Tag: basketball

What is traveling in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is traveling in basketball? Can you explain the traveling rule? I know it has something to do with a player walking instead of dribbling but I don’t quite understand how it works.

Thanks,
Traci

Dear Traci,

Like you said, traveling is a rule in basketball that dictates how a player can move with the ball. A traveling violation is called when a player moves in an improper way. When this happens, a ref blows his or her whistle and the ball is given to the team that had been defending. Beyond this, I have to admit that I’m probably about as unclear as you are. Traveling has officially flummoxed me! It’s a strange feeling. Usually, when I get a question, I have a pretty good idea of how to answer it. Other times, I have to dig into the internet and do some research before I can come up with an answer. Even with the hardest questions, it’s rare for me to be stumped, even after reading up on a subject. Traveling is just one of those semi-unfathomable mysteries in life, like the nature of black holes or why breakfast is so satisfying when eaten at non-traditional times. Still, your question deserves an answer, so I’ll do my best.

From an overly simplified vantage point, traveling is easy to understand. Imagine teaching a child to play basketball. The first thing you establish would probably be the goal of the game — to get the ball through the basket in a top-down direction. Great! The kid gets it, grabs the ball, runs down the court and tries to score. “No, no” you might say, “you can’t just run with the ball, it’s not like football.” Then you’d explain the second most obvious rule in basketball — that you have to bounce the ball on the floor while moving with it. Traveling is the name given to a violation of this second rule. In principle, it’s simple. In reality, it’s complicated. I think the best way to delve into the complications is in the form of a question and answer session.

Q: Does it matter how many steps you take between bounces while you’re dribbling?
A: No! As long as you are dribbling, you can pretty much do whatever you want — you can take giant tall dribbles with lots of steps between bounces or tiny small ones.

Q: Can you start dribbling, stop, and then start again?
A: No! Once a player starts dribbling with the ball, she has to keep dribbling to keep moving. If she stops, another player on either team (or the rim) has to touch the ball before she can start dribbling again.

Q: Do you have to start dribbling right away, once you get the ball?
A: No! If a player gets the ball and comes to a stop (or maybe he was already standing still) without dribbling, he can stand still with the ball without dribbling. He can even move around a little as long as one foot remains still on the ground. This foot is called the “pivot foot.”

Q: What’s the deal with squirming around on the ground? I’ve seen that sometimes called traveling.
A: You’re right! If a player is on the ground, she may not “gain an advantage” by sliding while holding onto the ball.

Q: Okay, got it. This doesn’t seem so complicated. So, how many steps can a player take without dribbling?
A: Ah. There’s the rub. I don’t really know. The traditional, basketball-folk story has been that only two steps were allowed. In recent years though, particularly in the NBA (all our discussion today has been about NBA rules, although NCAA rules are not so different) this has obviously not been the case. Some of this is due to a culture of leniency when it comes to how referees enforce the traveling rules. Perhaps the league instructed them to err on the side of allowing play to continue undisturbed unless the traveling violation were particularly offensive. That’s possible. But it’s also true that the rule seems to almost intentionally obfuscate the issue. Instead of simply talking about steps, the rule uses the word “counts.” For example, “A player who receives the ball while he is progressing or upon completion of a dribble, may use a two-count rhythm in coming to a stop, passing or shooting the ball.” It then goes on, in great and almost incomprehensible detail to try to define what counts as a “count.” Some of the sub-definitions refer to the number of steps a player can take, some don’t. It’s almost as if the NBA wanted to make the traveling rule so complicated that fans (and maybe even players) would simply have to take the referees word as the truth.

Q: Hmm. So when you watch a basketball game, you really have no idea when traveling is going to be called?
A: No — that’s the funny thing. I generally do know when traveling is and isn’t going to be called. It’s as if, over the hundreds of hours I’ve spent watching basketball, I’ve developed an instinct for traveling as defined by NBA refs collective judgement. I know it when I see it (most of the time) but I can’t properly explain it. This is frustrating to me because it goes against my theory that with proper explanation, non-sports fans would be able to understand and enjoy sports much more than they do today.

Q: So what do I do now? How can I learn more about traveling?
A: Well, I guess the best thing to do is to understand the basic principles, which I hope this blog post has helped with, and then understand that even the most die-hard basketball fans probably don’t actually understand much more than that. Sometimes just knowing that other people don’t know either is all you need to know. You know? Armed with that understanding, you should feel free to watch lots of basketball and build your own sense of what should and shouldn’t be a travel. There are also lots of YouTube compilations of basketball plays which people think should have been called travels but weren’t. Here’s one good one.

Thanks for the questions,
Ezra

March Madness Final Four Previews, April 4, 2015

I know, I know, it’s not even March anymore. How can it still be March Madness? Truth be told, aside from the very first day of this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament, it hasn’t been very mad at all. There have been relatively few major upsets and this is reflected in today’s two games between the last four teams remaining. Of the four teams remaining, three are 1 seeds, which means the committee that selected teams for the tournament and ranked them before the tournament began accurately predicted three of the four best teams. The only surprise, 7 seed Michigan State, is only kind of a surprise. Although they weren’t predicted to do this well this year, their coach and program has an incredibly strong recent history of success. For some reason beyond my comprehension, these games — as exciting and high profile as they are

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #7 Michigan State Spartans vs. #1 Duke Blue Devils, 6:09 p.m. ET on TBS.

This game is definitely the undercard or less anticipated game of the two. This is mostly because it doesn’t feature Kentucky, the team that virtually every narrative in this tournament is focused on. Putting narratives aside for a minute though, this is a very attractive basketball game. Duke has the most polished offensive big man in the game this year, a player named Jahlil Okafor who is likely to be the first overall draft pick in the NBA this coming year. Watch for him — he’s the enormous dude who wears number 15 – when he gets the ball near the basket. He’s surprisingly graceful for someone who is 6’10” and 270 lbs at age 19. One of the most effective motivations for a sports team to over-achieve seems to be the sense that the world did or does not believe they can succeed. Michigan State has gleefully taken up that mantle and, because they were given a relatively poor 7 seed for this tournament, it fits to a degree. Michigan’s coach, Tom Izzo, is well-known for being able to whip together some tactics that will work to counter-act whatever the opposing team does best. If Michigan State has a chance in this game, it’s because coach Izzo will be able to outsmart Duke’s coach. The problem with that is that Duke’s coach, Mike Krzyzewski, is the most well-respected coach in college basketball. Duke has the clear edge in this game but not by enough to make it worth skipping.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #1 Wisconsin Badgers vs. #1 Kentucky Wildcats, 8:49 p.m. ET on TBS.

All roads lead to Kentucky in this tournament. They are two wins (this game and the finals on Monday) away from completing the first undefeated season for a men’s college basketball team since 1976. (The University of Connecticut women’s basketball team has had four undefeated seasons since then including a streak of 90 straight games which included two complete undefeated seasons and championships in 2008/9 and 2009/10.) The primary fascination for this tournament revolves around whether or not Kentucky will be able to complete the undefeated season and win the championship. To do that, they’ll need to beat a Wisconsin team that’s had it out for them since Kentucky eliminated them from March Madness last year. That’s right — these two teams played last year in the Final Four as well. In that game, Kentucky beat Wisconsin 74-73 on a last second three-point shot. By most accounts, these two teams are both better this year than they were last year, so this should be a heck of a game. I’m looking forward to it!

Why runs in basketball are a lie

During virtually every basketball game you watch, men’s or women’s, college or professional, at some point a little graphic seems to float up onto the screen and an announcer will note its content to reinforce it’s message. “The UC-Irvine Anteaters are on a 9-2 run in the last three minutes and 26 seconds,” the announcer will say. What this means is that in the last X time Team A has scored Y points while Team B has scored Z points and Z is always significantly less than Y. This is supposed to be surprising and impressive. “Wow” the viewer is meant to think, “Team A is really beating up on Team B in a significant way. Scoring Y points and only allowing Z points must mean that Team A is way better than Team B.” This conclusion is certainly true sometimes but not nearly as often as you’re meant to think.

I have a book on my shelves called How to Lie with Statistics. It’s a classic and one of its lessons applies to this situation. A great way to lie about statistics, and one that must be used every time one of these runs statistics pops up in a basketball game is selection bias. Selection bias is a great way of lying with statistics. Wikipedia defines it as:

Selection bias refers to the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis such that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.

In this case, the way that the selection is biased is in its starting point. It’s end point is always the current moment of the basketball game. That’s an essential element of the con — “In the last X minutes…” The starting point is not random though, it’s carefully chosen. I guarantee that the second before the television station chooses to start the period, Team B (the one that seems to be losing terribly) scored a basket. Otherwise, why not extend the period further back? The longer it is, the more impressive it is.

If we assume that Team B scored right before the run started, than every time we see or hear about a run, we should add two (or three) points to Team B’s score. A 9-2 run becomes a 9-4 (or 5) run in our heads. A 7-0 run would more fairly be seen as a 7-2 (or 3) run. The reason why I say to add two or three points is the source of another form of trickery. Single points can be scored in basketball but by far the more common forms of scoring involve either two or three points being scored at once. That means a 9-2 run probably only involves four scores on the part of the team with 9 and one from the team with 2. (There’s lots of other ways this could happen, but this is the most likely. A 4-1 run seems less unlikely and therefore significant than 9-2. Basketball’s scoring system makes runs seem more crazy than they actually are.

The other piece of selection bias is this: the television station only points out a run when it happens. I know, that sounds utterly stupid, but it’s true. We don’t notice when the last 11 points have been split relatively evenly between two teams because no one points out that this has just happened.

I suspect that even if basketball were totally random — by which I mean that you could replace the basketball game in this scenario with someone flipping a coin a couple hundred times and marking down every Heads as a score for Team A and every Tails as a score for Team B — that you would expect to see runs worth noting by a commentator in almost every game. After all, a basketball game has around 140 possessions in college and around 190 in the NBA. If you think of it as 140 or 190 coin flips in a row, doesn’t it seem pretty likely that we’d see at least one run of four or five or six or even seven Heads with only one or two Tails mixed in?

I’m quite sure that there’s a mathematician out there who can help with the statistics in our coin flipping game. How likely are what types of runs in a game of 140-190 coin flips? If we can find that mathematician and pair her with a basketball statistics junkie who can find out what runs show up how often in real games, then we’ll be able to figure out whether the runs in basketball are actually notable or simply sleight of hand used by television producers to keep us glued to our seats. My money is on the magic trick.

— — —

Note 1: I use this trick all the time on this blog. I know it’s deceptive, but it is how most sports fans think about games — “this is an important game for my team because they’ve lost six of the last seven (of 82 or 162) regular season games. They need to break the streak!” I even think about games that way when it’s my favorite team involved. Sports fandom is not always or even often rational.

Note 2: The simple way to fix this would be to think about scoring in terms of arbitrary splits — what has the score differential been in the last two minutes or four minutes? This gets rid of one form of selection bias — the starting point — but it would still be vulnerable to the other kind of selection bias where commentator only note the split when it seems unusual.

Sports Lives, March 2015

Obituaries are a wonderful source of amazing stories about people you wish you had known more about when they were alive. That’s true in sports as in so many aspects of life. This week, I read three amazing pieces about recently departed sports figures.

The Hit

by Stefan Fatsis for Slate

In today’s climate of concern about brain injuries in football, it’s hard to remember that football’s culture was exactly the opposite for many years. Football glorified its violence for decades and in doing so, it made heroes out of players who injured another player in a particularly epic way. Chuck Bednarik became one of those heroes after he hit Frank Gifford in 1960. Gifford was injured so badly on the play that he missed the rest of that season and all of the next. Bednarik was glorified. This one incident became Bednarik’s main claim to fame and was (quite literally as we found out last week) in the first paragraph of his obituary. The hit unquestionably caused a terrible injury, but for the most part, the idea that it was a brutal hit remained unquestioned until Steven Fatsis researched it and wrote about it this week. What he found may surprise you.

So was it a blindside tackle to the chest? A right shoulder under the chin? Or a forearm to the chest? Was Bednarik moving at full speed? Did the blow itself knock Gifford out? Was it one of the hardest hits ever?

Let me respond to those questions: no, no, no, no, no, and no.

Patrick McDarby, Sport Logo Designer, Is Dead at 57

by Margalit Fox for The New York Times

Sports logos are so ingrained into the fabric of the teams that they represent that they’re almost invisible. You can’t think about the Toronto Maple Leafs without the leaf or the Oakland Raiders without their eye-patch festooned pirate. If we rarely think about the logos themselves, we almost never think about the people who design them. Patrick McDarby was one of those people.

Over the years, Mr. McDarby designed more than 200 logos. For each, he received a flat fee, no royalties and, by the nature of his craft, little public recognition…

The design of sports logos entails singular challenges. In a small space, and only two dimensions, the artist must convey a sense of movement, excitement and power. The design must be simple enough to be immediately interpretable but evocative enough to be enduringly memorable. Ideally, it should distill the very essence of the thing it represents.

Dean Smith requested $200 be sent to each of his former players in will

in Sports Illustrated’s Extra Mustard column

When legendary North Carolina basketball coach, Dean Smith, died last month, the sports world poured out an unbelievable slew of tributes to him. He was, by all accounts, a good person as well as a great coach. He was an early leader in integrating college basketball in his area. One of the things that made him special was the tight connection he developed with his players, which continued throughout his and their lives. This week we found out that it actually continued a little bit past Dean Smith’s life.

In the letter Smith’s former players received from Miller McNeish & Breedlove, PA, it was revealed that Smith requested each of his former players be sent a $200 check with the message, “enjoy a dinner out compliments of Coach Dean Smith.” The enclosed checks also included the notation, “Dinner out.”

March Madness Previews, March 29, 2015

We’re down to these four teams fighting for two spots in next Saturday’s Final Four games. Last night, Kentucky and Wisconsin, two 1 seeds, won their games and qualified to play each other in the Final Four. Today we’ll see which two teams will play each other next Saturday for the right to play either Kentucky or Wisconsin in the championship game.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #7 Michigan State Spartans vs. #4 Louisville Cardinals, 2:20 p.m. ET on CBS.

Hey! This is our one chance — actually our one certainty — to get a team into the Final Four that wasn’t a 1 seed and therefore expected to make the Final Four. Usually, the team that unexpectedly makes it into the last four is the delight of the tournament but this is… a little different. It’s hard to think of either Michigan State or Louisville as a surprise underdog considering they’ve combined to make 11 Final Fours since 2000. That’s a sustained record of excellence unsurpassed by many programs. So, while it’s novel to see a 7 and a 4 seed play in the Elite Eight, it’s perfectly conventional to see these two teams.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #2 Gonzaga Bulldogs vs. #1 Duke Blue Devils, 5:05 p.m. ET on CBS.

You can view this game as a battle of old vs. new, traditional vs. modern. Duke is the traditional team — they’ve been a basketball powerhouse in one of the toughest conferences in the country for well over thirty years now. They’re built a little like an old-school team. Their star player is a big man, Jahlil Okafor, who plays close to the basket. Gonzaga is the future of basketball. They’re a “mid-major” team which means they’re the best team in a conference that has not traditionally produced NCAA Champions. Their best player is Kyle Wiltjer, a 6’10” forward who uses his hight primarily to shoot over people from distance as opposed to banging bodies down low like Okafor. In this battle of past vs. future, we’ll see who owns the present.

March Madness Previews, March 28, 2015

And then there were eight; eight teams left in March Madness, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championships. There haven’t been many surprises in this year’s tournament so far, which itself, I guess could be considered a surprise. If every favorite had won, all the way through the tournament, tonight’s games would only differ by a single team. By the rankings, one would expect #2 Kansas to be playing Kentucky instead of #3 Notre Dame. Not exactly an upset of mammoth proportions. The downside of not having any giant surprises is that there aren’t attractive underdogs to root for. The upside is that the games are likely to be extremely close contests — and the best play that college basketball can provide for our enjoyment. Here is a little background about each game.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #2 Arizona Wildcats vs. #1 Wisconsin Badgers, 6:09 p.m. ET on TBS.

Many people believe that these are the two teams most equipped to truly have a chance at beating the still undefeated Kentucky Wildcats. To some extent then, it’s a shame that they play each other before meeting Kentucky. It means that only one will get a shot at the presumptive champs. On the other hand, the winner of this game will play the winner of the next game, and assuming that is Kentucky, at least it means that one of them are guaranteed to play Kentucky. This game itself could be one of the best in the tournament. Both teams are game tested, having survived close games in the previous round, and both have deep casts of excellent basketball players.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish vs. #1 Kentucky Wildcats, 8:49 p.m. ET on TBS.

We’re all assuming Kentucky will win this game. After doubling their opponent in the last round (poor West Virginia lost 78-39!) Kentucky looks completely unbeatable. That said, the only thing they aren’t that good at (shooting three-point shots), Notre Dame is devilishly competent in. If Notre Dame gets off to the kind of fast start that they have in other games this year, when every shot they take seems to be just falling into the basket, then we could be in for a tight game.

March Madness Previews, March 27, 2015

Tonight is the second night of the Sweet Sixteen. The Sweet Sixteen is where the NCAA Tournament transitions from strictly numbered rounds (“the round of 64/32” or “the first/second/third round”) to rounds with catchy nicknames. The Sweet Sixteen reduces the field from 16 teams to 8, the Elite Eight winnows it down from eight to four, those four are referred to as the Final Four, and the two teams that win those games go on to play each other in the Championship game. The four games on tonight represent half of the Sweet Sixteen. Let’s run through these games and see what they mean.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #11 UCLA Bruins vs. #2 Gonzaga Bulldogs, 7:15 p.m. ET on CBS.

With two 1 seeds, a 2 seed, and a 3 seed advancing in yesterday’s games, the 11th seeded UCLA Bruins seem like they’d be the tournament’s last hope for the type of unlikely Cinderella story that everyone loves. The problem is, as I’ve written before, that UCLA is an overdog disguised as an underdog. UCLA men’s basketball has had too much success to ever really engender the kind of “it could be anyone” love that lower seeded teams sometimes do during March Madness. Gonzaga, on the other hand, is what happens when Cinderella wins and wins and wins until she’s not really an underdog anymore either.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #8 North Carolina State Wolfpack vs. #4 Louisville Cardinals, 7:37 p.m. ET on TBS.

Although ranked higher than UCLA, North Carolina State has more underdog cred. They’re certainly an afterthought in their own state, behind giants North Carolina and Duke. After beating number one seed, Villanova, last week, they’ll be ready to take on the confrontational but not insanely talented Louisville team.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #5 Utah Runnin’ Utes vs. #1 Duke Blue Devils, 9:45 p.m. ET on CBS.

One of the ways I suggested filling out your March Madness bracket before the tournament started was by looking at other people’s rankings, often done with the collaboration (or at least assistance) of a computer. Most of these rankings absolutely loved the Utah team — enough so that CBS wrote of this game that the rankings suggest it will be a very even game. That said, it will still feel like a triumphant upset if Utah can beat Duke. Duke is not as deep in talented players as Kentucky but they’re best five players are the closest thing out there to Kentucky’s.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #7 Michigan State Spartans vs. #3 Oklahoma Sooners, 10:07 p.m. ET on TBS.

Michigan State has gotten at least this far in the NCAA Tournament is six of the last seven years. They’re institutionally good! Vegas actually has Michigan State as a very slight favorite (less than two points) to beak Oklahoma. This game and the Utah Duke game seem like the best of the bunch tonight, so if you need to approach the evening strategically (either to carve out time for basketball or from basketball) there’s a strong case to be made to do something else early on in the night and switch your attention to basketball starting around 9:45. Good luck!

March Madness Previews, March 26, 2015

Tonight is the first night of the Sweet Sixteen. The Sweet Sixteen is where the NCAA Tournament transitions from strictly numbered rounds (“the round of 64/32” or “the first/second/third round”) to rounds with catchy nicknames. The Sweet Sixteen reduces the field from 16 teams to 8, the Elite Eight winnows it down from eight to four, those four are referred to as the Final Four, and the two teams that win those games go on to play each other in the Championship game. The four games on tonight represent half of the Sweet Sixteen. The other four games will be tomorrow. For now, let’s run through these games and see what they mean.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #7 Wichita State Shockers vs. #3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish, 7:15 p.m. ET on CBS.

When a 7 seed beats a 2 seed, like Wichita State did to Kansas in the last round, the standard narrative would be to view them as a surprise, Cindarella-like team. It’s hard to view Wichita State that way though because of their recent history of success. Two years ago they went to the Final Four and last year they were a 1 seed that lost only to the eventual runners-up, Kentucky. Wichita State is not an underdog but they’re also not unworthy of support. As a member of the Missouri Valley Conference, they still represent college basketball’s sympathetic second tier in a way that Notre Dame never could. Unless you’re a Notre Dame fan, I suggest throwing your support behind the Shockers.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #4 North Carolina Tarheels vs. #1 Wisconsin Badgers, 7:47 p.m. ET on TBS.

Wisconsin became my (and lots of other people’s) favorite team in the tournament this year when the team’s fascination with short-hand became public last week. That’s right, after their win last weekend, what seems like a majority of their press conference was focused on the team’s interest in the stenographer who was transcribing it. Nigel Hayes, a 6’8″ power forward, even sprinkled his answers with complicated and unexpected vocabulary words just to make things more interesting for her:

That’s enough for me — I’m now rooting for the Badgers to make it all the way to the Championship game.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #5 West Virginia Mountaineers vs. #1 Kentucky Wildcats, 9:45 p.m. ET on CBS.

Everything in the tournament, even the stenography obsession, is just a side-show to the ongoing saga of the Kentucky Wildcats. They’re undefeated and looking to become the first team to go through the entire season and win the championship without losing a game since the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers. There are only a few teams out there who are talented enough to challenge the Wildcats. The West Virginia Mountaineers are not one of those teams but they may be crazy enough to think they are and tough enough to have a shot despite their difference in talent.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #6 Xavier Musketeers vs. #2 Arizona Wildcats, 10:17 p.m. ET on TBS.

Arizona is one of the few teams with talent enough to match up against Kentucky. That should give them more than enough class to get past the Xavier Musketeers tonight. The best character on either of the teams is a senior center on Xavier named Matt Stainbrook who gave up his scholarship to his little brother, Tim, who is also on the team. The elder Stainbrook has been making some extra cash in his free time as the world’s largest (I’m guessing) Uber driver.

How March Madness and the NFL have switched places

Once upon a time — not so long ago — sports fans watched professional football and college basketball on television. That may not sound so different from today, but before the internet took over the world the way we were presented with these two sports was just a little bit different.

In the past, if you wanted to watch March Madness, you tuned your television to CBS. There it would stay, from around noon on the first Thursday of the NCAA Tournament until whenever the nets got cut down in celebration… or you ran out of beer… or had to eat. There was no channel hopping. All the games were on CBS, even if not all the games were televised since many of them overlap in time. The people who ran CBS would pick what they thought the best game would be and go with that. As the day went on, they reserved the right to switch from one game to another if the other was more exciting. As games neared their end, sometimes simultaneously, this resulted in a frantic back-and-forth telecast, that at its best was more exciting than watching a single game. Certainly part of what made March Madness so great — and specifically the first round of March Madness with its 32 games in 48 hours so great — was its overlapping, buzzer-beater-every-fifteen-minutes, relentless nature.

If you wanted to watch professional football, you had lots of options each Sunday during the fall, but they were heavily constrained by where you lived. Over the years, games were televised on every major broadcast network, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, plus cable channels like TNT and ESPN. Games were on at 1 p.m. ET and 4:30 p.m. ET every Sunday — usually about seven games at the earlier time and three or four in the later time-slot. The thing was, you only got access to one or sometimes two games at a time. No matter how bad the local team (and if you didn’t have a local team, you were assigned one) was, when they played that was the only game you could watch. When the local team was idle, the networks decided what game you had access to based on what they thought of the game and your geography.

Then, in 2009, everything changed for football viewers. The NFL launched a new cable channel called the NFL RedZone. From 1 p.m. ET to whenever the last 4:30 p.m. ET game ended, usually around 7:30 or 8 p.m. ET, the RedZone would show football, all the football, and nothing but the football. With one brilliant studio host, the RedZone captivated its audience, by steering them from game to game based on how exciting the game was; making sure they saw every score and almost every meaningful play. Watching the RedZone was an amazing experience and despite its ability to leave your brain spinning and your eyes aching, it was and still is incredibly popular. It changed the way people watch football. No more were they trapped watching a boring local game — no more were they even trapped watching a single game. The RedZone captured the exhilaration of those few frantic minutes of buzzer beaters in a March Madness broadcast and translated it to football viewers every Sunday.

Meanwhile, things were also changing in the world of college basketball. One of the tricky elements of March Madness for sports fans had always been how to watch the first round, given that much of it happened between noon and the end of work on a Thursday and Friday. In many offices, this meant widespread breakouts of bronchitis or ludicrously long lunch meetings. At some point though, some brilliant person at CBS realized that what most people have at work was not a television but a computer. CBS started streaming the games over the internet. Aside from the fact that early on, most places didn’t have the bandwidth to handle the sudden influx of people trying to stream video, the shift to internet created one vital difference in how people consumed March Madness: the curated channel experience that jumped the viewer from game to game was gone. In its place was a simple interface for you to choose which game you wanted to watch. Watching a blow-out? Want to check in on the other game? It was only a click (and usually the required viewing of an advertisement) away.

Within a couple years of this innovation, CBS made a similar shift in its television coverage. In 2010, CBS was forced to renegotiate their agreement with the NCAA to cover March Madness and as part of that negotiation, they agreed to share the rights with Turner Broadcasting System. Instead of using one channel to cover multiple games, they now used multiple channels simultaneously. When games overlapped, they were simply televised on different channels: CBS and TNT, TBS, or TruTV. The television experience now mimicked the online experience. The games were all available but you had to manage your experience by flipping from one game to another yourself.

These parallel evolutions in how professional football and the NCAA Basketball Tournament are presented to viewers each have their benefits and their disadvantages. Critics of the RedZone channel would say that the pace and narrative consistency of watching one football game at a time has been lost; that people no longer care about what team wins, just about individual plays and players. Proponents of the RedZone may point out that old-fashioned game-based television is still as available as it ever was and that the RedZone allows people to watch teams they could never (or less frequently) have seen in the past. Proponents of the multi-channel approach to March Madness will argue for its obvious superiority by saying that it has made every minute of every game available to viewers who otherwise would not have had a say in what they were watching; that it has democratized the viewing of college basketball. Critics of the multi-channel reality may argue that availability without curation simply cannot create the gasp-inducing thrill of the old way; that having to manage your own viewing experience in this way is like going to a restaurant and being forced to choose the ingredients for your dish instead of relying on the expertise of a chef.

What all sides should be able to agree on is that it’s curious how technology and time have popularized a curated experience in football while simultaneously eradicating a similar experience in college basketball. The moral of the story is that progress rarely moves in a straight line but usually twists and turns and doubles back on itself. What’s old is new and what’s new is old more frequently than not.

The End… for now.

What happened to Jeremy Lin?

Dear Sports Fan,

What happened to our incredible Jeremy Lin? What is he up to these days?

Thanks,
Jeehae

Dear Jeehae,

Jeremy Lin is still chugging along, playing basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA), currently with the Los Angeles Lakers. He’s a solid NBA player but has never regained the spectacular play that made him a cultural phenomenon in 2012 when he played with the New York Knicks. Those crazy days of stardom which came to be known as “Linsanity” are now just a memory to be treasured or deconstructed.

For those of us who don’t remember or who never really knew what Linsanity was all about, here’s a short recap. At the start of 2012, Jeremy Lin was one of the dozens of people hovering around the fringes of NBA teams, good enough to have been signed by a team but not quite good enough to be a regular member of that team. Lin played his college basketball at Harvard where he played for four years and grew as a player each year. In his senior season, Lin was voted unanimously to the All-Ivy League First Team and received several other college honors as well. All-Ivy League First team is great, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into having a professional career. The Ivy League is a much weaker conference than the conferences most prospective NBA players play in. Indeed, Lin was not drafted by any of the 30 teams in the 2010 NBA draft but, after a decent showing in the NBA’s summer league, he was signed to a two-year contract by the Golden State Warriors. This seemed like a great fin. The Warriors were Lin’s favorite team, having grown up nearby, and as the first Chinese or Taiwanese-American player in the NBA, Lin was disproportionately popular for an unheralded rookie, especially among the Warriors already large Asian-American fan base. After one year with the Warriors, Lin was waived or released from the team. This isn’t unusual for a player of his stature in the league, and Lin wouldn’t have to wait long for a second and third chance. The first team to pick him up was the Houston Rockets but Lin could not break through the three more established players that team already had at his position. The Rockets cut him as well. After several weeks without a team, the New York Knicks claimed Lin.

Even though the New York Knicks signed Lin, he was no sure thing to succeed there, or even to play. He needed a little bit of luck just to get onto the court. He found that luck in January, after a particularly bad game from the Knicks starters prompted then Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni to turn to Lin in desperation (and perhaps to instill some competitive fear in the rest of the team.) Lin took off. For a couple weeks, it seemed like he could do no wrong on the basketball court. He set records for performance in his first handful of starts. He averaged over 20 points and seven assists in his first five games and made a couple memorable buzzer beaters. Lin got famous in a hurry. After the season was over, the Knicks were expected to give a long term contract to their new most popular player. It wasn’t meant to be. Lin was a restricted free agent, which means other teams were able to make contract offers to him, but the Knicks could match their offers and keep Lin if they wanted. The Houston Rockets, perhaps feeling regret over having had Lin on their team and then releasing him, made Lin an offer he couldn’t refuse and the Knicks couldn’t match. All of a sudden, Lin was a Rocket and Linsanity in New York was just a memory.

Since then, the Knicks have never recaptured the city or the world’s attention the way they had it when Lin was a thing, nor have they been very successful as a basketball team. Lin too has never been as good as he was in those first days in New York. He struggled for two seasons in Houston before being traded to Los Angeles in a move that was more about Houston releasing themselves from the financial obligation of paying him than it was about basketball. In Los Angeles this year, Lin has been a part of one of the worst teams in the league. Still, he’s in the NBA and shows no signs of leaving, which is actually more of an achievement than you might think. The NBA is an amazingly shallow league — there simply aren’t that many jobs for basketball players and each year between 30 and 60 new, young, players come out of college or Europe to compete for jobs. Lin should be proud of simply staying in the league.

How should we evaluate Linsanity with the benefit of hindsight? It was truly a remarkable performance from a relatively unknown player but the phenomenon of Linsanity was also aided by two important factors: Lin’s unique backstory as the first Asian-American NBA player and the fact that he was playing for the New York Knicks, a marquee franchise because of its history and location. Streaks of impressive play by newcomers do happen. Any player who is skilled enough to make the NBA is skilled enough to put together a string of seemingly unlikely statistical performances but they don’t always become cultural stars. A good comparison is the case of Hasaan Whiteside. Whiteside was almost a complete unknown before this year. He had played college basketball at Marshall University in West Virginia and, unlike Lin, was actually drafted by an NBA team. Before long though, he was out of the league and played in the NBA Development League, Lebanon, and China, before being welcomed back into the NBA by the Miami Heat. When he broke into their lineup this January, he quickly became a basketball revelation of similar proportions to Lin. Whiteside is an athletic seven-foot tall player who puts up remarkable scoring, rebounding, and blocking statistics. As famous as he rapidly became in basketball circles, he never broke out of the sports section and onto the news pages. Whiteside is not notable from a personal interest or historical standpoint and Miami, without LeBron James to make them notorious, is not as interesting a team as the New York Knicks are (even when they’re terrible.)

Linsanity was a special time and Lin is a good NBA player but he’ll probably never be as good again as he was in his first games with the Knicks.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer