In any given year there are more than 500,000 American boys playing on almost 20,000 high school basketball teams, and fewer than 2% of them will make it to March Madness. Only 60 young men get drafted by an NBA team each summer, and in the most recent draft a third of those spots went to international players. The numbers suggest the funnel from the Amateur Athletic Union into the NBA is one of the narrowest in all of sports.
Things aren't going well for the Calgary Flames, the professional Canadian hockey team founded in 1972. Despite pushing for a playoff spot late last year, the Flames only have three wins through fourteen games this season, securing an early spot as the worst team in the National Hockey League so far. Some fans think this may be the sign of early-season tanking - when a team loses on purpose in order to get a better draft pick in the summer.
Then you think, well, who would be counting that? Well, the NBA does. NBA teams do and count just about everything you see on the court. And nowadays, it's really easy to drown yourself in stats, but writer Shea Serrano instead wants you to stop counting basketball numbers and start getting in touch with how watching basketball makes you feel.
From tracking player movement with eerie precision to whispering tactical tweaks into analysts' ears, artificial intelligence is now as common at training grounds as bibs and banter. Clubs crunch mountains of data to predict fatigue, refine pressing triggers, even scout teenagers before they've finished growing. VAR, of course, remains the clumsy cousin still learning when clear and obvious' actually means clear and obvious. But love it or loathe it, AI isn't leaving the pitch anytime soon.
Some transactions result in meteoric success, like the Thunder and Celtics acquiring players like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jayson Tatum through trades.
The opening games produced statistical outliers compared to how these teams usually play, making it crucial to examine metrics to assess each team’s performance.
