regressing Page 21 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Facebook Fandom Map Shows Who We're Rooting For In The NHL Playoffs
Just in time for the postseason, Facebook has put together this map showing which of the remaining 16 NHL teams are favored in each American state and Canadian province and territory. ...
How Long Is Every Minute Of An NBA Game?
The last minute or so of basketball games, college or pro, is going to take a while if the game's tight. But what about all the other minutes—how long do those take, relative to each other? Inpredictable played a riff on our NCAA tournament stopwatch viewing and ran the timestamps for every play in ...
How Phil Ivey Beat (Or Maybe Cheated) A Casino For Millions
Over the weekend, a story about Phil Ivey, the best poker player in the world, made its way around the Internet. He's being sued by the Borgata casino in federal court for cheating at a version of baccarat using a method known as "edge sorting." All told, Ivey took the casino for close to $10 millio...
If You Want To Be A Pro Soccer Player, It Helps To Be Born In January
You've probably heard the Malcolm Gladwell spiel about Canadian hockey players—namely, that a massive number of them are born in January. As it turns out, this isn't just a hockey thing. Scraping birthdays from transfermarkt.de, David Bauer has found a very similar effect among professional soccer p...
Proof That America Fills Out March Madness Brackets Like Idiots
You're looking at a chart from Stephen Pettigrew's look at 11 million brackets yesterday. Pay special attention to the spike at 680 points, though. It's the strangest damn thing you'll see today. ...
Wrestlemania XXX Box Score: Every Suplex, Chair Hit, And Top Rope Dive
In the depths of kayfabe, there's really no difference between a suplex, a top-rop dive, or a steel chair—every move, hold, and stunt is just a means to the dramatic end. You can't quantify a comeback or a domination when the comeback is part of the script. But: Who really cares? Here's your Wrestle...
How Serious Is Tony Parker's Back Injury?
Tonight, Tony Parker will likely miss his third straight game with a back injury, and more than a few assume that Parker's "injury" is really just a cover for Gregg Popovich to rest his star before the playoffs. The injury, tweeted April 7th from the Spurs' official account as "a sprained facet join...
Chargers Logo Used To Spice Up Synthetic Chemistry Research
In an outstanding sports-nerd move, chemists at the Scripps Research Institute—located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego—have managed to slip the Chargers logo into the research abstract of an upcoming Journal of the American Chemical Society paper. ...
The MLB Pundits Are Back. Will They Be Less Of A Disaster In 2014?
In what is becoming an annual tradition, we ask the question: Will this year finally be the one where the baseball pundits turn it around? After a string of terrible prediction seasons from 2009-2012 (see details), the "experts" followed it up with a truly pitiful 2013, in which no one picked either...
Paul George, In Two Charts
Kirk Goldsberry has a new post on Paul George over at Grantland, which you should go read. It includes the charts above, which tell the story of George's shooting numbers sinking like a bag of anvils, and some of that is hard to figure, like the numbers close to the rim. But some is really hard to e...
No, It's Not Just You: LeBron Really Has Been Bad On Defense
Tom Haberstroh has a post over on ESPN Insider going over the uses of ESPN's new stat, Real Plus-Minus, and how it bears out on things like the MVP race. Tucked inside are a few telling statistical bits about LeBron's defense this season. So we thought, why not go ahead and take a dive into the rest...
The Last Play Kentucky Ran Was Everywhere This Tournament
Kentucky didn't really have a great shot at winning, down six with 20 seconds to go, but the play it ran to get a late look was one we've seen over and over this year. ...
How A Clever Kansas Play Went Viral And Took Over College Basketball
Kansas was on the ropes. Down five against Stanford with 21.5 seconds remaining, it appeared the Jayhawks would fail to make the second weekend of the NCAA tournament for the fourth time under coach Bill Self. This being March, though, a month where games aren't over until there has been a buzzer be...
Just What The Hell Is Real Plus-Minus, ESPN's New NBA Stat?
Just ahead of playoffs season, ESPN today announced a new stat for the NBA called "Real Plus-Minus." It's envisioned as furthering the idea of traditional plus-minus, except, that's sort of already been furthered. So what's going on here? ...
The Last Flight Of DeAndre Kane, College Basketball's Old Man
DeAndre Kane played his last game for Iowa State this past Friday, losing to UConn in the Sweet 16. A lot of things went into his rise into being pretty much the most indispensable player on any team in college ball this season, but maybe none was quite as important as simply waiting around....
Which Pundit Has The Worst Bracket Heading Into The Final Four?
As we count down to the Final Four this week, let's see which pundit's bracket is in the best shape. As a reminder, we are tracking 26 "experts" this year (from ESPN, Yahoo, SI, CBS Sports) as well as the president. To revisit our rankings after the first weekend, see our prior post....
Who Were The Tallest Athletes In History?
As part of the new collection Sportographica, the chart above shows the tallest players in history by sport/league/discipline. While there isn't a regular-sized human in there to give you context, consider this: If you stacked all these professional athletes on top of each others, the pile would str...
Charts: Your Spending Habits Get Lamer As You Age
In a neat series of charts, NPR Planet Money looks at how spending changes over the course of an average American's lifetime. All the data are indexed against the average spending of 25-year-olds, which is when "Bars And Clubs" spending peaks, and not much else....
Will DeSean Jackson Make Washington Better?
Over at FiveThirtyEight, Neil Paine has an interesting post on what sort of expectations we should set for DeSean Jackson. This is a good question, but it raises a second, wider question: What should we expect DeSean Jackson to mean, on net, for his new offense as a whole? ...
How Many Times Does Clyde Frazier Say "Dishing and Swishing" Per Game?
From night to night, odds are Clyde Frazier is best thing going during any given Knicks telecast. Swoopin and hoopin may as well run on every graphics package. But is there a method to how Clyde dishes out the Clydeisms? Yes, actually. ...