Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
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On Coaching #74: Alex Hutchinson - Good podcast on the balance between going by the watch and training by feel in distance running. As someone who may sometimes go too far on the feel end of things, there was a lot of good stuff in here.
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Hockey Analytics: A Game-Changing Perspective - This book focuses on the next steps for hockey analytics emphasizing three key areas - transition, clear paths and power plays. The main takeaway for me was how impactful learning from player tracking data will be once it becomes available.
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How to Wrestle Your Data From Data Brokers, Silicon Valley — and Cambridge Analytica - Steps on how to get your personal data from various companies. For all the talk recently on privacy and personal data it’s good to know the types of data they are collecting and what they are trying to guess about your views. Some of these companies may not know as much about you as they let on.
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The fraudulent claims made by IBM about Watson and AI - Be skeptical of any hype about the abilities of artificial intelligence.
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Bad doctors who cross the border can hide their dirty secrets. We dug them up - Toronto Star investigation into doctors with disciplinary and malpractice histories in the US who are able to practice in Canada.
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Baseball Therapy: Bunt, Joey, Bunt! - With more teams using extreme shifts, I’ve wondered if left handed hitters should just bunt down the third base line. They may only need to do it a few times before teams adjust and stop shifting so much, which is a good result for the hitter. This article has the detailed math on the situation.
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The Tyranny of Metrics - Case studies on where we go wrong using metrics as a measure of performace. Relying too much on metrics can lead to too much focus on the short term, ignoring what can’t be measured, gaming the stats and risk aversion. A lot of the book can be summed up by this quote - “There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits. The things that gets measured may draw effort away from the things we really care about. And measurement may provide us with distorted knowledge - knowledge that seems solid but it actually deceptive.”