Back before all that other crazy stuff happened in the fourth quarter and overtime, there was like a 30 percent chance that last night’s opener of the Pacers-Heat series was going to be known as “The Tyler Hansbrough Game.” Nah, he didn’t go full-on Nate Robinson or anything, but he did have a stretch where he hit four buckets in about a five minute stretch, keeping Indiana’s head above water during the Heat’s characteristic third-quarter surge and killing valuable time for David West on the bench. His name trended on Twitter. Reggie Miller made a reference to him being the MVP or some such. Then a couple crazy shots, a couple crazy fouls, a couple crazy defensive breakdowns, and now Tyler Hansbrough’s breakout is kinda whatever. Oh well.

I’ve long been infatuated with Tyler Hansbrough’s role on the Indiana Pacers, because I can’t remember another player in the league in a position quite like it. Usually, nominal sixth men/first men off the bench types are shooting/playmaking guards, or at the very least, big men with impressive post games like Carl Landry or Paul Millsap a couple years ago. Tyler Hansbrough is basically the Pacers’ sixth man by default, because they have no other good bench players (or even competent ones, really — would any of DJ Augustin, Orlando Johnson, Ian Mahinmi, Sam Young or Gerald Green get even spot minutes on the Heat?), but he’s definitely not a shooter or a playmaker, and his post moves are pretty pedestrian, if even that.

Still, he gets results, sort of. Taking a cursory look at Hansbrough’s per-game averages on the season, they certainly won’t blow you away — seven points, about five rebounds, 43 percent shooting and one turnover per game is pretty unremarkable stuff. Look a little deeper, though, and he starts to look decently effective. First and foremost, despite only playing the seventh-most minutes per game on the team — yes, even Gerald Green played more — he drew the second-most free throws on the team, shooting nearly four a game in his 17 minutes, good for a per-36 average of nearly eight a contest. He was one of only 38 players to shoot 300 free throws this year, and he played by far the fewest minutes of anyone on that list.  And while he’s not quite a Reggie Evans-sized monster on the glass, he certainly crashes it with abandon, grabbing the second-most offensive boards on the team. Again, he was one of only 41 players to grab 160 offensive rebounds this year, and of those 41, only the prodigious Andre Drummond played fewer minutes.

To paraphrase Trey on a recent podcast, this is basically the entirety of the Pacers’ second unit offensive strategy: Tyler Hansbrough goes running around and hopes to draw a foul. The net results of that being your entire offensive strategy for stretches of the game at a time is obviously disastrous, as is reflected by Hansbrough’s unflattering on-court/off-court plus-minus numbers. But hell, if Hansbrough’s knees-and-elbows efficiency doesn’t do its damnedest to make it slightly redeemable. In the end, he posted an above-average PER for the season (15.3) and was worth a very respectable 4.4 Win Shares on the season, with his .154 WS/48 being the third-highest on the Pacers, higher than even All-Star and budding superstar Paul George. It’s not pretty, and Tyler doesn’t do anything to make it pretty. In fact, he makes it as brutal-looking as possible.

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I’d tell you to mentally prepare yourself for a summer filled with anonymous quotes from kind folk in and around the Jets locker room who are saying horrible things, but such preparation isn’t needed. Recently, anonymous Jets vitriol has been just as much a part of summer fun as beer, bikinis, fast boats, and apple pie. If you don’t think apple pie belongs there, you’re doing it wrong.

We’re still about a month away from the official start of summer, but what the hell, let the fun begin. What say you now, nameless Jets player who hates someone?

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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.

And now for something completely different. Craig Robinson of Flip Flop Flyball gets weird and wonderful on us with this thought experiement: what if a baseball diamond had FIVE bases? No need to say much more, just open your mind and enjoy!

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Today we’re gonna take a look at relocating your team in Madden 25’s Connected Franchise mode. Moving your franchise is a big decision and it’s not an easy task to do. Sometimes things just don’t work out in your current city (no funding, small market, etc), so moving the team is the best option.

Before we begin, I should note that your team needs to be really bad before you can just up and move. Your record has to be bad, and the Fan Happiness level has to be low. So teams like the Green Bay Packers and the New England Patriots that have deep rooted ties to the city and are continuously successful probably won’t have the option to move. Teams like the Jaguars, Browns and Raiders have a better chance to move.

You’ll need to create yourself as an owner, then select “relocate”. Once there, none other than ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter questions your motive for moving, asking “You’ve been a highly successful businessman, and now you own a BFL Franchise, what’s the next step for you and this team?”

You then can pick from three answers (subject to change):

• “I’ve had a lot of success and now I want to have fun and give back to these fans and provide them with a great experience every Sunday.”   TICKET PRICE – Per Win +2%/Per Loss -5%
• “Part of being good at business is surrounding yourself with smart people, so that will continue to be priority A.  We’ll build a continual winner from the top down.” TEAM SUCCESS – Per Win +2%/Per Loss -5%
• “Business to me is turning a profit, so I want to make this franchise the one everybody thinks of first when they think of the NFL.” TEAM SUCCESS – Per Super Bowl Win +2%/Per Playoff Missed -5%

Depending on the answer you choose, you’ll hear back from the league, whether you can move or not. Here are the cities you can move to (subject to change):

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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Sergio Garcia would like to remind us that racism still exists. Unfortunately, his method for doing so was not a public service announcement, but a joke aimed at Tiger Woods that referred to fried chicken. There are two things that are awful about this: 1) The public reinforcement of an incredibly demeaning stereotype that the majority of us would love to do away with; and 2) His attempt at irreverence wasn’t even remotely funny.

It all started two weeks ago during the Third Round at The Players Championship at Sawgrass. Tiger Woods decided to take a wood out of his bag – signifying to the crowd that he was going for the green on the par-five second hole – just as Sergio Garcia was taking his swing. The crowd cheered Woods’s decision, causing Garcia to slice his shot.

During a rain delay, Garcia vented some of his frustration while speaking with the Golf Channel:

Well, obviously Tiger was on the left and it was my turn to hit. He moved all the crowd that he needed to move, I waited for that. You do have a feel when the other guy is going to hit and right as I was in the top of the back-swing, he must have pulled a wood and everybody started screaming. So that didn’t help very much.

… and so it began.

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