regressing Page 18 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Heights And Weights Of Athletes, By Position, In The "Big Four" Sports
Last fall, Craig Booth put together an excellent series of charts on the heights and weights of current NFL players, by position. Now Sportchart—who created that NHL map from a few weeks ago—has taken the analysis a step further, comparing the height and weight distributions of major positions acros...

What Happened To Mike Trout's Swing?
There is nothing average about Mike Trout. People built like Brian Urlacher shouldn't be able to scale walls and run like a scared deer, all while squarely hitting a round ball with a round bat. The 2014 season has seen Mike Trout put up a more earthbound line than usual: .263/.358/.509 after last n...

Greg Little, Maybe The NFL's Worst Receiver, Claimed By The Raiders
Greg Little, cut by the Browns last week, has been claimed by the Raiders. This move has been met with a collective groan, because Greg Little is widely acknowledged to be a terrible wide receiver. But just how bad is he?...

Gambling Hot Streaks Are Actually Real
A fascinating new study on online gambling published in this month's issue of Cognition comes to an unexpected conclusion: winning a bet does, seemingly, make you more likely to win your next one. The researchers looked at 565,915 wagers placed by 776 online gamblers in Europe and the U.S., and foun...

The Competitive-Balance Argument Against Paying Athletes Is Bullshit
High on the list of myths thrown out as excuses to delay or prevent the advent of pay-for-play is that the price-fixing engaged in by the 351 schools in Division 1, and especially the now 128 schools in FBS who play football, is necessary to ensure competitive balance across the sport. ...

The Scientific Case Against Vibram's FiveFinger Running Shoe
Last week's class-action settlement by Vibram, an Italian footwear manufacturer known for making silly-looking lightweight running shoes, recalls the recent case against Sketchers, a company that agreed to pay out $40 million after falsely claiming that walking in its product would give you Kim Kard...

The Prettiest MLB Box Scores You Can Find Online Are Now Updated Live
You might remember Statlas's baseball graphics from the end of last season, which aimed to provide a more contextual, visually-appealing update to traditional MLB box scores....

Are Triple-Doubles More Common In The Playoffs? (Also: Why?)
So far these playoffs, Russell Westbrook is the only player to score a triple double—and he's already got three. He nearly came up with his fourth triple double of the playoffs last Friday, finishing with 23 points, 13 assists, and 8 rebounds in 37 minutes. It was an awesome game, but the weirdest t...

Stan Van Gundy Is Going To Be So Mad At The Pistons, All The Time
Stan Van Gundy, a favorite around these parts, has been hired to "reshape" the Pistons. God help him. ...

LeBron Is The Human Analytic, And He's Unstoppable
Last night's Game 4 between the Heat and Nets came down to a three-play sequence that was laced with a fun bit of irony. With just under two minutes to go, game tied at 94, the Heat—the team paced throughout the night by its star cannon-balling his way to 49 points—rode out the game's crisis point w...

Which NBA Teams Does Your Town Root For?
Like they did for baseball fandoms, The Upshot has put together a map of which zip codes root for which NBA teams, based on Facebook data. It's pretty cool....

Where Do NHL Players Come From?
Sportchart has put together a neat series of maps on the birthplaces of active NHL, NBA, and MLB players. For most graphics like these the players are divvied up by country of origin, but—as you can see from the NHL dots above—this misses a lot of the nuance in the data. Specifically, U.S. players a...

Who Hugged Roger Goodell Longest At Last Night's Draft?
The NFL draft does gangbuster ratings, as football fans from around the country tune in to watch very large men embrace a very rich one. It's a Deadspin tradition to measure each draftee's hug time, and this year we've got a graph to go with it....

Every Shot Kevin Durant Has Taken In His Career, In One Awesome Chart
"Every shot Kevin Durant has taken in the NBA" is the kind of thing that belongs in a museum, in some fashion. Kirk Goldsberry at Grantland made a chart of exactly that, and shoved it into his piece on the evolution of KD today. It's great. I can't stop staring at it. I want it on my wall. I want it...

Deadspin's Johnny Manziel Obsession, Visualized
Both the ESPN and NFL Network draft broadcasts Deadspin and Regressing blogrolls were Johnny Football-obsessed tonight last night, but the Worldwide Leader and everyone around here was especially interested in the Heisman-winning Texan. Led by a drooling Jon Gruden a drooling Samer Kalaf and Tim Bur...

ESPN's Johnny Manziel Obsession, Visualized
Both the ESPN and NFL Network draft broadcasts were Johnny Football-obsessed tonight, but the Worldwide Leader was especially interested in the Heisman-winning Texan. Led by a drooling Jon Gruden, ESPN mentioned Manziel 113 times—nearly four times as often than any other draftee....

Holy Shit, Durant And Westbrook
KD and Russ are the best and we love them and they're very fun to watch, sure. But this is preposterous. This is obscene. From Elias Sports: ...

Why Is Blood Donation Still Incredibly Homophobic?
When University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam is selected in this week's NFL draft, it will be a soft milestone—the first time that an openly gay athlete is drafted into one of the major American sports—making discrimination based on sexuality seem that much more archaic. But you might not r...

Reminder: Mel Kiper Stinks At Actually Evaluating NFL Talent
While Big Mel does OK for himself in mock drafts, though not overly OK, we thought it would be prudent to remind you that the last time we looked, Kiper's pre-draft rankings (which are his estimations of how good the players are, not where they will be drafted) stunk pretty hard. ...