Tag: language

What does it mean to roll with the punches?

Dear Sports Fan,

You know the expression, “roll with the punches?” It means to be adaptable to whatever comes at you in life. Is that a sports phrase? What does it mean to roll with the punches in a sports context?

Thanks,
Sara

Dear Sara,

The phrase “roll with the punches” comes from boxing, where athletes are literally in the business of punching and getting punched. Although many people think of boxing as the ultimate aggressive sport, defense is as important or perhaps even more important than offense. If a boxer can develop techniques to defend themselves from being hit or being hit hard by their opponent, they are well on their way to winning the fight. Rolling with the punches is one defensive option in boxing. What I love about how the expression has moved from its sports context into general use is how precisely the meanings line up with one another. The parallels are almost poetic once you see them. Here’s how rolling with the punches works in boxing.

Getting hit is inevitable in boxing. Oh, sure, boxers are taught to protect themselves with their hands, so punches land harmlessly on padded gloves instead of chins, noses, or stomachs. And yes, dodging a punch is a great idea too. But eventually, every boxer is going to get hit right in the head. This is when the smart boxer rolls with the punch. As they see or feel the punch coming, they move their head or body so that it’s moving the same direction as the punch. If a punch is coming at their head from their left, they move their head backwards and to the right. Watch Mohamed Ali demonstrate with two classic rolls:

This allows the body to arrange itself into an alignment that’s used to moving and proper for moving in the direction the punch will inevitably send it. This protects the boxer from the most damaging element of being hit – the sudden rotational force applied to the brain. This rotational force is what generally knocks a boxer out and causes the worst brain damage. If you watch fights, it’s usually the punch that a boxer doesn’t see and therefore can’t prepare for that knocks him or her out. The head snaps backwards or sideways and you know the fight is over.

Rolling the spot that’s going to get hit with the expected force of the punch protects a boxer from being surprised in this way. If you don’t believe me, take your hands and put them out and up in front of you with your elbows bent and your palms faced out. Get a friend to punch your hands a few times. Experiment with trying to keep your arms rigid (it hurts, right) and then letting your arms go loose and your hands give way as your friend punches them. It hurts a lot less, right?

The beautiful part of this is that in boxing, as in life, every one is going to get hit. If you can find a way to prepare yourself, not with fear or rigid resistance, but with calm acceptance, you can learn to live through most of what the world has to throw at you.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra

 

What does it mean to be a two possession game?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching a playoff basketball game last night and I heard the announcers talking about the game becoming a “two possession” game if someone made a free throw. It was clearly important but I’m not sure what it means. Is it about how much time is left? Or the score? What does it mean to be a two possession game? And why is it important?

Thanks,
Maria

Dear Maria,

A two possession game is a game in which one team is winning by enough points that the team that is trailing cannot catch up with a single score. The term is usually used in basketball and football, two games where scoring can be done in different increments. The number of possessions needed to tie the game is a simple mathematical equation based on how scoring works in each sport.

In football, the highest number of points that a team can score at a time is eight which they could achieve by scoring a touchdown followed by a two point conversion. A football game is said to be a “one possession” game if the team leading is leading by eight or fewer points. In basketball, the most points a team can score in one trip down the court is actually four points (a player is fouled while shooting a three point shot but still makes the basket; they are given the three points and get one chance at the free throw line to add a single point to their total) but this is so rare and so easy to prevent (just don’t foul a player taking a three point shot) that it’s generally discarded from the conversation. Instead, in basketball, a single possession game is generally thought of as one in which the team trailing is losing by three points or fewer. If you want more information (and a handy chart) on how scoring works across different sports, check out our post on the topic here. A two possession game in basketball is one in which a team is trailing by three to six points. Down by seven points? That’s a three possession game. 10, 11, or 12 would be a four possession game. Football follows the same pattern by eights. A zero to eight point deficit is a one possession game, nine to 16 is a two possession game, 17-24 is a three possession game, and so on.

The importance of whether a game is a one, two, or three possession game is tactical. While you were wrong in thinking that the term was based on the amount of time left, you were on to something. People usually talk about how many possessions apart the teams are only close to the end of the game, and end of game tactics are very much about the combination of score and time. A trailing team’s players, coaches, and fans are constantly doing a mental calculation: “how far behind are we and how much time do we have left to catch up?” One very useful short-hand to that mental math is to express both sides of the equation in terms of possessions — “how many possessions do we need to tie the game and how many possessions might there be time for?”

The end of basketball games is often defined by one team intentionally fouling the other. This topic is worth a blog post of its own, but the short story for why they do this is that a foul stops the clock. While fouling will give the other team an easy opportunity to get up to two points by successfully shooting free throws, it also extends the game by creating time for more possessions with the ball, during which the trailing team could score two or three points. What you probably saw was a player from the team that had the lead shooting a free throw that was intentionally given up by the trailing team. If that player had missed, the trailing team could have taken the ball and tied the game on that possession, whit a single shot. If the player made the free throw, it would have pushed the difference between the teams from three to four points, and meant that the trailing team would have needed to get the ball, score, and then either stop the other team from scoring or intentionally foul again, before having a chance to tie the game. The difference between a one possession game and a two possession game is a big deal.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

 

What does it mean for football to get a hot stove?

Every avocation has its own language and sports is no different. There’s a particular language that sports fans become conversant with and fluent in over the course of years. Like all languages, it’s difficult for an outsider to understand. This is a shame because there’s no reason for sports to be an exclusive society. Twitter, with its 140-character limit only magnifies the difficulty for casual fans or non-fans to understand what someone is saying about sports. There’s no room, even for the most open and thoughtful sports fan, to explain all the terms they’re using or the implications of what they’re saying. Today, I’m going to take one tweet from Wall Street Journal writer Kevin Clark and unpack it.

Let’s start with the what is probably the most immediately confusing phrase in this tweet: “hot stove.” What does a kitchen appliance have to do with sports? Hot stove is a phrased used to refer to the movement of players from team to team during a time when a sports league is not actively playing games and the rampant and excited speculation among fans that potential or real player movement creates. According to Wikipedia, this term “dates from nineteenth-century small town America when, during the winter, people ‘gathered at the general store/post office, sat around an iron pot-bellied stove, and discussed the passing parade. Baseball, along with weather, politics, the police blotter and the churches, belonged in that company’.” Players can move from one team to another by signing a contract with a new team when they are at the end of a contract and are therefore free agents or by being traded to another team while under contract.

Now that you know what a hot stove is, the next step is to understand why football hasn’t traditionally had one. There are a couple reasons for this. One is specialization. Football is the most highly specialized sport. Players can not only just play one of the dozen or so positions on the field but they usually are best in a particular offensive or defensive scheme. As opposed to basketball, hockey, or certainly baseball, transitioning from one team’s system to another is way more painful in football. There are lots of examples of good players moving from one team to another and never regaining the success in a new system that they had in their first. Another reason is power. The NFL is the most lopsided of the major American sports leagues when it comes to the power dynamic between players and teams. NFL teams can arbitrarily cut all but the best players and are usually able to get their way in contract negotiations. As a result, NFL players have traditionally had less power than in other leagues to ask for or force their team to trade them. The last reason is the salary cap. Unlike in the National Basketball League, where player contracts are all guaranteed and trades are often made for financial reasons, in the NFL, teams have the opportunity to cut their players if they don’t want to deal with counting their salaries towards the team’s cap.[1]

The NFL’s free agency period began yesterday and with it came an unprecedented slew of player signings and meaningful trades. The Philadelphia Eagles have led the way by trading a star running back to Buffalo for a young linebacker and a draft pick and then following that up by swapping quarterbacks and draft picks with the St. Louis Rams. Right behind them in terms of timing and significance were the Seattle Seahawks who acquired the outstanding tight end, Jimmy Graham from the New Orleans Saints. The Miami Dolphins signed controversial but effective defensive lineman Ndamukong Suh to a massive free agent contract and the New York Jets traded for wide receiver Brandon Marshall and signed free agent cornerback, Darrelle Revis. These moves came in quick succession and their perceived importance brought football writers and fans everywhere to their computers in droves where they registered their thoughts, complaints, and excitement.

The last thing to unpack in this tweet is Clark’s suggestion that other sports leagues “should shut down” if the NFL’s player movement becomes exciting and plentiful. This is likely a somewhat hyperbolic statement but there’s some truth to it. The NFL is already by far the most popular sport in the country and when it is in season, it’s hard for other sports to get attention from sports fans. Luckily for them, the NFL only plays from September to February. Beyond those times, only the NFL draft in late-April/early-May generates enough excitement among football fans to draw attention away from other sports. If there were more player movement between teams, like there was yesterday, it would extend the period of NFL obsession even further and that would damage the ability of other sports to have their time in the spotlight.

Twitter is a powerful platform for facilitating communication but it does sometimes make hard-to-understand comments impossible. If you see a sports tweet you don’t understand, send it to dearsportsfan@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to explain it.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Note that this is a gross simplification. Salary cap rules are bewilderingly complicated. It’s a simplification but it’s directionally correct.↵

What is a nutmeg in soccer?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a nutmeg in soccer? And why does it have such a crazy name?

-Naomi

Dear Naomi,

Nutmeg is a colorful term used in soccer that refers to when one player directs the ball intentionally between the legs of another player. It’s similar to the ice hockey term, “five hole” which we wrote about earlier this week but the two are not interchangeable. Whether it’s a shot that goes between the goalie’s legs on its way into the net, a pass to a teammate that goes between a defenders legs, or if a player dribbles literally right through another player and keeps control of the ball, getting nutmegged is one of the most humiliating moments in soccer. Soccer is a very territorial sport. I often think of soccer teams as being made of a semi-viscous material that stretches between nodes centered on each player. To score in soccer, you need to find a point between players where the material is thin enough to be punctured. As an attacking team gets closer and closer to a defender, the material gets thicker and harder to break through. Going directly through a player is usually too difficult to even be worth attempting. A nutmeg is the ultimate breakdown of this rule. A defender who gets nutmegged has failed his or her team in the most basic way.

The derivation of the term nutmeg is a mystery with several plausible solutions. The Wikipedia entry on the topic and a 2005 article from The Guardian list the same three possibilities:

  • That it comes from the slang use of the word “nuts” to mean testicles. If the soccer players are male, then a nutmeg will involve the ball traveling directly under the nutmegged players nuts. It’s also plausible to think of it as a term of admiration referring to the brazenness of the player making the attempt.
  • The second possible derivation is that it stems from English rhyming slang that replaced the word “leg” with “nutmeg.” In this case, nutmeg refers to what the ball passes between instead of underneath.
  • The last possibility and the one that The Guardian likes the best, is that nutmeg gained its soccer meaning from an 1870s practice of deceit on the part of spice importers who would hide some wooden carvings in their shipments of nutmeg to lower their cost and raise their profits. This practice led to use of the word nutmeg to generally mean, “to be tricked or deceived, especially in a manner which makes the victim look foolish” which is a perfect match for how it feels to get nutmegged in soccer.

Whichever derivation you prefer, it’s interesting to see how many of the words for this action in other languages also have some element of food in them. All according to the same Wikipedia article:

  • In Hispanic America there are four words for nutmeg and three of them have a food element – caño which means spout, ordeñar which means milk, and cocina which literally means kitchen.
  • In Jamaica, it’s called salad.
  • Brazil has three words for it and one of them, rolinho, means little roll.
  • In Hungarian, the word for nutmeg is kötény which means apron.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a real blog post if I didn’t suggest another, totally unfounded, theory about nutmeg. Getting nutmegged is harmful in many ways. It’s humiliating to be faked out and beaten so badly. It’s also bad, potentially very damaging for the team to have allowed a player to go through what should have been a defensive stronghold. Perhaps nutmeg was an apt word to use because it too can be harmful. Nutmeg is not only a spice, it’s also a reasonably strong drug. A New York Times article from 2014 on the subject describes the experience of consuming too much nutmeg as “not exactly comatose, but… really sluggish.” Playing the ball through an opponent’s legs is the most effective way to make him or her look “not exactly comatose, but really sluggish.”

Could the use of the term nutmeg in soccer come from the experience or observation of a person suffering through a bad nutmeg trip? Who knows! It’s fun to think about. While you ponder, enjoy a highlight reel of some amazing nutmegs.

Thanks for asking,
Ezra

 

What is a buzzer beater?

Dear Sports Fan,

What exactly is a buzzer beater? I know it’s a last second shot, but how last second does it have to be? And is it only in basketball? Why?

Thanks,
Wesley

Dear Wesley,

Nothing reminds people that sports are a constructed universe more than the clock that counts inexorably towards the end of a game. In most timed sports, like basketball, football, and hockey, this clock is present in the arena and on television screens throughout the entire game. In soccer, the official time is kept only by the referee, and in untimed sports like tennis and basketball, time takes a back seat to sets, games, or innings. Each sport that has a clock deals with what happens when the clock runs out a little differently. Hockey rules simply that when the clock hits zero at the end of a period or game, the action ends. If the puck is an inch from crossing the goal-line when the clock hits zero, there is no goal. As befits football’s nature as a set of successive plays, football rules dictate that time only matters at the start and end of plays. If there is a second on the clock, that is enough time for another play. If there is no time at the end of a play, (with an exception for penalties) there will be no next play. The clock hitting zero during a play makes no difference to the result of that play whatsoever. Basketball has a different way of deciding what happens when a clock hits zero.

There are two clocks in basketball: the game clock and the shot clock. The game clock starts at 12 minutes for each National Basketball Association (NBA) quarter or at 20 minutes for each college basketball half. The shot clock starts at 24 seconds in the NBA and 35 in college and resets each time possession of the ball switches from one team to another or if a shot hits the rim. The shot clock was introduced in the NBA in 1954 in order to force teams to shoot the ball more frequently. Basketball wants shots! As part of the shot clock rule, the NBA decided that instead of requiring a shot to go in or hit the rim before the 24 second clock hit zero, they would enforce it from the moment the ball left a player’s hand. Once the ball is in the air, flying towards the hoop, time is effectively no longer an issue. Basketball teams have 24 seconds (or 35 in college) to shoot the ball, not to make a basket or hit the rim.

This is a natural rule for the shot clock. After all, the shot clock was not put in place to stop play every 24 or 35 seconds, it was intended to create a fast-moving, offensive, and continuous game. When the same logic is applied to the game clock, it’s a little bit more jarring. When applied to the game clock, it means that a ball, flying through the air, after the clock hits zero, is still in play as long as the player who shot it let go before time expired. This is the essence of a buzzer beater! It’s a shot that continues after the game clock has hit zero.

There are, as you might expect, a few wrinkles to how this term is used. First, although a buzzer sounds whenever a shot clock or game clock hits zero (thus the “buzzer” moniker), people almost always use the term to refer to the game clock hitting zero at the end of the fourth quarter. Second, although buzzer beater literally should be a shot that leaves a player’s hands when there is time left on the clock and goes through the basket (or doesn’t) after time has expired, people have gotten a little sloppy. Shots that are made with less than a few seconds left are often referred to as buzzer beaters, even if you and I know that they technically should not be. In this Youtube video of great NBA buzzer beaters, about half of them should technically not qualify because there is still a fraction of a second left on the clock after they go in:

As you can see from the video, buzzer beaters are exciting! This is the third and last exception to their pure definition. A buzzer beater that happens when a team is down by forty points is not really considered a buzzer beater. To really be though of as a buzzer beater, a shot should not only fall after the clock hits zero, but it should also win the game for the team that shot it.

The only other sports parallel I can think of to the buzzer beater is from boxing where a fighter who has been knocked to the ground can be “saved by the bell.” In boxing, a downed fighter has ten seconds to rise back to his feet and prepare to continue boxing. If he or she can’t do that, they lose the fight. The only exception to this is a boxer who gets knocked down with less than ten seconds left in a round. In this case, depending on the rules of the fight, he or she might be given a free pass from that time requirement. It’s mostly an anachronism today — boxing rules have evolved enough to recognize that a fighter who cannot recover in ten seconds should not keep fighting, even if it is at the end of the round. Still, it’s interesting that both phrases for how sports action continues after the clock hits zero have become recognizable phrases in our language. People are fascinated by what will happen after their own time has run out. In the constructed world of sports, we get to decide how that works. In boxing and basketball, there is momentarily, life after death.

Thanks for asking,
Ezra Fischer

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.

— — —

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