Basketballs: May 2004 Archives
Watching Timberwolves basketball with J John Afryl is one hell of a roller coaster. We've made this movie (1.3 MB) so you can join us on the ride.
My two favorite aspects of sports are the business of sports and the incredible amount of stats in sports. Over at Stdev.net they have created graphs of games based play-by-play data at ESPN.com. Really incredible stuff. You can enter a player's name to see the points.
Graphing the course of a game is awesome. Two things Matt plans on adding to his graph: "... it would be interesting to overlay other statistics on top of the game-o-graphs. For instance, I could plot a moving average of field goal percentage on a second axis. if the two curves have a similar shape, or are moving in the same direction for a while, then you could tell the lead was increasing or decreasing because the team was starting to make or miss their shots."
"I'd also like to test a hypothesis that many announcers state as fact. If a player is shooting poorly, and then they get a dunk or a layup, announcers will say the dunk or layup will 'get them going,' as if to say the dunk or layup somehow makes shooting jump shots easier. If this is true, then field goal percentage for shots taken after a layup should be higher then the field goal percent of shots not taken after a dunk or layup"
I missed the first round of the playoffs because I was in Europe. Now I'm missing the second round because I don't have cable and no one will go to the sports bars with me! What is the deal here! This is the pinnacle of the season! And the Lakers are down 2-0.
Going to Slabtown alone to catch a game ain't bad, though. Big TVs, and a lot of them. $1 PBR from 4-7. I could do worse.
As expected, Kevin Garnett was named Most Valuable Player of the National Basketball Association yesterday. While I am definitely excited to see my favorite player win this award, I'm focusing my attention on the people who say it doesn't mean much, because nobody seems to believe he can take the T-Wolves to the championship.
I'm going to just ignore the critics and not engage in discourse. I am obviously biased and have placed all my faith in KG as the savior of my beloved franchise. He has taken them this far, I have no reason to believe he won't take them to the top.
Destiny creates a Dynasty right?
Oh my god, the Nets just scored 56 points in an entire NBA playoff game. How does that happen?! What a statement by Detroit. I will now take any and all bets on the Nets for this series... No one can recover from being embarassed that badly.