statistics Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

The NBA is walking a fine line with new foul rules, but Draymond is into it

The NBA finally listened to the outcry and decided to turn back the clock on the game and make things more balanced where foul calls are concerned. The league is walking a fine line and must be careful not to reel the game back too far. Some of the more prolific scorers in the league have already be...

NBA’s habitual foul seekers having a hard time finding fouls

If the world ended today (because that’s the only way the NBA season would end today, and I hate cliches, but this one is useful in this case), the NBA would finish with the fewest free throw attempts per game in the history of the league. Even though we’re only five games into the season and player...

Lighten up, Wainwright

I understand that every team in every sport is desperate to make the “only the guys in this room believed in us” the rallying cry of their team. It’s easier to think you’re the underdog, and when you’re a professional athlete you need anything and everything to drive through an interminable season. ...

MVP debates make my ass weary

I’ve come to the conclusion that a big part of being a member of the baseball media is just justifying your existence. Which is why they spend most of the time turning stuff into a debate that isn’t really a debate. Nothing is worse than individual awards, where distilling what “valuable” means has ...

Hockey isn’t any better at picking its defensive player of the year than basketball

Recently, the discussion in basketball has been Defensive Players Of The Year and just how exactly certain players ended up with that award. As we watched Rudy Gobert stare blankly from the lane at the Clippers as they constantly kicked the ball out to whomever he was supposed to be guarding outside...

NBA needs to reevaluate these flagrant-foul rules

The NBA must reconsider the definitions of these fouls. ...

Albert Pujols’ career wasn’t supposed to end like this

Albert Pujols’ lifetime numbers are utterly staggering. He has 667 home runs, that’s more than Willie Mays. 3,253 hits, more than all but 14 players, more than hitting machines like Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn and George Brett. More than some guy named Napoleon Lajoie, who played 120 fucking years ago and...

Here we go with this Superleague nonsense again [Updated]

It seems a little more serious this time around. Which means it’s a bigger threat this time around. But the news of the biggest European clubs forming their own sSuperleague” starting in 2022 is more likely to be used as blackmail to UEFA more than it is actual formation.The end goal is for the rich...

The Colorado Avalanche make medicine sick

It isn’t much of a story when a preseason favorite starts rising to the top of the standings. Most everyone thought the Colorado Avalanche would be a Cup contender this year, playing 56 preseason games and one warm-up series before a West Division final with the Vegas Golden Knights that will contai...

This Sean McVay stat will blow your mind

Three years ago, Sean McVay could seemingly do no wrong. He was the wunderkind of the NFL, a savant of offensive play-calling, the maestro of the second coming of the “Greatest Show on Turf.” Whatever he touched turned to gold. Any assistant lucky enough to shake his hand suddenly shot up job boards...

Introducing the MLB COVID Index: Ranking Each Baseball Team’s Coronavirus Schedule Score

The coronavirus pandemic gets worse by the day in the United States. Giants icon Buster Posey is the latest player to opt out of playing this season. Mike Trout, the best player in the game, remains uncertain about what to do. But Major League Baseball presses on, having announced its 60-game schedu...

“I joked that if we started our sites a year earlier we’d be Mark Cuban right now.” If you liked the New York Times story about the indispensable Sports Reference network of sites, here’s an even better one, from a year ago, with much more meat on its bones, from Noah Frank of WTOP. It’s worth your ...

What's Up With The Broken Stats At The Australian Open?

As you might have gathered from the three tiebreaks and the names involved, today’s third round match between Nick Kyrgios and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga was a white-hot serve-off. At 1-1 in the third set, Nick Kyrgios fired one particular serve that caught my eye. By this point I was admittedly a little de...

The Chris Paul Problem Is An Analytics Problem

In broad terms, the Chris Paul Problem—there is one!—is as follows: Pretty much everybody agrees that Paul is, and has been for the past decade, one of the NBA’s best players. He made nine straight All-Star games from 2008 to 2016; he has made eight All-NBA teams and nine All-Defense teams; he is th...

Ron Jaworski Is Using Someone Else's Data Without Attribution

Until he got swept away by the recent round of layoffs, Ron Jaworski dissected Xs and Os for several of ESPN’s NFL-related programs. Those gigs gave him a prominent platform from which he could draw heavily on his knowledge as a former NFL quarterback. Jaworski still loves to boast about how much ta...

Are You Sure Russell Westbrook Should Be MVP? Consider These Stats

An NBA season is not a triple-double-getting contest. Yesterday, Albert Burneko argued that the discussion about who deserves the NBA Most Valuable Player award has lately gone off track—that Russell Westbrook, averaging a triple-double for the Oklahoma City Thunder, has been so thoroughly and overw...

Cool Charts Show You Just How Good The NBA Has Gotten

By pulling team statistics from Basketball Reference and graphing them by category, stats guy Ed Küpfer has offered us a pleasantly concise picture of the NBA’s evolution over the last 36 years:...

Basketball's Most Influential Pick-and-Roll Turnover Ball Handlers

Today, Politico shared a list of bloggers ranked by influence by a proprietary survey conducted by an analytics firm called StatSocial. This seems useful, in its way. Similarly, Deadspin would like to share some data from Synergy Sports, a sports analytics firm. Here is a list of NBA players, ranke...

Introducing: The Shabazz Assist 

Two years ago, Grantland's Kirk Goldsberry introduced the Kobe Assist, a new statistic that "proves that missing shots is sometimes just as valuable as making them." Goldsberry's analysis was interesting, but it left out a key component: the dunkpass. You see, Goldsberry examined what percentage o...

Chart: All Of Peyton Manning's Pick-Sixes, By Defender And Distance

Hey, remember that cool chart from last week, visualizing all of Peyton Manning's regular season touchdowns? Well, it missed a few. In belated honor of Peyton's record-setting career throwing touchdowns, here are all the touchdowns he's thrown to the other team. ...