There are a few of these videos from Amir Johnson’s trip to Google’s new Toronto offices, but I like this one the best, and not just because it features my current favorite track off a spectacular rap record, even though I will admit that is a really big part of it. No, I like this one the best because I think it would be great to hang out in a secret closet party with Amir Johnson, and I’m pretty sure he would actually throw one. I mean, if he’s going to spend an hour getting put in to zombie makeup, he must know of somewhere with a bookshelf dance club. Hit me up, bro.

(via Raptors Republic)

Today’s edition of the Getting Blanked podcast is a “who’s who” of Major League baseball talent. Sure we talk about Jose Bautista for a while, but after that it is all Worley, all the time – with a little MONTERO thrown in for good measure.

Listen to the podcast directly here.

Subscribe to Getting Blanked on iTunes to ensure the podcast, daily video show and other life-changing materials goes straight to your device of choice each week. Or, you can hook up the RSS feed here if that is more your style.

Some (underlined) Mint Musical Interludes courtesy of The Constantines and Arts & Crafts Records and Deathwish Records. Check out the full catologue and buy what you like. It’s the right thing to do.

I don’t believe in fate or destiny, but I understand why others might. Sometimes, seemingly unrelated circumstances coincide so perfectly to form a singular result that it’s difficult to not believe in an unseen and powerful guidance shaping the outcome.

Like many Canadians of a similar background and age to my own, I loved open-wheel racing before I even understood that it was open-wheel racing that I loved. Also, like many Canadians of a similar background and age to my own, my love for North America’s premier source for open-wheel racing came to an abrupt halt in the mid-nineties when the departure of Jacques Villeneuve from the Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) series conspired with the introduction of the Indy Racing League (IRL) – and subsequent desecration of the Indy 500 – to reduce the relevance of the sport on the entire continent.

Eighteen years later, the IndyCar Series is haunted by this past, even as it strives to return to a time when its brand of racing attracted new fans and captivated long-time supporters. Leading the charge to fight these ghosts and bring the sport back to an era of increased public interest is a 26-year-old driver from Oakville, Ontario – James Hinchcliffe.

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We pride ourselves on fine tattoo reporting around here. From Von Miller’s arm chicken to the largest and stretchiest Dolphins tat ever, we document the history of NFL ink. It takes hard work, perseverance, and the ability to click a computer mouse and use a keyboard. Advanced stuff.

But this is the first time I’m not sure if I should be frightened, or impressed. Both?

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If there’s one thing the University of Cincinnati baseball team is good at, it’s knowing how to sabotage post-game interviews. They finished 24-32 this season, but their best plays occur after the game in their post-game interviews. Just watch the video and check out the skill.

I understand that Brad Richards has not played well for the Rangers in the eyes of John Tortorella. There’s a reason he’s been demoted and given minimal minutes. But now it’s come to this:

Brad Richards says he is not playing tonight. He said Tortorella called him this morning to tell him.

— Dan Rosen (@drosennhl) May 23, 2013

“Nothing is over, work harder and try my best to never let it happen again,” Richards said.

— Dan Rosen (@drosennhl) May 23, 2013

Re. Richards, this was brewing. He was on 4th line b/c he wasn’t playing well enough to be in top-9. Next logical step was the press box.

— Dan Rosen (@drosennhl) May 23, 2013

With this move, we’re left to believe one or a couple of a few things about the well-compensated captain’s situation:

A) John Tortorella is right right in his assessment that the Rangers are better served with Brad Richards not playing at all. They’re better off with Arron Asham, or Mats Zuccarello or whoever they decide is more deserving than him.

B) John Tortorella is right that he’s not playing well, but wrong in healthy scratching him because he’s at least better than whichever 12th forward you plug in for him.

C) John Tortorella is entirely wrong (and has likely hurt the play of Richards, or at least the team, with his management of him).

D) John Tortorella likes attention.

Personally, I subscribe to B. I also subscribe to C and D, though. “Over-coaching” is a word that springs to mind.

The point that I made on the podcast about Richards was pretty basic: if you’re John Tortorella, you either believe that Brad Richards is a good NHL player playing poorly, in which case you should play him because good players who’ve been playing badly will have an over-correction of sort to get back to their average (or at least will play closer to how they normally do),

OR,

You believe the player playing badly is just a bad hockey player, in which case this “bad” is normal and you can expect to see more of the same and therefore no correction.

Brad Richards is not a “bad” hockey player. Quite good, in fact.

If Richards has been playing bad (it’s tough to tell given his usage of late, tough to get into a game as a skill guy playing eight minutes), then it’s only a matter of time before he has a good game. By putting him in the stands, you avoid getting the guy’s bounce-back games, piss him off in the process, and in Tortorella’s case, probably make one of your last Become The Center of Attention moves of your time with the Rangers.

I think making him a healthy scratch is intentionally fielding a lesser line-up, which is putting yourself ahead of the team as coach, which is selfish and wrong.

And you?

I try not to do standalone posts on other blog posts as much, but I think this is such a cool idea, and a good opportunity to encourage others to try something like this. One of Counter Attack’s favourite analytics blog 11tegen11 has been fooling around with open-source statistics software R and ran this little simulation:

Imagine this thought experiment…

It’s August 10, 2012 and the 2012/13 Eredivisie is about to start in Tilburg, where newly promoted Willem II is about to host NAC Breda. Just prior to the kick-off, we press an imaginary ‘save’ button and quickly fast-forward to May 12, 2013, the final Match Day.

Here we reload our ‘save game’ from August 10, 2012 and we run the same season again. And again, and again and again… A million times.

Using bookmaker odds as an estimate for team strength, we can do just that. After all, bookmaker odds can’t be too far off, otherwise we would be allowed an easy occasion to make some cheap money exploiting them.

In fact, as we’ve seen in our Friday Football Predictions model, the betting odds are very, very good, and most decent publicly available predictive models don’t err and stray too far from the regular lines. After all, despite all the cool guys who go on about how the best betting models aren’t made public, a betting line is a betting line: it’s crafted for maximum loss protection. It’s as accurate as people who worry a lot about losing money can make it.

In any case, our intrepid blogger ran the Eredivisie a million times, and discovered that, on the odds, PSV would win the league this past season over half the time. Sad sack relegation losers Willem II and VVV wouldn’t win once.

More importantly, it’s a graphic means of distinguishing process from results: yes, Ajax won the league this season, but PSV was arguably superior. The sample size afforded by the use of the software R provides a very good illustration of this. If you want to see the results in full, click here.

I love this because this is really intelligent use of publicly available data and software to make a very important point. I first heard about R by chance while at the Sloan MIT Sports Analytics conference, and I urge anyone who wants to tinker around with some interesting approaches to tinker around with it.

This is what analytics should be about.

In the latest installment of RaptorBlog Radio, Drew, Oliver and I get together to discuss the “sort of” firing of Bryan Colangelo, the current state of the Raptors organization, who may replace Colangelo, and what might become of Dwane Casey.

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