Heading into last night's Game 1 against the Miami Heat, the San Antonio Spurs had exactly nine days of rest, something that became somethingofastory line in the days that followed. The Heat ended their series Monday and had a three-day turnaround, a fairly less-than-normal amount of time to have between two playoff games.
After the Spurs’ close win last night, I started to wonder how much exactly this tidbit of information mattered. Did the Spurs’ extra days of rest give the team more strength to power through against the very physical and aggressive Miami team? Or did their extra days of rest leave them drained, rusty, and slightly underprepared for the tough matchup?
If Brian Kenny has a tell, it’s his eyebrows. Flip over to MLB Network — where Kenny is a studio host, talking head, and defender of sabermetricians — and you’ll see his eyebrows shoot up until they form twin quotation marks on his forehead. This means Kenny is about to blow his top. Like Fox News's Shep Smith or ex-CNNer Jack Cafferty, Kenny is a guy you can count on to get angry when the world stops making sense. Watching him stew is just about the most wonderful thing on sports TV.
It was the year a man became very famous for possessing an unshakable belief in math and basic reasoning skills. This probably says less about Nate Silver and more about the small armies of Silver skeptics, gut-driven intuitionists uninterested in parsing the differences between probability and prediction, correlation and causation. But in the weeks leading up to election night, Silver cemented his role as our all-seeing eye. His name and fine-tuned, closely guarded formulas became an instant salve anytime someone started freaking out: “Nate Silver says … ” Between his bestseller, The Signal and the Noise, and near-flawless election predictions, nobody had a better year reputation-wise than Silver.
Here’s a look at the numbers behind some of the biggest sports stories this past month. Send us suggestions for next month’s edition by tweeting at @michaelkruse with the hashtag #GrantlandStats.
Amount of money Peyton Manning made last year: $42 million.
Amount of money David Beckham made last year: $46 million.
Number of soccer teams among the top 10 highest-paying sports teams in the world: 7.
