These can pretty much be presented without comment. It’s really fate that’s cruel in this first one (courtesy of James Mirtle):
There’s no question as to who is cruel in this second video. Those are some serious anger management issues.
The player’s name is Elizabeth Lambert–here’s an ESPN report (auto-playing video ahead) about the match. They rightfully raise two questions about these incidents: why aren’t the teammates of the fouled player standing up to Lambert, and how did she make it through the whole game with only a yellow card?
UPDATE: Phillip sent along this New York Times article in which Ms. Lambert responds to the video. The reporter goes pretty easy on her.
Let’s end the week with a bit of hockey magic. Owen Nolan (the only player born in Northern Ireland playing in the NHL, as it happens) defied his 38 years last night and scored a top ten goal of the year:
Of course, those two mincing Tampa Bay defencemen made him look pretty good, but it’s still a fantastic goal.
A while back I wrote about Couch to 5K, an iPhone app that helped me run–you guessed it–five kilometers. I’ve graduated to a new app, RunKeeper, and recorded a quick screencast about it (apologies for the mumbling):
One additional point I should have made in the video: this app really bleeds your iPhone battery. I’m told it’s because the GPS is making a query every second or two to determine your location, and that requires a lot of power.
The Canucks signed star goalie Roberto Luongo to a humongous 12-year, $64 million deal today. The many non-sports fans among my dear readers should keep reading, though, as there’s an interesting business angle to this story.
The NHL operates under a salary cap system. For the 2009-2010 season, teams aren’t permitted to pay their players a collective salary of less than $40.8 million (call that the ’salary underpants’, maybe?) and no more than $56.8 million.
This system, also used in other professional sports leagues, encourages parity and fairness among the teams. Teams in big cities like New York, can’t buy a championship by waving big money under the noses a slew of star players. On the other hand, a nefarious owner can’t, for whatever reason, operate a team on minor-league salaries. The NHL cap is only four years old but, by my estimation, so far, so good.
There are lots of ways, some legitimate and some dubious, to manipulate your salary cap ‘hit’–what your salaries are counted as against the cap–throughout the year. There’s even a slangy job title for the numbers man inside your organization who pays attention to these things–he’s a ‘capologist’.
A Handy Loophole
Most hockey players hang up the skates around the age of 35 or so. So why have the Canucks signed a 12-year contract with the 30-year-old Luongo that would have him playing through his 43rd birthday?
The deal, you see, is front-loaded. Luongo will earn much more money in the first few years of his contract than the last few. In fact, in the last two years, he’s only (forgive me, but this is professional sports) earn $2 million and $1 million respectively.
However, when the league calculates how a player’s salary impacts the salary cap, they take the average per year salary. When his contract kicks in next year, despite the fact Luongo makes $7 million in the first year, the ‘cap hit’ the league counts is only $5.33 million. This gives the Canucks valuable flexibility in managing the salaries of the other 22 players on the roster.
Will Luongo play until he’s 43? Almost certainly not. He’ll retire when he’s ready, and decline however much money is left on his contract.
It’s a loophole, and one that’s being exploited by several teams at the moment. It will be closed in the next few years, but everyone expects these existing super-long contracts to be grandfathered in.
Training Camp is Just Around the Corner
With Luongo signed long term, I like how the team is shaping up this fall. They recently acquired some defencemen who should be able to fill Ohlund’s skates, and the signing of Mikael Samuelsson seems like a wise move. It would be great if Cody Hodgson or Michael Grabner could make the team, too.
Luongo’s deal makes blue-chip prospect goalie Cody Schneider a high-value, tradeable asset. I expect GM Mike Gillis to hold off until well into the season before the goalie is moved, though. Gillis will assess the team, decide what they need, and use Schneider to buy it.
What do you think? Is the Luongo super-deal a good thing?
This weekend we were in Seattle. I watched a little American TV in the hotel room, and caught some of ESPN’s Sports Center. Among the other highlights, I saw footage from Women’s National Basketball Association or WNBA.
While I like hockey and soccer, I’m not much of a basketball fan. I could name a half-dozen current NBA players, but couldn’t tell you who the top five teams are. I know even less–well, nothing–about the WNBA. I don’t think that’s a gender bias–I watch women’s international soccer, for example. It’s more just a symptom of the leagues’ relative visibility.
Watching the WNBA highlights, I started wondering about a bunch of things: how many teams are there? How much do the players get paid? Is the league on solid financial footing? Who are the league’s superstars? Does the WNBA have a television contract?
Join me then, on my little tour of discovery regarding the WNBA. Most of this information comes from the WNBA’s website and Wikipedia entry.
When did the league start?
The first game was 12 years ago, on June 21, 1997. The Los Angeles Sparks beat the New York Liberty, 67-57. It wasn’t the first women’s basketball league. That distinction belongs to the short-lived WBL. The league launched with eight teams. The Eastern conference had the Charlotte Sting, Cleveland Rockers, Houston Comets and New York Liberty while the Western Conference was comprised of the Los Angeles Sparks, Phoenix Mercury, Sacramento Monarchs and Utah Starzz. The ‘Starzz’ may be the worst team name in the history of sports.
How many teams are there today?
Thirteen. Eight teams have folded or moved over the years, including four of the originals: Charlotte, Cleveland, Houston and Utah (cursed, no doubt, by their awful name). New teams have emerged, and there’s the possibility of future teams in Tulsa, Toronto, Baltimore and Nashville.
How many players are on a roster?
Eleven, and all are active. This means, I gather, that they can all play in a given game. The NBA has a 12-man active roster, and teams can keep three players on the inactive list.
How much do players earn in the WNBA?
The 2009 salary cap is $803,000. If you divide it evenly among the thirteen players–though it’s probably weighted toward four to six starters–you get about $60,000 a year. The average rookie salary is reportedly $36,500, and the maximum salary is $95,000. That’s obviously minor-league money, and reasonably similar to what the average CFL player makes (though the quarterbacks and other star players make a lot more). That said, the season only runs from training camps in May to the finals in late September. Apparently a lot of women spend the winter playing in Europe.
How many people attend an average game?
Average attendance is about 8000 people a game, with the Los Angeles Sparks and the (ahem) Washington Mystics being the most well-attended franchises. I couldn’t find any really reliable information about fan demographics, but this page reports that the audience is 78% female. According to this site (which features the phrase “I call on all my Sapphic sisters”) and USA Today, gay women are, statistically, over-represented. This Flickr search seems to reinforce the fact of a predominantly female audience.
Who is the WNBA’s star player?
It looks like that’s probably Tina Thompson, who’s the second all-time leading scorer behind Lisa Leslie, who just retired. Apparently an alliterative name is important to WNBA success.
This might be the first in an infrequent series of “Darren learns about” stuff. What do you think?
Let’s be clear on something: I hate exercise. I have ever since Phys Ed class in high school. It was my poorest class–I probably averaged a C+. Whenever we did any kind of long distance running, I would usually come third to last in the class. I’d beat the corpulent Chinese kid and an asthmatic Brit with skin the colour of flourescent light.
I actually don’t mind competitive (though not too competitive) sports like soccer or Ultimate frisbee, but lately my schedule has prohibited much of that. And hiking is nice.
These days I go to the gym twice a week, and loathe every minute of it. It’s a necessary evil, though, and I’m planning on adding some cardiovascular activity to the routine.
When we lived in Morocco, I did most of the Couch to 5K running plan jogging barefoot on the beach. It’s an interval program where you start with lots of walking and a little running and, after nine (though I’ll probably take 12) weeks, you’re running five kilometres.
Because it’s an interval program, you spend a lot of time glancing at your watch and saying to yourself “okay, run until the second hand goes past the three, twice”. I found it a little tricky to focus on the audio book or podcast I was listening to when this time-tracking sub-routine was always running in my head. And the audio book or podcast is critical, because it’s the only enjoyable aspect of exercising.
I’m embarking on the Couch to 5K routine again. This time, I’m going to do so armed with this nifty little iPhone app:
It provides vocal cues–in male voice, female voice or beeps–to tell you when to switch from walking to running and vice versa. You can listen to music or other audio and it just interrupts for a moment to tell you to slow down or speed up.
I’ll still hate jogging, but this will make my morning runs 4.6% less excruciating. Which is a good deal, at $1.99 for the app.
For reasons I can’t quite grasp, I enjoy watching the FIFA World Cup more than any other sporting event. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the most-watched sporting event (and, quite, possibly, any event) in the world. The final is as close as I’ll probably ever get to the shared experience of the Moon landing. Or maybe it’s just that the football/soccer is terrific, and the stakes are as high as they get.
It’s got nothing to do with national pride, because Canada’s men’s team has only ever qualified once, in 1986. They were knocked out in the earliest ‘group phase’, and in fact never scored a goal. I live in hope that they’ll at least make it back to the World Cup in my lifetime.
For those unfamiliar with the tournament, 32 national teams qualify. This time around, those 32 are whittled down through regional competitions from 204 member nations over a year and a half leading up to the World Cup finals. Here’s where they come from:
Europe: 13 places
Africa: 5 places (and South Africa, the host nation)
South America: 4 or 5 places
Asia: 4 or 5 places
North, Central American and Caribbean: 3 or 4 places
Oceania: 0 or 1 place
The selection process is incredibly baroque–it’s worthy of a Common Craft video. However, this Wikipedia article does an exquisite job of laying out all the permutations, and staying up to date with the ongoing matches. If you’re supporting a particular nation, or are remotely interested in the competition, this (combined, perhaps, with the newly-revamped FootyTube) is a terrific way to keep abreast of each nation’s shifting fortunes.
To answer my own question, as of today, only five teams have qualified for the tournament: Australia, Japan, South Korea, Netherlands and the hosts, South Africa.
A quick OCD aside: there are actually 208 FIFA members–Brunei, Laos, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines failed to register for the tournament. Wikipedia lists 203 sovereign states, so now I’m curious about the members on the FIFA list who aren’t on the list of sovereign states (and vice versa). A few examples of non-countries on FIFA’s list include the Faroe Islands, Palestine and Bermuda. I’d be curious to find an exhaustive comparison of the two lists.
There’s a back lane behind our house. It’s an unusual feature on the west coast, and presumably it’s a reflection of the neighbourhood being at least a hundred years old. As children have done for at least that long, there’s a couple of kids who haul nets, sticks and a tennis ball into the lane to play hockey. They’ve even chalked out a little ice rink, with faceoff circles and a centre ice line.
As you probably know, the NHL playoffs are winding down. In fact, if Detroit beats the Pittsburgh Penguins tomorrow night, they’ll hold aloft their fifth Stanley Cup in 12 years–a remarkable feat.
The lane is sloped, so you pay a price when you miss the more southerly net. I instantly recognized this as a kid’s decent interpretation of the Penguins’ logo, which appears at centre ice in Pittsburgh’s Mellon Arena:
Here’s another view, for some perspective. Clearly the kids are pretending to be Crosby and Malkin, not Zetterberg and Datsyuk.
I was a pretty solitary kid growing up. I preferred to tape out a goal on one wall of our two-car carport, and shoot tennis balls at it from the far side. If a ball took a particularly bad bounce, it ended up on the steep, wooded slope between our house and the neighbours. I had to psych myself up to retrieve those wayward balls. The neighbours had a surly Doberman named Sasha, and she didn’t care for children.
In a recent piece in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell combines the tales of a high school basketball team, King David and Lawrence of Arabia to explore how and why underdogs beat favourites:
“And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.
Now, those of you who are familiar with my writing will know that this practice of talking about X by discussing Y is my only rhetorical move.
There’s also a wonderful piece by Adam Gopnik (probably my favourite magazine writer) about razors and innovation in that issue. Unfortunately, it’s not online, but it’s in the May 11th issue, should you get your hands on a copy.
