One of the nice things about being a parent is getting to introduce SteelyKid to my own obsessions. Like, for example, the great game of basketball: “You want me to throw this how high?” Maybe we’ll stick with something a little smaller for now: (Hey to Todd Clark, who gave us the toy hoop…)
Category: Basketball
MJ, Fame, Writing, and More
If you’re desperate for something to fill your Friday afternoon, and not the comment-leaving sort, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour and a half (give or take) with Chuck Klosternman and Bill Simmons in their two part ESPN podcast. It’s nominally about sports, but they spend a good bit of time […]
This Isn’t Basketball
It’s that time of year when I check in to the giant methadone program that is the NBA, to help ease my way from college basketball season into the long, dull, summer when nothing worthwhile happens, sports-wise. Thus, I watched the second halves of most of last week’s playoff games (I didn’t get back to […]
There’s No Escaping Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell has a number of public responses to the sort of thing I ranted about the other day— not to me specifically, mind, but to the same general points– on his own blog and on ESPN’s Page 2. It’s pretty much the same argument others made in the comments to my post. Taking a […]
Malcolm Gladwell Is No Charles Barkley
I’m never quite sure what to make of Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of smart people seem to be favorably impressed by his writing and ideas, but whenever I actually read anything by him, there doesn’t seem to be much there. Take, for example, this New Yorker piece on basketball as a metaphor for innovation. As seems […]
Congratulations to the Tar Heels
Between the sleep deprivation caused by being home alone with the baby, and the new Jim Butcher book, I realized that I almost forgot to mention North Carolina’s defeat of Michigan State for the NCAA basketball championship. I’m glad to see it for two reasons: their victory let me win two of the basketball pools […]
Final Four Thoughts
Last week, the more annoying yelling heads on ESPN and its affiliates were all making a big show of brushing off the complaints of NCAA fans who felt the tournament was missing something due to the lack of a “Cinderella” team from a small conference making it to the round of 16. This was just […]
First Round Thoughts
The good news is, I’m solidly ahead of Barack Obama in my NCAA pool. The bad news is, the success rate of my serious picks is distressingly close to that of the Physics Grad Programs backet… Various and sundry thoughts on the first two days of NCAA tournament action: — Not that many big upsets, […]
Twenty Years Ago This Week
I carry some of my gear to and from the lunchtime basketball game in a red and white canvas-and-mesh bag. The zipper doesn’t work, and hasn’t for years, and the logo on the side is almost worn off, but if you look closely, you can still make out the New York State Public High School […]
Teams Who Are Ahead Win More Frequently
Over at the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers gets into the March Madness spirit by reporting on a study of basketball games that yields the counter-intuitive result that being slightly behind at halftime makes a team more likely to win. It comes complete with a spiffy graph: Explained by Wolfers thusly: The first […]