.

  1. If the sport is played inside, there should almost never be a weather related delay.
  2. The harder the hardest substance used in normal game-play is, the less likely the sport will be to play through bad weather.

Let’s see how these work in practice.

Pro or College Basketball, Volleyball, Boxing, Hockey, Ping Pong — all played inside and all safe from weather delays.

Soccer, Football, Rugby, Cross Country Running — all played outdoors and the hardest material involved is no harder than a soft, inflated leather ball. Their surfaces are all grass or dirt. The only weather that will stop these games is a lightning storm in the direct area of the game.

Golf, Baseball, Tennis, Cricket — all played outdoors and the hardest material is significantly harder than leather. Golf has metal clubs and hard resin balls, baseball has wooden bats and hard leather balls, tennis is played on concrete with fiberglass rackets, and cricket has wooden bats and a hard leather ball.

These rules work pretty well to predict whether a sport will play through bad weather or not with only a few exceptions. You may have noticed that football is in the play through the weather category despite its helmets being much harder than an inflated leather ball. Two possible explanations for this are that historically the helmets were made of soft leather or that because the helmet is attached to the body, its danger is not modified by the weather. Of course if we allow the historic state of sports to enter into the equation, we’d have to admit that tennis used to be played only on grass and clay and that the rackets used to be made of wood. Then again, women’s tennis attire once “included a bustle and sometimes a fur” according to one history of tennis. Basketball’s treatment of weather is modified by its setting. If you are in an outside basketball league, played on concrete, games will be canceled if it is raining. Cycling admittedly breaks this rule entirely. They ride in the rain even though their bikes are made of fiberglass and the roads are made of road. I can only explain this by saying that cyclists are a little crazy and that no rule is perfect.

These rules should help you if you ever need to know whether your tickets to a sport are in danger of being rained out or if you decide to invent a new sport and want to set reasonable weather expectations.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

What Does Games Back Mean in Sports Standings?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does games back mean in sports standings? And how can a team be a half game back?

Thanks,
Greg

— — —

Dear Greg,

That’s a great question! Games back can be a confusing concept. Games back is a metric that attempts to show how far behind a team is, controlled for the number of games they have played. A team can be a certain number of games back from another team or from a position in the standings. In both scenarios, the target is moving. Games back is a concept that confuses many people who follow sports religiously so showing an understanding of this concept gives you a simple way of flashing your sports expertise, even among sports fans!

On the first day of a season, Team A beats Team B. Team A’s record is now 1 win and 0 losses. Team B’s is 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B is behind Team A in number of wins and in games back. So far those are the same thing. On the second day of the season, Team A plays Team C and wins again. Team B doesn’t have a game. Now Team A’s record is 2 wins and 0 losses and Team B’s record is still 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B now has two fewer wins in the standings but they are not two games back of Team A. This is because Team B has played one fewer game and the games back metric tries to control for that. Games back controls for unplayed games by counting them as one half of a win. You may hear these unplayed games called games in hand, so just remember that while a game in hand may be worth two in the bush, it’s only worth half a game in of games back. Team B is said to be 1.5 games back from Team A.

As the season goes on, this metric becomes a little harder to calculate in our heads like we just did for Team B and Team A. Wikipedia has a simple calculation for games back and though I don’t exactly understand why it works, I believe it works. It’s Games Back = ((Team A’s wins – Team A’s losses) – (Team B’s wins – Team B’s losses))/2. In our scenario, that’s ((2-0)-(0-1)/2 which simplifies to 3/2 or 1.5 games back.

In addition to calculating how many games back Team B is from Team A, it’s also common to express games back relative to a position in the standings. Two common ones are games back (or behind or out of) first place or the last team that would qualify for the playoffs. In this case, the calculation is the same, it’s just done by comparing Team B to whatever team represents that place in the standings. If today Team A is in first place, Team B would be 1.5 games out of first place. If tomorrow Team C, D, or E[1] is in first place, the calculation would be done between their record and Team B’s record.

AL StandingsBefore we leave this topic, let’s look at some real standings as of today in Major League Baseball. The WCGB column stands for WildCard Games Back. The way baseball playoffs work is that the three division winners all make the playoffs automatically and then the next two teams with the best records make it as well. These two playoff spots for non-division winners are called Wildcards. The WCGB column is calculating the number of games back a team is from getting that second and last wildcard playoff spot.

Right now the Indians are in the last playoff spot so they are zero games back. They are the target. The Rays have played the same number of games as the Indians and have one more win and one fewer loss so they are said to be +1 games back. Don’t worry about how stupid that sounds, this means they are a game ahead. The Rangers have also played exactly the same number of games as the Indians. They have one fewer win and one more loss though, so they are 1 game behind the last playoff spot as represented currently by the Indians.

We have to go all the way down to the Mariners to find a team that is an uneven number of games back. If you add their wins and losses, you see that the Mariners have played 159 games compared to the Indians’ 158. That explains the .5 in the games back column. The Indians have 18 more wins than the Mariners but because they have a game in hand, they are given an extra .5 when calculating how far back the Mariners are compared to the Indians.

Data visualization guru Edward Tufte uses sports standings to show how much data can be packed into a simple table and remain understandable (even to dumb sports fans is the unspoken ellipses that I hear) and why making a chart for any fewer than a few hundred data points is usually not necessary. As a devotee of his, I’m happy you asked this question. Hopefully this post has made all those tables in the sports section a little easier to read!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. GO TEAM E!!!↵

Three Good Sports Links for the Long Weekend

Hi All and Happy Labor Day Weekend!

I know all of you are lying around wondering what you can possibly do with yourselves now that your primary hobby (I’m talking about wearing white pants, of course) is coming to an end. Here are three good sports related stories to fill the void with.

Amazing Sports Photography

This photo was taken by Lorenz Holder and was entered in the New Creativity section.

In their ongoing attempt to link ingesting caffeine, taurine, glucuronolactone, B-group vitamins, sucrose, and glucose with exciting adventure sports, Red Bull sponsors a tri-annual sports photography contest. Many of the photos are amazing and I enjoyed paging through them all. Voting is still open for the people’s choice award.

Name Dropping – Hip Hop and Basketball

Hip hop and basketball have always shared a special connection. They’re both forums that reward creativity and style within well defined boundaries. Rap is full of cultural references and basketball players often find themselves planted in a lyric. Usually this is just because the rapper admires the basketball player’s style or performance, but sometimes it’s as a form of coded speech. Bdon.org created a handy infographic that charts the number of mentions a basketball player gets in raps against the number of points he scored in that year. A couple of surprises to me were how few Allen Iverson references there were given that he is generally thought of as the player who brought hip-hop to the NBA and also how references to Scottie Pippen have accelerated in the bast few years despite his having retired years ago.

Thanks to Deadspin.com for finding this infographic.

A Sad Story of Loss and Love and Basketball

A year or so ago there was a story that popped up in the news that bewildered me. A former NBA player, Dan Roundfield, had drowned in the Caribbean where he had been on vacation with his wife and family. The news stories were all a little unclear about what exactly had happened but they all said that Roundfield had died saving his wife from drowning and they all portrayed the deceased as a remarkable man. My eyes perked up the other day when the New York Times returned to the story a year later. The story is sad, obviously, but like the best eulogies or obituaries it conveys the great joy of Dan Roundfield’s life as well.