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45 thoughts on “April 24, 2018: WGOJ”
With Logan Morrison struggling, it occurred to me that perhaps some might be wondering how Kennys Vargas is doing in AAA. The answer is not well at all. He's batting .173/.286/.308 in 52 at-bats. Two homers, eight walks, twenty strikeouts. I know people don't worry about batter strikeouts the way they used to, but a strikeout percentage of nearly .400 seems to me to be not very good.
Though still better than Sanó's 43.7%.
The NBA isn't fun to watch when they decide not to enforce the rules. Those screens by Capela are awful.
As a counter-argument, those KG years were pretty fun despite KG's highly illegal screening.
Those calls are not the reason the Wolves lost. That being said, it's infuriating when there's clearly a talent gap that's widened because the refs give favorable calls to the other team. I absolutely despise Harden's game. Guy's freakishly athletic and he's a drop dead shooter. He doesn't need to get extra steps, and bailed out with foul shots constantly to be good.
Yes. They would have lost anyway. Watching them get away with that stuff makes not want to watch at all.
Same.
This was essentially what made me give up on the NBA. The reffing was far too Kafkaesque to make watching basketball feel like a leisure activity.
YMMV, obviously.
For me, there is tremendous artistry in the Warriors' style, and still a lot in the Spurs'. I'm sure the Emeritus will chime in at some point in defense of King James, whose tremendous talent and will enables him to carry mediocre teams to the heights on a regular basis. That can be compelling viewing too.
and then there is the ridiculous athleticism on display almost every night. Sure, some of the reffing (and adaptive play) bugs me, and sure, the iso-ball stuff is boring and there are some really annoying personalities. But teh Talents!
if it were up to me, every team would model their style of play after the Warriors and their organization after the Spurs and Warriors. Motion offense with lots of ball movement, off-the-ball movement, and unselfish play is so fun to watch.
And, let's be honest here, the reffing in the NBA is miles better than at the college level.
But yeah, my mileage is the same as yours and why I am on board the Jazz train right now.
I agree. Ideally I'd want a team with the ball movement of the Warriors or Spurs with the ruthless shot efficiency chart of the Rockets. Instead, I get to watch Teague pound the air out of the ball, Crawford dribble into contested 19 footers, and listen to Thibs scream from the sidelines.
One of my favorite sequences from last night was Teague, even with that bum hand from earlier in the game, pounding the ball then slowly start making a drive. He went right past KAT and didn't even look his way despite KAT being WIDE OPEN at the top of the three point arc. Instead he continued his stupid, slow drive and biffed a contested layup.
And that is why I think Towns has not been good. Part playoff jitters and part 'my teammates suck and it has me dispirited".
I realize that with a high-usage player like Jimothy Buckets, you're going to have some f*ckball. But good god, getting it from Crawful and #25 all the time is absolutely infuriating. Moreso than when it's Jimmy!
They need to be feeding the ball nonstop to Towns and Wiggins. They need opportunities. They're the future of this team, not Rose and Crawful.
I'd rather see Wiggins as the future of the team in the sense that they are able to swindle another team and get a player who can join Towns as the future. But I agree. It doesn't matter anyway, though, since I'm bailing for as long as I have to as soon as they ink #25 to a 3-year contract.
True. I'm not in love with Wiggins' game, and he shows flashes, but ugh. I don't think Thibs is going to get "it" out of him if it's in there.
Rubio / LaVine / Buckets / Bjelly / Towns could have been SO FUN...
For my money, the NBA is the greatest major sports league in the country. I'm not so bummed by the officiating. It's a tough league to officiate because of how damned good the players are. The league is in an absolutely terrific place right now. They still have the King, who is arguably the greatest player ever and almost impossibly still in his prime after 15 seasons in the league. He's not what I would call a scorer, but he just led the league in points scored. He had career highs in assists and rebounds. Fifteen years in. He's played more minutes than Hakeem. Still on top.
The Warriors have been great, the Rockets are ascendant, although their window of opportunity seems relatively small. The 76ers feel like they are about to be the best team in the league. The Wizards are one player away, I think, from challenging the 76ers place. The Bucks have a tremendous talent to build around. The Knicks suck! Utah seems like they are ready for a long stretch of being a playoff team.
Plus, the game itself. The impossible size of the players. The unbelievable range that players have. It's astounding to me.
All of this is true but if it feels like the officiating is operating under two different sets of rules, it becomes an exhibition instead of a competition.
I don't in any way mean to besmirch the play. The athleticism is amazing. The teams doing it the "right" way are amazing. I think what Stick says is on point, as to the league as a whole.
But.
When you care about the outcome of a game or series... it gets a lot tougher to deal with things like officiating. When you're rooting for sporting entertainment, regardless of outcome, that matters a lot less. Instead of a break going for or against you, it's just another thing that happened. So maybe I shouldn't say I gave up the NBA. What I gave up was following a team, because the league and reffing made rooting for that team feel like a perpetual exercise in injustice.
The Rockets scored 50 points in the third quarter. I was rooting for the Wolves, but my takeaway was that Houston's ability to hit shot after shot after shot was the determinative factor in the outcome.
Despite your response, I suspect that you understand my point isn't "officiating determined that outcome" or even something like "officiating determines most/many outcomes."
I think Stick nailed it when he said that it's a tough league to officiate because of how talented the players are. I would add that many NBA coaches are quite adept at offensive strategy to get favorable mismatches, which also puts a ton of pressure on the refs when those mismatches lead to penetration into the paint (as they so often do).
The hardest thing in the world to call consistently (and unbiasedly) is block/charge. You could call a foul on damn near every play in the paint.
What tends to bother me (and us?) are the alleged/apparent homerism (I think there is solid evidence of a home-team bias in call outcomes; some of that is the players playing differently at home than on the road) and the alleged/apparent bias in favor of stars. Call traveling! Call palming/carrying!!!
But the contested nature of block/charge will never go away. As long as the game is based on isolation play and pick-and-roll, there will be a lot of contact in the paint. Again, part of why I love the Warriors and Spurs so much. When the ball moves and when players off the ball move, the chess match is much, much faster and you end up with lots of open shots.
I was sitting at my buddy’s restaurant, with the Wolves on one television, the Twins on another and reading about Leipold’s GM plans the phone, thinking, “What the hell am I doing? Why do I even pay attention!? My free time is finite ... this isn’t fun. There haven’t been enough positive outcomes in my 30! years of sporting fandom to justify this garbage. Do I really get anything from suffering ‘with’ the team; not being a bandwagon fan?”
This same thought occurred to me about 6 years ago. I stopped buying my shirsy per year, and stopped paying for mlb.tv. Without this place I wouldn’t have nearly the connection to sports that I currently have, and that’s pretty minimal. When the boyos do well it’s exciting, but I can’t get worked up about why the management doesn’t do something about it.
There's a lot (of good) to be said for bandwagon fandom.
Yup, best decision I ever made.
That's why I carry this:
Noice.
So, tomorrow off on my first trip to Europe: four days in Sweden to visit cousins and see with my own eyes where the Runners originated, a couple days in Copenhagen and a dinner with family friends there, and six days in London where my Anglophile wife will show me around and where we'll have dinner with a college buddy. Really looking forward to the whole shebang
On my quick sprint through that part of Europe, Copenhagen ended up being a surprise favorite for me.
When my cousin said to fly into Copenhagen (only an hour away from them) instead of Stockholm, I knew we had to schedule in a couple days of exploring there as well.
What jobu said. I haven’t been back to scandahovia since 1999, but Copenhagen was a highlight.
When in London make sure to visit the Sir John Soan museum in Lincoln’s Inn Field. Totally awesome experience, and free(!). See any play you can at the globe.
That sounds awesome. Enjoy.
A couple years after it crashed onto 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko's surface, people are still doing cool things with Rosetta's data:
#ROSETTA 😍 OSIRIS #67P/CHURYUMOV-GERASIMENKO new albums 😍--ROSETTA EXTENSION 2 MTP030-- Miércoles 1 Junio 2016 all filters stacked pic.twitter.com/Bf173Z5g79
What you’re looking at is the surface of the comet 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is orbited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe. The photo comes from Rosetta’s OSIRIS, or Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System. The raw data was collected on June 1, 2016, and posted publicly on March 22 of this year.
Why is it snowing on a comet?
You mean why is it outgassing on a comet
[T]hree kinds of specks. The stars in the background belong to the constellation Canis Major, according to ESA senior advisor Mark McCaughrean. Some of the foreground stuff could be streaks from high-energy particles striking the camera—it’s a charge-coupled device (CCD), so even invisible particles can leave streaks in the results (more on that here). And some could be dust from the comet itself.
The dots moving the same direction (generally downward) are the stars.
The streaks that appear to be going random directions are the high-energy particles (aka cosmic rays). They're the particles flying around in space that our atmosphere and magnetic field help protect us from.
The slower-moving blobs that look like they are mostly moving left-to-right or right-to-left are the dust/snow.
Images like that really help you understand how much the atmosphere protects us. That's a lot of streaks. I don't know the time scales, but I'm assuming no more than hours.
It’s way less time than that. The whole animation is made of 40 images, each of which has 12.5 seconds of exposure time. So those streaks you see are about 8.3 minutes worth of particles hitting the camera. Even with the protection we get on the surface of the Earth, images from the sensitive digital cameras telescopes use can only have exposure times of 30-45 minutes per image, because if you run much longer than that you end up with too many cosmic ray streaks for your image to be useable.
Maybe because I follow him positioned it, but Phil Plait responding directly below the main tweet politely asking for a very detailed explanation is my favorite part of this. Well, that the whole comet thing.
With Logan Morrison struggling, it occurred to me that perhaps some might be wondering how Kennys Vargas is doing in AAA. The answer is not well at all. He's batting .173/.286/.308 in 52 at-bats. Two homers, eight walks, twenty strikeouts. I know people don't worry about batter strikeouts the way they used to, but a strikeout percentage of nearly .400 seems to me to be not very good.
Though still better than Sanó's 43.7%.
The NBA isn't fun to watch when they decide not to enforce the rules. Those screens by Capela are awful.
As a counter-argument, those KG years were pretty fun despite KG's highly illegal screening.
Those calls are not the reason the Wolves lost. That being said, it's infuriating when there's clearly a talent gap that's widened because the refs give favorable calls to the other team. I absolutely despise Harden's game. Guy's freakishly athletic and he's a drop dead shooter. He doesn't need to get extra steps, and bailed out with foul shots constantly to be good.
Yes. They would have lost anyway. Watching them get away with that stuff makes not want to watch at all.
Same.
This was essentially what made me give up on the NBA. The reffing was far too Kafkaesque to make watching basketball feel like a leisure activity.
YMMV, obviously.
For me, there is tremendous artistry in the Warriors' style, and still a lot in the Spurs'. I'm sure the Emeritus will chime in at some point in defense of King James, whose tremendous talent and will enables him to carry mediocre teams to the heights on a regular basis. That can be compelling viewing too.
and then there is the ridiculous athleticism on display almost every night. Sure, some of the reffing (and adaptive play) bugs me, and sure, the iso-ball stuff is boring and there are some really annoying personalities. But teh Talents!
if it were up to me, every team would model their style of play after the Warriors and their organization after the Spurs and Warriors. Motion offense with lots of ball movement, off-the-ball movement, and unselfish play is so fun to watch.
And, let's be honest here, the reffing in the NBA is miles better than at the college level.
But yeah, my mileage is the same as yours and why I am on board the Jazz train right now.
I agree. Ideally I'd want a team with the ball movement of the Warriors or Spurs with the ruthless shot efficiency chart of the Rockets. Instead, I get to watch Teague pound the air out of the ball, Crawford dribble into contested 19 footers, and listen to Thibs scream from the sidelines.
One of my favorite sequences from last night was Teague, even with that bum hand from earlier in the game, pounding the ball then slowly start making a drive. He went right past KAT and didn't even look his way despite KAT being WIDE OPEN at the top of the three point arc. Instead he continued his stupid, slow drive and biffed a contested layup.
And that is why I think Towns has not been good. Part playoff jitters and part 'my teammates suck and it has me dispirited".
I realize that with a high-usage player like Jimothy Buckets, you're going to have some f*ckball. But good god, getting it from Crawful and #25 all the time is absolutely infuriating. Moreso than when it's Jimmy!
They need to be feeding the ball nonstop to Towns and Wiggins. They need opportunities. They're the future of this team, not Rose and Crawful.
I'd rather see Wiggins as the future of the team in the sense that they are able to swindle another team and get a player who can join Towns as the future. But I agree. It doesn't matter anyway, though, since I'm bailing for as long as I have to as soon as they ink #25 to a 3-year contract.
True. I'm not in love with Wiggins' game, and he shows flashes, but ugh. I don't think Thibs is going to get "it" out of him if it's in there.
Rubio / LaVine / Buckets / Bjelly / Towns could have been SO FUN...
For my money, the NBA is the greatest major sports league in the country. I'm not so bummed by the officiating. It's a tough league to officiate because of how damned good the players are. The league is in an absolutely terrific place right now. They still have the King, who is arguably the greatest player ever and almost impossibly still in his prime after 15 seasons in the league. He's not what I would call a scorer, but he just led the league in points scored. He had career highs in assists and rebounds. Fifteen years in. He's played more minutes than Hakeem. Still on top.
The Warriors have been great, the Rockets are ascendant, although their window of opportunity seems relatively small. The 76ers feel like they are about to be the best team in the league. The Wizards are one player away, I think, from challenging the 76ers place. The Bucks have a tremendous talent to build around. The Knicks suck! Utah seems like they are ready for a long stretch of being a playoff team.
Plus, the game itself. The impossible size of the players. The unbelievable range that players have. It's astounding to me.
All of this is true but if it feels like the officiating is operating under two different sets of rules, it becomes an exhibition instead of a competition.
I don't in any way mean to besmirch the play. The athleticism is amazing. The teams doing it the "right" way are amazing. I think what Stick says is on point, as to the league as a whole.
But.
When you care about the outcome of a game or series... it gets a lot tougher to deal with things like officiating. When you're rooting for sporting entertainment, regardless of outcome, that matters a lot less. Instead of a break going for or against you, it's just another thing that happened. So maybe I shouldn't say I gave up the NBA. What I gave up was following a team, because the league and reffing made rooting for that team feel like a perpetual exercise in injustice.
The Rockets scored 50 points in the third quarter. I was rooting for the Wolves, but my takeaway was that Houston's ability to hit shot after shot after shot was the determinative factor in the outcome.
Despite your response, I suspect that you understand my point isn't "officiating determined that outcome" or even something like "officiating determines most/many outcomes."
I think Stick nailed it when he said that it's a tough league to officiate because of how talented the players are. I would add that many NBA coaches are quite adept at offensive strategy to get favorable mismatches, which also puts a ton of pressure on the refs when those mismatches lead to penetration into the paint (as they so often do).
The hardest thing in the world to call consistently (and unbiasedly) is block/charge. You could call a foul on damn near every play in the paint.
What tends to bother me (and us?) are the alleged/apparent homerism (I think there is solid evidence of a home-team bias in call outcomes; some of that is the players playing differently at home than on the road) and the alleged/apparent bias in favor of stars. Call traveling! Call palming/carrying!!!
But the contested nature of block/charge will never go away. As long as the game is based on isolation play and pick-and-roll, there will be a lot of contact in the paint. Again, part of why I love the Warriors and Spurs so much. When the ball moves and when players off the ball move, the chess match is much, much faster and you end up with lots of open shots.
I was sitting at my buddy’s restaurant, with the Wolves on one television, the Twins on another and reading about Leipold’s GM plans the phone, thinking, “What the hell am I doing? Why do I even pay attention!? My free time is finite ... this isn’t fun. There haven’t been enough positive outcomes in my 30! years of sporting fandom to justify this garbage. Do I really get anything from suffering ‘with’ the team; not being a bandwagon fan?”
This same thought occurred to me about 6 years ago. I stopped buying my shirsy per year, and stopped paying for mlb.tv. Without this place I wouldn’t have nearly the connection to sports that I currently have, and that’s pretty minimal. When the boyos do well it’s exciting, but I can’t get worked up about why the management doesn’t do something about it.
There's a lot (of good) to be said for bandwagon fandom.
Yup, best decision I ever made.
That's why I carry this:
Noice.
So, tomorrow off on my first trip to Europe: four days in Sweden to visit cousins and see with my own eyes where the Runners originated, a couple days in Copenhagen and a dinner with family friends there, and six days in London where my Anglophile wife will show me around and where we'll have dinner with a college buddy. Really looking forward to the whole shebang
On my quick sprint through that part of Europe, Copenhagen ended up being a surprise favorite for me.
When my cousin said to fly into Copenhagen (only an hour away from them) instead of Stockholm, I knew we had to schedule in a couple days of exploring there as well.
What jobu said. I haven’t been back to scandahovia since 1999, but Copenhagen was a highlight.
When in London make sure to visit the Sir John Soan museum in Lincoln’s Inn Field. Totally awesome experience, and free(!). See any play you can at the globe.
That sounds awesome. Enjoy.
A couple years after it crashed onto 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko's surface, people are still doing cool things with Rosetta's data:
This is cool.
What is this?
This.
Why is it snowing on a comet?
You mean why is it outgassing on a comet
The dots moving the same direction (generally downward) are the stars.
The streaks that appear to be going random directions are the high-energy particles (aka cosmic rays). They're the particles flying around in space that our atmosphere and magnetic field help protect us from.
The slower-moving blobs that look like they are mostly moving left-to-right or right-to-left are the dust/snow.
Images like that really help you understand how much the atmosphere protects us. That's a lot of streaks. I don't know the time scales, but I'm assuming no more than hours.
It’s way less time than that. The whole animation is made of 40 images, each of which has 12.5 seconds of exposure time. So those streaks you see are about 8.3 minutes worth of particles hitting the camera. Even with the protection we get on the surface of the Earth, images from the sensitive digital cameras telescopes use can only have exposure times of 30-45 minutes per image, because if you run much longer than that you end up with too many cosmic ray streaks for your image to be useable.
Maybe because I follow him positioned it, but Phil Plait responding directly below the main tweet politely asking for a very detailed explanation is my favorite part of this. Well, that the whole comet thing.
Happy Jose Berrios Day!
This. Is. Awesome.