The Stanley Cup playoffs begin today, with the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Tampa Bay Lighting entering as heavy betting favorites. And for good reason: Their regular season resume is impeccable. They earned 128 points by winning 62 games, placing them in a tie with the 1995-96 Detroit Red Wings for the most regular-season wins in league history. En route to all those wins, the Bolts led the NHL in goals scored, powerplay goals scored, shooting percentage and penalty kill percentage1 and finished third in save percentage. Nikita Kucherov became the first player in more than a decade to register 120 or more points, and Steven Stamkos had the most productive season of his already immensely productive career. Tampa is a balanced juggernaut, and every other team should be very afraid of it. With all that said, it must be noted that regular-season dominance hardly guarantees postseason glory in the NHL. Of the 13 teams that have won the Presidents’ Trophy since the lockout of 2004-05, just two have gone on to lift the Stanley Cup. And of the 10 regular-season winners to earn 120 or more regular-season points in league history, just four have gone on to win professional hockey’s ultimate prize.2 Still, NHL favorites3 haven’t had it all that bad since the lockout, especially when compared with the other three major North American men’s leagues. Only NBA favorites have had better championship odds going into the playoffs over the past 13 years. Hockey favorites don’t have it too badFor each of the four major North American men’s leagues, playoff field size and average pre-playoff title probability* for favorites, 2006-2018
While it might not be as inevitable as, say, the Golden State Warriors winning the NBA title in 2018 (or 2017 or 2015), Tampa’s regular-season dominance suggests that it’s poised to continue this trend. The Bolts scored 103 more goals than they conceded during the regular season; the next best mark was set by the Calgary Flames, who posted a +62 goal differential. The gulf between best and second-best is immense, and it underscores Tampa’s historic regular-season greatness. And indeed, Tampa may be the NHL’s best team since the lockout. Hockey-Reference.com’s Simple Rating System (SRS), which estimates the strength of every team in the NHL,4 reiterates just how special this Bolts group is. From 2005-06 to 2017-18, just three teams finished the regular season with an SRS better than 1, and no team eclipsed 1.2. The most recent team to do so — the 2012-13 Chicago Blackhawks — won the Stanley Cup. Tampa finished the 2018-19 regular season with an SRS of 1.21. All signs are pointing to late-spring celebrations on the Gulf Coast. Tampa’s only real concern at the moment is the health of Victor Hedman, the reigning Norris Trophy winner for the top defenseman. The Swede missed Tampa’s final three games with an “upper-body injury.” Hedman has a history of concussions, and “upper-body injury” is often NHL front-office code for concussion. The slick-skating defenseman is Tampa’s fourth-highest scorer, its power-play quarterback and the leader of a rearguard partially responsible for that gaudy goal differential. The Bolts can probably survive a first-round tilt against a slightly better-than-average Blue Jackets team without Hedman, but things might not be as easy against subsequent teams. If there’s a cautionary tale for this iteration of the Bolts, it’s that Red Wings team from 1995-96: Detroit earned the second-most regular-season points in NHL history and boasted two of the league’s best offensive players (Sergei Fedorov and Steve Yzerman) and the league’s reigning Norris Trophy winner (Paul Coffey) and yet failed to advance beyond the Western Conference finals. In the NHL, history is written between April and June, not October and April. Tampa is on top of the hockey world at the moment. But that world could change significantly in a matter of weeks. from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-lightnings-historic-dominance-wont-matter-without-a-cup/
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Major-championship season tees off this weekend in Augusta, Georgia, so settle in for some high-definition azaleas, a sweet-sounding Jim Nantz overture and a musky aura of self-importance. The 2019 Masters is not short on juicy questions. In pursuit of his first major victory in more than 11 years, is Tiger Woods about to have a green jacket for every day of the work week? Can Dustin Johnson add the Masters to his list of vanquished tournaments after posting three consecutive top-10 finishes at Augusta?1 Could this year’s winning putt possibly elicit a more tepid reaction from the gallery than Patrick Reed’s did in 2018? But there is one debate that can be shuttered before it attracts oxygen: The hottest player on the planet is Rory McIlroy, the pint-sized Irishman with bionic power off the tee. No one on any tour is playing better golf than McIlroy.2 In eight starts this season, McIlroy has a tour-leading seven top-10 finishes, including a win at the Players Championship. Bettors are aware, installing 8-1 odds, the shortest of any player, for the 15-time PGA Tour event champion. A win at Augusta National would make McIlroy just the fourth player in golf’s modern era to complete a career grand slam before turning 30, according to ESPN’s Stats & Information Group.3 And there’s reason to believe this week represents the best opportunity the 29-year-old has had to capture the green jacket that has eluded him. By true strokes gained, which adjusts regular strokes gained for field strength,4 McIlroy is playing the best golf of his career this season, picking up an average of 2.83 strokes on the field — nearly one full stroke better than his 2018 performance and even more exceptional than his 2014 campaign (+2.56), when he won three tournaments, including two majors. Rory is outdoing himself this yearTrue strokes gained per round in different areas for Rory McIlroy, 2009-19
“Rory is in a great place right now,” said James Jankowski, a specialist putting coach who is currently working with players on the European Tour. Behind blistering tee shots and gorgeous iron play, McIlroy had one of the best starts to a career in modern golf history. But for years, it has felt like he is being held back by one club: his putter. Inexplicably, the same guy who made driving greens on par-4s feel ordinary could also five-putt at Pebble Beach. “If Rory McIlroy could only putt well,” The Telegraph’s James Corrigan wrote last year, “he would win every week.” Indeed, one of the sport’s most gifted ball-strikers finished the past three seasons 97th, 159th, and tied for 135th in strokes gained per round with the putter. What’s perhaps most remarkable this season, then, is that McIlroy ranks 57th in the metric. He’s sinking 92.9 percent of his putts from 5 feet, which ranks sixth on the tour and is a full 12.2 percentage points higher than last season. He hadn’t ranked higher than 92nd in the metric in the past three seasons. Inside of 10 feet, he’s draining 88.3 percent of his putts, tied for 56th on tour, after finishing 64th last year. He ranked outside of the top 130 in the metric in 2016 and 2017. “Mentally, he seems to be better (this year),” Jankowski said of the man who once screamed, “Who can’t putt?!” at a fan. “Making more important putts and seeming more relaxed about the outcome.” And while those numbers could certainly dip as McIlroy tallies more rounds, he has never putted this well relative to the field at this juncture of the season. And in terms of total true strokes gained, he is doing better than any previous winners had from Jan. 1 until the Masters started. McIlroy is in better form than previous Masters winnersHighest true strokes gained per round from Jan. 1 through the start of the Masters for previous Masters winners and Rory McIlroy, 2007-19
But that will be tested this weekend. Augusta’s sloping bentgrass greens boast nightmare-inducing undulation. Former and current players have described playing on them as “very intimidating,” “the most difficult” and “Mickey Mouse, miniature golf.” Legendary golfer Ernie Els once six-putted to start the tournament and later intimated that he might soon quit the sport. Last year, two-time Masters champ Bubba Watson sent an eagle putt into a greenside bunker. “It embarrasses you,” Charles Coody, who won the tournament in 1971, told Sports Illustrated. “Sometimes you do stuff where you want to walk off and hide.” McIlroy would have been forgiven if he had done just that last year. Trailing Reed by three strokes entering the final round, he logged a 2-over-par 74 and was irrelevant by the back nine. Not trusting his putter, McIlroy told reporters, “made a big difference.”5 McIlroy is on record, though, not putting too much stock in putting — particularly at the Masters. “At Augusta, you don’t need to putt great,” McIlroy said last year. “You need to not waste any shots.” He isn’t alone with that hypothesis — and there’s more evidence pointing to that conclusion.6 Mark Broadie, who pioneered the strokes-gained metrics, found that Augusta has the highest three-putt rate of any stop on tour.7 However, Broadie also noted that because the greens are so well manicured, players also sink more putts inside of 10 feet at Augusta than anywhere else. The issue, then, is sticking approach shots within a reasonable distance of the flagstick to limit lag putts and mitigate long-range misreads. McIlroy has been doing just that, picking up 0.97 true strokes gained on approach shots, the second best mark of his career. Additionally, if he maintained his current numbers, McIlroy would set a new career best in three-putt avoidance (1.98 percent of putts). The past 15 champions were picking up 0.18 strokes on the field with the putter entering tournament week. McIlroy is picking up strokes at more than twice that rate. Away from the green, precision from the tee box is valuable, to be sure, but the Masters layout doesn’t exactly do any favors for McIlroy’s preternatural power. His 263.2 yards per drive at the Masters is well below his tee-shot averages in recent seasons and his historical averages at golf’s other marquee events. Although he bashes par-5s like you’d expect, he struggles on par-4s, where on average he’s plus-3.6, according to Golf Stats. Rory’s hot start this season has plenty of observers excited, though it’s not at all rare for McIlroy to surge out of the gate. When his past 11 seasons are compared with the pre-Masters performances of the past 15 Masters champions, McIlroy holds the top three marks in true strokes gained entering the tournament. But his 2019 performance has been prodigious. That McIlroy’s sensational play is setting him up for a potential historic win is made all the more riveting by the baggage he carries into the Georgia pines. In 2011, the then-21-year-old held a four-stroke lead after 54 holes before stumbling to the finish line with a final-round 80, giving him a 15th-place finish. It was the highest closing round by a 54-hole leader in 56 years and is still tied for the fourth-highest round of McIlroy’s professional career. “Rory needs to fly very quickly to Northern Ireland,” broadcaster Nick Faldo said as McIlroy tapped in the final bogey of the day. “And I’m sure that his whole country will give him a big hug.” But eight years later, is this finally when he puts it all together and earns the time-honored tradition of an uncomfortable post-victory interview in Butler Cabin? “The Masters has now become the biggest golf tournament in the world, and I’m comfortable saying that,” McIlroy said last year. “I don’t care about the U.S. Open or the Open Championship, it is the biggest tournament in the world. It is the most amount of eyeballs, the most amount of hype. The most amount of everything is at Augusta.” from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/this-is-rory-mcilroys-masters-to-lose/ The WNBA Draft will be held on Wednesday, just three days after the women’s NCAA tournament wrapped up. It’s an incredibly tight turnaround for the players and their prospective teams, particularly for anyone who made it to the Final Four. The tournament therefore serves as both a fitting capstone on collegiate careers and a real-time combine for a league that doesn’t have one for its tops prospects. Take Notre Dame, which fell 1 point short of a second-straight national title on Sunday. It has four elite seniors and one junior expected to hear their names called; they will have had less than 72 hours after finishing their work in Tampa to get prepared mentally and physically for the moment their professional dreams come true, then balance professional obligations with graduation. “They don’t have time to search for agents and they don’t have time to make decisions,” Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw said Saturday. “Every game they go into, they’re thinking about their future because if they play poorly, they’re wondering is their stock going to drop, if they play well, is their stock going to rise?” McGraw is right about this reality: WNBA coaches and GMs are scrutinizing every last possession to make sure their draft preferences reflect the most current reality. So at FiveThirtyEight, we decided to let the players and coaches make their best cases for themselves or their soon-to-be-former players, while measuring their claims against the statistical record. Here’s what we found on the best pro prospects at the 2019 Final Four.1 Notre DameWe’ll start with Notre Dame. Arike Ogunbowale is best known for her dual buzzer-beater shots last season, and UConn head coach Geno Auriemma, whose team was victimized by one of them, called her “virtually unguardable one-on-one” this past weekend. Ogunbowale will transition well into the WNBA “because she can play the same type of position she’s playing now,” McGraw said of her senior guard. “I think she’s ready. I think her body is ready…I think she’s ready right now for the next level.” The numbers back McGraw and Auriemma up. Just four players have logged 800 offensive possessions this year, according to Synergy Sports. Ogunbowale is not only one of them, a tribute to Notre Dame’s reliance on her, but she easily leads that group. She does so in a variety of ways, shooting 44.6 percent from the field and 35.9 percent on threes, with a turnover rate below 10 percent for the third-straight season despite all her ball dominance. At 5-foot-8, Ogunbowale will also be asked to play some point guard by most potential teams at the next level, and so her elevated assist ratee — 19.0 percent, an improvement from 13.6 percent in 2017-18 — only bolsters her WNBA case further. Interestingly, the same is true of her backcourt mate, Marina Mabrey, who was forced into primary point guard duties due to other injuries last year and has proven herself to be a combo guard candidate for the WNBA, with most league evaluators expecting her to be chosen in the second round. “I feel like it’s helped me because if there’s somebody at my position at the two, that’s playing, I can still play at the one,” Mabrey said Saturday. “It will give me a better chance at getting on the floor quicker.” The numbers support this. Mabrey’s assist rate this season jumped to 23.9 percent, but it hasn’t come at the expense of her shooting efficiency (54.4 percent from two, 40.8 percent from three). So a WNBA team drafting Mabrey can add the fourth-best spot-up shooter, per Synergy, of the 1,212 shooters with at least 75 such possessions in Division I this season. Forward Brianna Turner, meanwhile, has been a primary driver of Notre Dame’s improved defense. “If anybody is looking for someone who can defend any position on the floor, I think she would be a tremendous fit for any team,” McGraw said of Turner on Saturday. Turner is slated to go early in the second round. Her fellow big, Jessica Shepard, brings an unusual skill to the table: her passing. “I think my passing is what will separate me from other things,” Shepard, also pegged to go early in the second round (or even late in the first), said Saturday. “And also my versatility to shoot the ball on the outside.” McGraw, too, praised Shepard’s ability to share the ball, while lamenting that the Irish system didn’t allow her to shoot the three as she did in her prior college stop at Nebraska, where she shot 31.5 percent from deep her sophomore year. “She can shoot threes and play on the perimeter probably more than I let her,” McGraw said. Again, though, Shepard’s passing skills are on the record. Her assist rate was up to 18.3 percent this past season, extremely high for a 6-foot-4 big. And it’s been north of 14 percent in all four of her college seasons, even during the two years at Nebraska when she served as the team’s primary scoring option. Moreover, she is particularly adept at the outlet pass, which doesn’t lead to assists most of the time, but sets up her team in transition offense. The result: Notre Dame was sixth in Division I in points per possession in transition, at 1.107 per Synergy, and the Irish got more of those opportunities than any other team in the country, with transition plays accounting for 25.3 percent of their total possessions. And that brings us to Notre Dame’s final top prospect: Once those chances came along, almost no one was deadlier on those fast breaks than junior Jackie Young, who renounced her final year of eligibility. Among players with 150 transition possessions, per Synergy, Young’s 1.236 points per possession ranked third in the country. Like seemingly everyone else in McGraw’s offense, Young is also an excellent distributor: She posted a 23.4-percent assist rate despite sharing point guard duties with Mabrey and Ogunbowale. BaylorBaylor coach Kim Mulkey has one crystal clear WNBA prospect in 6-foot-7 Kalani Brown. Mulkey has repeatedly made the argument that Brown is quick enough to dominate at the next level, addressing the primary weakness brought up by WNBA talent evaluators. But as Mulkey noted on Saturday, that conversation obscures what are the astonishing strengths Brown brings to the table as well. Brown has always been fundamentally sound, Mulkey said — she’s always been able to shoot, defend and rebound. But, Mulkey said, she’s matured, working on her defensive mobility at the high post and her endurance. So let’s take these each in turn. Brown shot 61.4 percent from the field this season, with more shots taken further from the basket. She shot 75.2 percent at the free-throw line, which traditionally suggests that she will be able to expand beyond the 3-point line at the next level. Her block rate also jumped to 7.1 percent this year, from 4.9 percent a season ago. Her rebound and assist rates remained static, but they were already pretty good. And Brown did start to play for longer stretches; her minutes per game, at 26.8, were almost double what she managed her freshman season. And most encouragingly, Brown logged 35 minutes in both the Elite Eight win over Iowa and the Final Four semifinal victory over Oregon; she reached 37 minutes in the final over Notre Dame — a tribute to both her conditioning and ability to stay out of foul trouble. Brown hasn’t fouled out of a game all season and has only reached four fouls in a game three times all season, remarkable for a big. ConnecticutDespite its so-called down year, Connecticut still lost only three games this season — and reached a record 20th Final Four — thanks largely to a pair of Huskies who will get their names called very early on Wednesday night: wings Napheesa Collier and Katie Lou Samuelson. For Collier, the key is less that she can do one thing amazingly, and more that she does everything well, according to her coach, Geno Auriemma. “The competition’s going to be tougher, and she’s pretty good at putting the ball on the floor and getting to the rim,” Auriemma said. She also has something to fall back on if they won’t let her catch the ball in the lane, he said. “She makes just enough jump shots from the perimeter that you have to go out and guard her. She’s got a little bit of everything for whatever the occasion calls for.” The results have been 1.152 points per possession this season, per Synergy, second in Division I among players with at least 600 possessions. Notably, too, Auriemma is right about her varied strengths. While she trailed Iowa’s Megan Gustafson in this category, 411 of Gustafson’s possessions came in the post-up this season (55.5 percent of her total). Collier accumulated points in post-up, cut and transition on more than 100 possessions this past season. As for Samuelson, the numbers speak to what she can be at the next level — an assist rate of 20 percent means she will be the wing facilitator needed in the modern WNBA offensive sets, while her turnover rate finished below 10 percent for the second year in a row. She shot the ball extremely well from the field, 53.6 percent from two, 37.6 percent from three, a season after those numbers checked in at 59.6 and 47.5, respectively. Her free throw rate of 87.6 percent reflects the truth of her shot. Indeed, there’s no WNBA coach who won’t give her the green light, especially with her 6-foot-3 length that allows her to shoot over most defenders. But what stuck out to Auriemma was her toughness, playing through a back injury to score 29 against Louisville in the Elite Eight and a team-high 20 against Notre Dame in the national semifinals. “She doesn’t look it, but she’s a tough kid,” Auriemma said after last week’s 80-73 UConn win over Louisville to lift the Huskies into the Final Four. “There’s a certain toughness about her.” You can be sure all that registered with WNBA front offices, busy finalizing their lists and checking them twice. from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/who-are-the-best-wnba-prospects-from-the-final-four/ Just before the start of free agency last June, Los Angeles Lakers president Magic Johnson made a relatively blunt declaration when he said he’d willingly step down from his post if he failed to sign star players. So it was a legitimate jaw-dropper when Johnson, just nine months after landing the world’s best player, opted to resign Tuesday during a tearful, impromptu press conference in the bowels of Staples Center prior to the team’s season finale. Yes, this was a trying year for Johnson and the storied franchise, which fully expected to return to the playoffs after getting LeBron James. But the playoffs didn’t happen, and while Johnson and general manager Rob Pelinka deserve a lot of the blame for why things went wrong, no one thought it would result in this – at least not this soon, and certainly not in the bizarre manner that it played out. In the coming weeks, there will be ample opportunity to analyze what comes next for the Lakers, who still have LeBron, a young supporting cast and enough cap space to make the kind of signing that could make them an actual contender again out West. Normally, we’d be prone to view a team president’s sudden resignation as a sign of enormous trouble for a franchise. The fact that we aren’t talking about how much this will damage Los Angeles speaks volumes about Johnson, and how ill-prepared he was for the front-office job in the first place. Team owner Jeanie Buss, who got wind of the resignation after reporters did, now has an enormous task. She has to tap the right person, but based on her hiring of Magic – a choice she made based on trust, and their almost 40 years of friendship after contentiously ousting her brother in 2017 — we don’t know yet who she’ll get, or what level of experience that person will carry. Nonetheless, that role is vital, both to restoring the franchise to its rightful place — this 37-win season marked a Lakers’ record sixth-straight year with no postseason — and obviously for maximizing the 34-year-old James’s window for championship contention. What we do know now is that Johnson, an all-time great on the hardwood and one of the more personable businessmen in America, simply wasn’t prepared for the cut-throat front office life, an issue we touched on briefly back when he was hired. Johnson himself says that leaving the role of president will make him happier, as it will allow him to return to his old life, away from the sourced reporting that, to him, likely felt like anonymous backstabbing. And back to a life where he can freely mentor and tweet to congratulate players leaguewide — something he couldn’t do as an executive, because of the tampering rules. From the outset, Johnson struggled with how to play inside those rules. Even more concerning about his front-office tenure: He often struggled to properly assess the value of players and what they brought to the table. Months after taking the gig, he traded a young, talented point guard in D’Angelo Russell to get Brook Lopez and his expiring contract, as well as the pick that would become Kyle Kuzma1. While Kuzma’s been fine for a young player, Russell has since become an All-Star who has led Brooklyn back to the postseason. And Lopez — whom L.A. let walk in free agency last summer — has been one of the NBA’s best floor-spacing bigs, giving Milwaukee exactly what this shooting-starved Lakers club needs2. Similarly, 24-year-old Julius Randle had a career year (21 points, 8 rebounds a game) in New Orleans after the Lakers let their former No. 7 overall pick go in free agency despite his relatively modest price tag3. Instead, L.A. followed up on its LeBron move by then agreeing to deals with Rajon Rondo, JaVale McGee and Lance Stephenson, leaving it woefully deficient from a perimeter-shooting standpoint. The head-scratching decisions weren’t limited to the perimeter, though: The Lakers also offered talented big man Ivica Zubac to their Los Angeles counterparts at the deadline, reportedly befuddling the Clippers by trying to unload a solid young player unnecessarily. None of this even gets into the fact that Johnson and the Lakers took their sweet time — waiting until it was likely too late — to try and deal for a second star; borderline malpractice considering James’s age. Depending on how you look at it, the failed play to acquire Anthony Davis at the trade deadline was either just the Pelicans being stubborn, or them being realistic – and smart – after realizing the youngsters L.A. was offering in return weren’t good enough (particularly when James was injured) to justify dealing away a franchise player. But that doesn’t excuse the Lakers not being more aggressive two summers ago, when they could’ve made a play for Paul George, who’d made it clear that L.A. was his destination of choice before Oklahoma City gambled on a deal for him. Nor does it explain why the Lakers didn’t do more to engage the Spurs for Kawhi Leonard (and pair him with LeBron) before he was ultimately sent to Toronto. In either case, having a second star likely would’ve provided L.A. with the insulation it needed to withstand a James injury and make the playoffs regardless. And there were the problematic mixed messages that Johnson sent. The preseason comments about how new LeBron teams always take a while to find their stride and the need for patience, but then the reports about him going off on coach Luke Walton just weeks later, apparently for not meeting the expectations he’d just tamped down. Then there was his suggestion that the young players who’d heard their names rumored in potential Davis deals simply needed to be hugged and nurtured after the whole ordeal, which he followed, one day later, by saying those same players needed to be treated like men, rather than babied through the media. Had he remained on the job, Johnson’s next true test as team president was a decision about the future of coach Luke Walton. Johnson told reporters Tuesday he’d been given the necessary authority to fire Walton, who has history with the Lakers as a former player and still has a good friendship with Buss. But Johnson said he didn’t want to pull that trigger, and instead opted to step down himself. Now, it’s Buss’s turn to make a decision again. And while the stakes are incredibly high, with the team at an important crossroads, the Lakers can take solace in the fact that they’re almost certain to now get a more analytical, experienced front-office type than they ever had in Magic, who was never really meant for the unforgiving nature of an NBA job like this to begin with. from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/magic-johnson-was-never-cut-out-to-do-this/
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This week’s episode of Hot Takedown mourns the end of March Madness and celebrates the start of the NBA playoffs. With the race for the NBA’s Most Valuable Player still up in the air, Robin Lundberg makes the case for Giannis Antetokounmpo over James Harden. We see if there’s data to move the needle either way. It’s Masters week! With the most anticipated event in golf nearly underway, the team breaks down the prospects for Tiger Woods in a crowded field of contenders. Could this be Tiger’s last chance at the green jacket? His start to the season shows potential, but the game has changed since he last dominated. For our Rabbit Hole of the Week, inspired by her Minnesota Twins, Sara goes back to 1908 to track MLB players hitting for the cycle. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-stats-arent-sure-that-giannis-should-be-mvp/ You have to feel for Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis. Yes, Davis is being paid handsomely ($23 million) this season, and he’s had a solid 12-year major league career. But he currently finds himself mired in one of the most inglorious streaks in baseball history: zero hits in his past 49 at-bats, a new MLB record for futility. Davis broke the nearly 8-year-old mark set by former Dodgers infielder Eugenio Vélez, who went 0-for-46 over a 30-game span that lasted more than a calendar year. Vélez himself “surpassed” a record (45 games) that Craig Counsell had tied earlier the same summer; the original 45-game mark was set by Bill Bergen in 1909 and matched by Dave Campbell in 1973. Here’s a progression of all hitless streaks (among nonpitchers) that lasted 40 or more at-bats over time since 1908, the earliest season in Baseball-Reference.com’s game-level data:1 Before the season, FanGraphs’ depth chart projections called for Davis to hit just .200 this year, largely by virtue of the awful .168 mark he posted last season — already tied for 34th-worst ever by a hitter in a season that qualified for the batting crown. After Davis’s 0-for-28 start in 2019, FanGraphs now see him with a .193 projected batting average over the rest of the season, implying that they believe his true batting-average talent to be 7 points below the Mendoza Line. (Most of the time, players with extremely low batting averages have substantially higher true talent but are also very unlucky.) Combining that with the at-bats he’s already banked, Davis projects to finish the season with a .181 average, which would once again give him one of the 75 or so worst batting-average seasons in MLB history — for the second time in as many years. (So much for reversion to the mean!) But the irony is that Davis is actually hitting the ball better this season, at least according to MLB’s Statcast tracking system. Davis’s average exit velocity of 91.3 miles per hour is higher than it was in 2016 (90.8), when he hit 38 home runs and was a meaningful contributor to plenty of Oriole victories. The big problem is that Davis strikes out so much that he doesn’t have a chance to make use of those powerful swings. So far this season, he has struck out in 47 percent of his plate appearances, more than double the MLB average rate. (Last year, he struck out 37 percent of the time.) Although Davis ought to have broken out of his hitless streak by now — Statcast reports an expected batting average of .119 for Davis this season, based on the quality of his batted balls — his strikeout totals have made it impossible for him to be a functional hitter. The only real question is how much longer the Orioles will continue to pencil him into the lineup and give him more chances to extend the now-record streak of ineffective hitting. Check out our latest MLB predictions. from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/chris-davis-has-summited-the-everest-of-hitting-slumps/ The captain of Ajax is a Golden Boy. Its goalkeeper, right back, left winger and two-thirds of its starting midfield aren’t old enough to rent a car without a surcharge in the United States. Ajax has won four European Cups in its history, but as teams in England, Germany, Italy and Spain have all risen into a new economic bracket, the Amsterdam club has been forced to focus on youth — coaching them up and then selling their rights for profit. Last summer, it was 19-year-old Justin Kluivert to Roma for $19.67 million. This summer, it will be 21-year-old midfielder Frenkie de Jong to Barcelona for a club-record $85.5 million. The current iteration of the club has been called a “talent factory” — and it is — but you need more than just youthful exuberance to play in the quarterfinals of the Champions League, as Ajax does Wednesday. Ajax’s most important player isn’t a kid; he’s 26 years old. He was born in the Netherlands but represents Morocco on the international stage. He’s a ball hog who didn’t join the club until he was 23. Ajax’s hopes of overcoming Juventus in the Champions League rest on the shoulders Hakim Ziyech, European soccer’s version of JR Smith. In soccer, it’s really hard to be the kind of unrepentant gunner, chucker or volume shooter (or whatever other euphemism for inefficiency you may prefer) we see in a sport like basketball. In basketball, the best-case scenario for an off-balance, midrange jumper is only 2 points, and those 2 points don’t have much value. (NBA teams are averaging more than 111 points per game this season.) But the upside of taking a shot in soccer is quite different, since every shot has a chance of becoming a goal, and goals are very valuable. According to a study done by the authors of the book “The Numbers Game,” a goal is worth about 1 point, or one-third of a win. Soccer’s structural limitations seem to have emboldened Ziyech. The only way the attacking midfielder can be mentioned in the same breath as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo is by firing off shots. Among players in Europe’s top five leagues1 plus the Dutch Eredivisie, only Ronaldo has taken more shots per 90 minutes than Ziyech, while Messi sits third. But unlike those two legends, Ziyech isn’t taking good shots. According to expected-goals data provided by Opta Sports, Ronaldo’s average attempt has a 10 percent chance of finding the back of the net, while Messi produces 12 percenters on average (though he typically converts his chances at a much higher rate than the models suggest). Meanwhile, Ziyech’s chances average out at just 7 percent. In fact, among all players who average at least 3.5 shots per 90, almost no one takes worse shots than Ziyech. In other words, he is the most inefficient volume shooter in the highest levels of the soccer world. Ziyech makes up for this inefficiency by doing everything, and doing it all the time. Despite a lanky 5-foot-11 frame, he eats up space with the choppier steps of a much smaller player. In Ajax’s 4-1 victory on the road in the Champions League Round of 16 against Real Madrid, no player took more shots, played more crosses or attempted more combined tackles and interceptions. Ajax’s leaders in three major offensive statistics, 2018-19 season
In the Eredivisie this season, Ziyech leads Ajax in three major attacking statistics — by a wide margin. Here, again, you can see Ziyech’s inefficiency. Despite attempting more than twice as many shots as any of his teammates, Ziyech is second on the team in goals (15, to Dusan Tadic’s 20). But his passing is what makes all of the bad shots worth it. Just look at this thing:
While calculating a player’s expected goals does a pretty good job of determining just how good of a goal scorer he is, it’s harder to measure the effectiveness of most passing stats. Things like pass-completion percentage, chances created and assists lack the necessary context to show how much they contribute to winning. But some analysts are trying to change that. The newest issue of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports includes a paper from a group of Dutch researchers who used machine learning to create a model that determines how much value is gained or lost by every pass a player does and does not complete. Using more than 9,000 matches in seven leagues2 from 2014-15 through 2017-18, they measured the quality of a player’s passes by looking at the pass’s location, type, timing and success or failure. According to their analysis of the 2017-18 season, Ziyech was the eighth-most-effective passer last year. (Arsenal’s Mesut Ozil was first, Manchester City’s David Silva second and Messi third.) In volume and variance, Ziyech’s passing is a lot like his shooting — it’s just much more effective. “Hakim Ziyech was the most influential passer in the 2017/2018 Eredivisie season,” Lotte Branse and Jan Van Haaren, two of the paper’s authors, told me via email. “We found that Ziyech creates a lot of value by completing successful passes. However, at the same time, he also tends to take risks and thus loses quite some value by performing unsuccessful passes.” There are plenty of promising passing prospects in this current Ajax team, too. De Jong and Brazilian attacker David Neres rank third and fifth, respectively, in the study among all players under the age 23. Ajax’s young stars are the headliners. After all, the team captain, defender Matthijs de Ligt, is just 19 years old. But the prospects are buttressed by the contributions of veterans like Ziyech, plus 30-year-old Tadic and 29-year-old Daley Blind, who both joined from Premier League clubs over the summer. Each of them cost more than $12 million to acquire. Behind that mix of young and old, Ajax heads into the quarters with a 44 percent chance of advancing to the semis, according to FiveThirtyEight’s projections. Whether it does will partly depend on how many of Ziyech’s shots, passes and dribbles end up working out. Check out our latest soccer predictions. from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/meet-the-jr-smith-of-european-soccer/ Virginia was a postseason fraud, or it wasn’t. Tony Bennett’s system had unavoidable flaws, or it didn’t. The national championship couldn’t be won at a plodding pace, or it could. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is deemed the definitive assessment in the sport, and perhaps no team has been evaluated more harshly over the past two seasons than the Virginia Cavaliers. Bennett’s team entered this tournament with a regular-season record of 56-4 the past two seasons, but lost a game last tournament that will be remembered forever. On Monday in Minneapolis, Virginia answered the lingering questions about its philosophy, its mettle and its legitimacy. The Cavaliers reached the national title game with their defense and won it with their offense. They wore the scars from being the only No. 1 seed to lose to a No. 16 seed, thanks to a loss last year against UMBC. They won four straight close games to counter the perception that they faltered in tournament situations. Their performance Monday was typically efficient: 11-for-24 on 3-pointers (45.8 percent), 16-for-35 on 2-pointers (45.7 percent), even against Texas Tech’s top-ranked defense. Virginia won its six tournament games by an average of 7.5 points, the third-smallest margin for a national champion since the field expanded in 1985. In that category, the Cavaliers trail only Villanova in 1985 (a No. 8 seed) and Arizona in 1997 (a No. 4 seed). Virginia kept its fans on edgeSmallest average tournament victory margins of NCAA men’s tournament champions, 1985-2019
Three of Virginia’s six games came down to the final possession of regulation. Braxton Key blocked a Texas Tech jumper at the buzzer in the final; Kyle Guy hit three free throws in the final second of the team’s Final Four game; and in a tournament lacking game-winning buzzer-beaters, Mamadi Diakite delivered a game-tying jumper at the horn against Purdue in the Elite Eight. The Cavaliers trailed in the second half of five tournament games, all except their second-round win against Oklahoma. In the first round Virginia encountered a most ominous test: Faced again with a No. 16 seed in Gardner-Webb, Bennett’s team trailed by as many as 14 in the first half and looked, despite their resilience, spooked. But even that situation set the stage for Monday’s victory. “Before, in the locker room, I said, ‘You guys faced pressure that no team in the history of the game has faced, well, really all year. But being down 14 against Gardner Webb, you did not panic in that moment,’” Bennett told reporters after Monday’s game. The tournament woes predated UMBC. From 2009-18, in Bennett’s first nine seasons, Virginia was 7-6 in the NCAA tournament, ranking last in the country in how they performed vs. how college basketball guru Ken Pomeroy’s efficiency ratings would have expected them to perform. The Cavaliers lost in the Elite Eight as a No. 1 seed in 2016, in the second round as a No. 2 seed in 2015 and in the Sweet 16 as a No. 1 seed in 2014. They have discussed last season’s collapse so often that they refer to it not as “last season’s ending” or “the UMBC game” but just “UMBC.” (“I’m not even thinking about UMBC right now,” junior Ty Jerome told reporters Monday night.) With this year’s tournament run, Virginia has an answer for the criticism that its slow tempo makes it vulnerable to tournament upsets. Bennett’s team has ranked 316th or lower in adjusted tempo1 since he took the head coaching job, according to Ken Pomeroy’s stat-keeping. The fewer possessions, the smaller the margin for error. Last season, Virginia’s deliberate approach put the Cavaliers in a precarious 21-21 tie at halftime against UMBC. In the second half, the Retrievers blitzed, and Virginia was not nearly fast — or efficient — enough to keep up. In the first round of this tournament, Bennett’s team was in danger again, down 36-30 to Gardner-Webb at halftime. But they changed their strategy this time around, speeding the game up and playing more possessions than in any of their other four regulation tournament games. They won the second half, 41-20. Virginia was adaptable the rest of the way, too. Bennett’s stingy, pack-line defense crowds the paint and encourages opponents to stand around the perimeter and launch low-percentage, circus 3-pointers. When Purdue’s Carsen Edwards drilled 10 threes in 19 attempts against that defense, Virginia joined in the shootout, and Guy hit five triples after halftime. The Cavaliers also weathered second-half flurries by Auburn (which trailed by 10 with 5:24 left but took a lead inside the two-minute mark) and Texas Tech (which trailed by eight with 5:46 left but took the lead in the final minute). As it turned out, nothing could shake this Virginia team, and the numbers will cement Virginia as one of the most efficient teams this century. According to Ken Pomeroy’s recordkeeping, of all teams since 2001-02, this season’s Cavaliers rank third in adjusted efficiency at +34.22, behind only Kentucky in 2014-15 (36.91) and Kansas in 2007-08 (35.21). It helps that Virginia is No. 2 in offensive efficiency — the first of Bennett’s Virginia teams to rank higher on offense than defense — and has De’Andre Hunter, who is projected to be the school’s first lottery pick since 2000. He scored 27 points and hit the game-tying 3-pointer with 12 seconds left Monday, and afterward everyone could celebrate and exhale. Asked if the pain of last season was gone, Bennett said, “You have a scar, and it reminds you of that, but it’s a memory. Does it go away completely? No, I wish it wouldn’t have happened in some ways. Now I say, well, it bought us a ticket here. So be it.” from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-virginia-found-redemption/ As the world’s greatest golfers convene in Augusta, Georgia, this week for the Masters, it’s time for every sports fan’s annual rite of spring: wild speculation about whether Tiger Woods can add a fifth green jacket to his closet. Picking Woods used to be a trendy bet; then it began to feel like a totally futile exercise. Well after he last won the event in 2005, there was a period when Woods was in the news constantly for everything except golf success. In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that Woods’s relevance as a winning golfer seemed finished, along with his bid to chase down Jack Nicklaus’s record for all-time majors won. But that all changed last season, when Woods put everything back together again to finish eighth on the PGA Tour money list and win the season-ending Tour Championship in September. Now Woods is back, in his best position in years to win another Masters. According to VegasInsider, Woods has the third-best odds of any player to win this weekend; he’s also playing even more inspired golf than he did during last year’s comeback campaign. But at age 43, will this be one of Woods’s last chances to win at Augusta before his days of being a viable champion are over? Certainly, Tiger has been outplaying many of his much younger rivals these past few seasons. Since the end of his lost 2017 campaign, Woods ranks sixth among qualified1 PGA Tour players in total strokes gained per round, trailing only Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Justin Rose, Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood. He’s mostly regained his old mastery of irons on approach shots and still has some of the game’s best feel for shots around the green. In terms of strokes gained, Woods is picking up 1.67 shots (relative to the average player) per round so far in 2019, an even better mark than the 1.60 he posted last season — which itself was easily his best performance in five years. One of the most impressive aspects of Woods’s early play this season has been improved accuracy off the tee. According to the PGA Tour, Woods has hit 65.2 percent of possible fairways on his drives this season, which ranks 54th out of 214 qualified players. That might not sound amazing, but by Woods’s standards, it is ultraprecise accuracy. Last year, he hit only 59.4 percent of fairways, which ranked him 127th, and he struggled to break 55 percent over the four injury-plagued seasons before that. (Even during his really great pre-scandal/injury seasons, hitting fairways was an Achilles’ heel. In 2007, when he made the most money playing golf of his career, Woods ranked 152nd in driving accuracy and failed to hit 60 percent of fairways.) When Woods is scuffling, the first indication is often a wayward drive that requires subsequent artistry just to make par. With the help of that improved accuracy, Woods now ranks 72nd in strokes gained on drives this year — he was 100th last year — and ninth in strokes gained from the tee to the green, picking up 1.48 shots per round before ever setting his spikes on the putting surface. Classic Tiger was always a tee-to-green monster, ranking either first or second in the category every healthy season from 2006 to 2013, so his strong performance in that category this year is another signal that Woods is returning to vintage form. It’s also a very good sign for his chances at Augusta. That’s because, as Todd Schneider wrote about for FiveThirtyEight a few years ago, the Masters often comes down to a player’s skills with the long clubs — contrary to the tournament’s reputation for being a putting contest. Great PGA Tour players generally assert themselves most on approach shots and drives anyway, gaining about 4 strokes relative to average from tee to green for every extra shot they pick up on putts. But the recent history of Masters winners also suggests that a great long game is the true prerequisite for winning the green jacket. The average winner since strokes gained was first tracked in 2004 (excluding the 2016 and 2017 winners, Danny Willett and Sergio Garcia, because they lacked enough PGA Tour rounds to qualify for official leaderboards) ranked only about 86th in putting performance per round but 35th in strokes gained off the tee, 32nd in strokes gained on approach shots and 18th in total strokes gained from tee to green. Masters winners do their best work from tee to greenStrokes gained rankings by category for Masters Tournament winners during the seasons they won, 2004-18
Strokes gained tee-to-green was the top category (or tied for the top) for 46 percent of the Masters winners over that span,2 and 62 percent of winners ranked among the Top 10 in the statistic — like Woods does this year. (This is consistent with my previous research that driving distance and approach accuracy are the two secret weapons players can possess at Augusta, causing them to play better in the Masters than their overall scoring average would predict.) I haven’t mentioned Tiger’s putting numbers yet, and with good reason. Woods used to be the greatest putter in the world, but so far this season he ranks just 74th in strokes gained with the flatstick, adding only 0.19 shots above average per round. Last year, he was better — 48th on tour — though he still wasn’t the putting maestro who once showed me and countless others the fundamentals of a great stroke. However, Augusta has frequently seen putters who rank far worse than Woods win during the era of detailed PGA Tour tracking data. (In fact, more than half of qualified Masters winners since 2004 have ranked worse than 78th in putting.) Putting performance is so random from year to year — much less from tournament to tournament or even round to round — that it’s a lot easier for a good tee-to-green player to get hot on the green for a weekend than for a good putter to suddenly have an uncharacteristically amazing weekend off the tee. Because of all this, it’s not hard to understand why Woods is a strong 12-to-1 bet to win the Masters. But it’s also not hard to imagine that this could be the 43-year-old’s last, best chance to win another green jacket. Using our research on historical major winners from a few years ago, here’s what the aging curve for championship golfers looks like: That spike in wins for players in their early 40s came from 42-year-olds Ernie Els, Darren Clarke, Payne Stewart, Tom Kite and Gary Player, and it was the last actual uptick on the chart — and Woods is now on the wrong side of it. Jack Nicklaus famously won his final major at age 46, but most great golfers are largely done winning by their early to mid-40s. And the game has only gotten younger in the twilight of Woods’s career; while the average major-winner in our data set above (through 2014) was 31.9, that number is just 29.6 in the years since. With his own early career dominance and popularity, Woods has inspired a younger generation of gifted golfers that he now must do battle with. Woods is a special talent and in the conversation for the greatest golfer ever.3 He’s playing as well heading into Augusta as he has in a long time and excelling in exactly the right categories. But between aging effects and his own injury history, he may never have a better shot at winning another Masters than he does right now. Once upon a time, Tiger was legendary for pouncing on every opportunity left in front of him. We’ll just have to see if he can summon that ability yet again. from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/tiger-woods-may-not-get-a-better-shot-at-another-green-jacket/ Before the national championship game tipped off on Sunday, things seemed to be going according to plan for Baylor and Notre Dame. Two No. 1 seeds — and two of the three teams to be ranked No. 1 during the regular season — would face off, with one seeking to cap a dominant, one-loss season, and the other aiming for its second title in as many years. Once the game began, though, practically nothing went according to plan for either team. Baylor raced out to a 15-5 lead and led by as many as 17 in the first half and 12 at halftime. The Bears dominated, getting contributions from inside (12 first-half points from center Kalani Brown) and out (5-5 shooting in the first quarter from point guard Chloe Jackson). It was the bad kind of déjà vu for Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw, whose Fighting Irish needed a 15-point comeback — the largest ever in an NCAA championship game — to take home the trophy last season. But in the second half, it was Mulkey’s team that had the bad kind of déjà vu. A year after then-senior Kristy Wallace tore her ACL in Baylor’s regular-season finale, the Bears lost Big 12 defensive player of the year Lauren Cox to a knee injury in the third quarter. Notre Dame promptly came all the way back to tie the game at 74 with 5:18 left in the fourth quarter and even briefly took a 77-76 lead with a little more than three minutes left. Baylor ultimately pulled out an 82-81 victory behind big contributions from the game’s most outstanding player in Jackson (26 points, five assists), Brown (20 points, 13 rebounds) and freshman reserve NaLyssa Smith (14 points, six rebounds). Notre Dame looked unstoppable at one point in the fourth quarter, with Marina Mabrey canning three 3-pointers in just over two minutes, but came undone at the free-throw line late, with two crucial misses in the final minute. In the end, when the confetti fell from the rafters to signal the end of the 2018-19 women’s college basketball season, everything was more or less as expected. The No. 1 overall seed hoisted the trophy, emerging out of a field that saw all of the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds advance to the Elite Eight and the two teams that had the best odds of winning a title at the outset make it to the championship game. Yet parity was rightfully the buzzword of this season: Teams like Oregon and NC State had historic years; mid-major Rice cracked the top-25 rankings for the first time, and Gonzaga hit its highest ranking in program history at No. 12; and mighty UConn was not a No. 1 seed for the first time since 2006. In the Final Four, the combined margin of victory (including the championship) was 11 points — the smallest such margin in women’s NCAA Tournament history, according to ESPN’s Stats & Information Group. Paradoxically, the 2019 national champions both rejected that parity and exemplified it. Baylor dominated its schedule from start to finish, posting a 37-1 record and finishing the season on a 29-game win streak.. The Bears claimed their ninth-straight regular-season conference title and won the Big 12 tournament for the ninth time in 11 years. The 6-foot-7 Brown and the 6-foot-4 Cox had All-America-caliber seasons, combining to average nearly 29 points and 17 rebounds per game. Behind their two interior leaders, Baylor led the country in blocks per game, assists per game, rebounding rate and opponent field-goal percentage. But as much as they dominated, Baylor also embodied the growth of the game, defeating UConn in the regular season and Notre Dame in the championship game. This is the first time that a team has beaten both the Huskies and the Fighting Irish, two of the sport’s premier programs over the past decade-plus, in the same season since Baylor did it in 2012-13. The program has now won three national championships and made four Final Fours since 2005 while reaching the Elite Eight in eight of the past 10 seasons. By anyone’s definition, Baylor should be considered in the upper echelon of programs, on par with UConn and Notre Dame. Mulkey has built her program into a powerhouse in part by recruiting well, but also by developing players and putting them in position to succeed. She signed three top-5 recruiting classes in the past four years, according to ESPN, including the nation’s No. 1 class in 2018. Yet she still found herself without an experienced option at point guard entering this season. She settled on an unorthodox solution, moving graduate transfer Jackson to point guard and teaching her the nuances of the position throughout the year. On Sunday night, Jackson proved that her coach made the right decision, committing just one turnover all game and scoring Baylor’s final 4 points. In the end, Baylor claimed the 2019 national title by the slimmest of margins,1 simultaneously proving that parity is real in the women’s game and ensuring that the Bears will be regarded as one of this decade’s elite programs. They will rebuild again in the offseason, as they lose Brown and Jackson off of this year’s team. But don’t be surprised if Baylor produces the good kind of déjà vu in seasons to come, as Mulkey has built the Bears into a perennial contender and a team that can compete with anyone — UConn and Notre Dame included. Check out our latest March Madness predictions. from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/yes-parity-was-real-this-season-but-baylor-still-dominated/ |
Jody Edgar
Hi I am Jody Edgar,33 years old from Alabama state,USA.working as female run sports blog and girl’s guide to game day. ArchivesNo Archives Categories |