Remove ads, unlock a dark mode theme, and get other perks by upgrading your account. Experience the website the way it's meant to be.

Sports Articles Discussion

Discussion in 'Sports Forum' started by Meerkat, Mar 7, 2016.

  1. Meerkat

    human junk drawer Prestigious

    Thought this would be good to have since there are a lot of great articles being written about multiple sports or about specific happenings in sports that people might not see unless they're frequenting the specific sport's thread.

    I can add any links for websites people think would be beneficial to have "pinned"
    The Player's Tribune
     
    Jason Tate likes this.
  2. Meerkat

    human junk drawer Prestigious

    I don't watch hockey, but I'm actually a fairly big advocate for brain injury awareness and thought this essay by Adam Estoclet was one of the most honest and open looks into what brain injuries are actually like.

     
    Jason Tate likes this.
  3. Brain injury awareness is something I consider close to myself as well. Great piece.
     
  4. Anyone watching this 30 for 30 on the 10 year of the Duke Lacross case?
     
  5. Meerkat

    human junk drawer Prestigious

    Fuck has it really been 10 years?
     
  6. I didn't realize that either. But yeah that's what it's saying. It's hard to watch.
     
  7. Meerkat

    human junk drawer Prestigious

    Yeah the sports world really needs to be better with how it handles sexual assault, abuse, domestic violence, etc. It's incredibly off-putting.
     
  8. Meerkat

    human junk drawer Prestigious

    Analyze This
    The disparity between NBA data — even data across all male sports — and WNBA data is glaring. Data for the WNBA is relegated to basic information: points, rebounds, steals, assists, turnovers, blocks. While worthy of being noted, those are the most rudimentary numbers in our game.

    Data helps drive conversations, strategy, decision making. But data on its own isn’t terribly interesting. It needs context. It needs a storyteller. Data helps tell the story of a player, a team, an entire career.

    There’s a need to value data in the WNBA because there’s a need to value the stories of our league. Think about baseball, for example, or men’s basketball. Fans, players, executives and media value stats and information because it helps to tell a story that many are already invested in. And if they’re not already invested, then it gives them a reason to be. It helps GMs make decisions. It informs contract negotiations. It enables player development.
     
    Jason Tate likes this.
  9. A whole lot of new hires at The Ringer today. I'm really curious to see how they plan to pay all these people and keep this quality up. Going to be interesting to watch.
     
  10. TheVandyMan

    Please stop deleting my custom title Prestigious

    I'm guessing the site will take some time to find its footing like Grantland did. But I have high hopes, because man, I miss that site.
     
  11. I just am curious how they make it financially viable. I think they should have started smaller. I've stopped listening to the Channel 33 podcast because I hate how many episodes are things I don't care about at all, and it's not split out into separate ones to subscribe to. I definitely am not going to read an email newsletter 'cause fuck email. But, I dunno, I am worried by the instant overhead they created for themselves without even having a website up and running. I hope they figure it out, but so far they're making the same mistakes Grantland made IMO.
     
  12. TheVandyMan

    Please stop deleting my custom title Prestigious

    Yeah, it seems absolutely wild that they already announced 11 staffers, with apparently more to come during the course of the week. That can't be cheap if they're all full-time for The Ringer. I haven't really given the Channel 33 podcast the time of day — too much else to listen to already, haha. (Encore included!) I'm surprised they didn't go for a smaller corps of an editorial staff and then just bring on freelancers while they build up the site, but I guess we'll see. Looking forward to having solid long-form reads from a Simmons-selected crew again, although I agree with you that I hope they don't repeat Grantland's financial mistakes.
     
  13. Hell yeah! ENCORE! Haha.

    Yeah, I think I would have gone about it in a different way, but I think that Simmons took some money to start this — so they probably already have a nice budget to hire people, but, I dunno, I think I'm just more conservative by nature. I would not want to immediately have those expenses. That said, hell yes am I going to read it every day! I'm pumped for it. The hires are great. I just have a very business strategy mindset about websites and this tactic worries me unless there's something else to come. The overhead alone for this many employees is boggling.
     
  14. TheVandyMan

    Please stop deleting my custom title Prestigious

    Encore gets me through the end of my shift on Thursday nights, and occasionally my drive home from the office! It's a weekly tradition, haha. But yeah, he must have some good financial backing for this thing. One of the hires was a researcher for their copy desk, so if they actually have a full copy desk (and, from the looks of it, multiple desks, since their announcement for Sam Schube was that he'll be on the culture desk) on top of the rest of their editorial staff, they must be in really good shape. I feel like Simmons really, really wants to go all in on this, and isn't as conservative as you are, haha. Conservative just doesn't feel like his style. I'm wondering what else he has up his sleeve.
     
  15. Oh, he definitely wants to go all in, but he went all in at Grantland and that thing was a money pit. Sure, he can whine about the lack of support to grow the site and some monetization stuff from ESPN, but, he also built a company that would be almost impossible to turn profitable with the salaries he was paying the number of writers they had. I'm not convinced he's not repeating that mistake right now. Back of the napkin math puts his run rate above what most sites doing 20-30m pageviews a month could afford. I dunno. I'll be curious to see what his sales staff looks like and what they can put together and what their responses to rfps look like — but this is the opposite of what I wanted to see from a "lesson learned" perspective.

    Good read, since this is an article thread:

    Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing - Stratechery by Ben Thompson
    To be sure, it’s tempting to pull a “That’s Fine for Bill”; the guy has been writing online for eighteen years (and, technically, he’s not writing now). It’s a fair point but I think there’s room for another, equally compelling one: too much of the debate about monetization and the future of publishing in particular has artificially restricted itself to monetizing text. That constraint made sense in a physical world: a business that invested heavily in printing presses and delivery trucks didn’t really have a choice but to stick the product and the business model together, but now that everything — text, video, audio files, you name it — is 1’s and 0’s, what is the point in limiting one’s thinking to a particular configuration of those 1’s and 0’s?

    In fact, it’s more than possible that in the long-run the current state of publishing — massive scale driven by advertising on one hand, and one-person shops with low revenue numbers and even lower costs on the other — will end up being an aberration. Focused, quality-obsessed publications will take advantage of bundle economics to collect “stars” and monetize them through some combination of subscriptions (less likely) or alternate media forms. Said media forms, like podcasts, are tough to grow on their own, but again, that is what makes them such a great match for writing, which is perfect for growth but terrible for monetization.

    That’s why the lesson to be learned from Grantland may be the exact opposite of what it seems: the problem isn’t that ESPN spent too much money on a web site that couldn’t monetize, it’s that the web site should only have been step one to a multi-media endeavor that converted visitors to fans willing to invest time in formats that can actually pay the bills.
     
  16. How Steph Curry Broke The Way Basketball Video Games Are Being Built
    If you grew up playing basketball video games in the 90s and early 2000s, you probably hate cheese. Nah, not the milky protein we Americans put on everything, but the way digital counterparts of elite 3-point shooters can often be abused by gamers. Who hasn’t hit 15 3s in a 20 minute game with Ray Allen on NBA Live 2003? This so-called “3-point cheese” has been a constant frustration for serious gamers, but as basketball games — in particular, the NBA 2K series, the basketball game — have gotten more realistic and advanced, developers have found ways to mitigate player abuse of three-point shooters.

    “Scoring in the paint and 3-point shooting have historically been the toughest areas to properly balance,” says Mike Wang, gameplay director of NBA 2K, adding that fighting 3-point cheese is “always on his mind.”

    To that end, he and his team have developed a formula to keep 3-point shooting in check. For example, the game accounts for things like the difficulty of shooting off the dribble and volume shooting fatigue — meaning, if you just run around with your player jacking up shot after shot after doing three spin moves, you’re going to be shooting bricks, even if your player has a super high 3-point rating.

    “Taking 3s off the dribble are also definitely discouraged in NBA 2K,” Wang adds. “Especially after over-dribbling beforehand.”

    The formula, which also incorporates a lot of advanced metrics, has mostly worked, to the point that the last couple of 2K games have received universal praise for its balanced and realistic gameplay (these “rules” to keep digital basketball shooters in check apply to real life basketball playing, after all). I say mostly because there’s dude named Wardell Stephen Curry, whose ability to make insanely difficult 3-pointers has thrown all basketball conventional wisdom out the window.
     
    PyramidPostcard likes this.
  17. Brenden

    Trusted Prestigious

    Why does he not go by the name Wardell?
     
    Jason Tate likes this.
  18. TrueHoop Presents: You won't believe how Nike lost Steph
    On March 3, 2016, Business Insider relayed a note from Morgan Stanley analyst Jay Sole on Under Armour's business prospects. In it, Curry's potential worth to the company is placed at more than a staggering $14 billion. Sole's call on UA's stock is bearish relative to other prognosticators, but for one man's power to change everything.

    His note reads, "UA's U.S. basketball shoe sales have increased over 350 percent YTD. Its Stephen Curry signature shoe business is already bigger than those of LeBron, Kobe and every other player except Michael Jordan. If Curry is the next Jordan, our call will likely be wrong."

    What few fans know is the backstory of all this -- how the most electric player in a generation slipped through the grasp of the most powerful sports apparel company in the world, and how Under Armour pulled off the marketing heist of the century.
     
  19. Deanna

    Trusted Supporter

    @Jason Tate so far the Ringer newsletter has been pretty good, but I do think it would have been better to have the site up first. Even if it had been a simple site and they had someone working on a more complex one behind the scenes.
     
  20. Yeah, I refuse to read or sign up for more email. Just not gonna do it. Hahah, so I haven't checked it out yet.
     
  21. Deanna

    Trusted Supporter

    Yeah I started using unroll.me to get better control over newsletters and how many emails I get. I didn't put the Ringer in that specifically so I would remember to read it haha. And if they're building the site on Medium I don't see why it's going to be late spring/early summer for the site to actually launch. Seems like they could have just been posting on Medium all along already.
     
  22. I agree. I wish they were. I'd probably read some of this stuff if they were!
     
  23. Deanna

    Trusted Supporter

    Yeah the newsletter is a good start but with as much content as they've been getting out lately, would've been better to just use Medium as is. Plus, I'm all about those RSS feeds even though a lot of people seem to use them less now.
     
    Jason Tate likes this.
  24. Hell yes! Haha. Me too. I like having all my reading in one place, with the type and spacing and environment I can define.
     
  25. Deanna

    Trusted Supporter

    Hah yeah. I'm a huge Reeder user and then I toss a ton of articles to Instapaper.
     
    Jason Tate likes this.