Before blossoming into the greatest shooter the sport has ever known, Steph Curry was defined by his fragile ankles.
Over the course of his first 3 NBA seasons, Curry missed 66 games, most of that coming after his initial operation, as he sprained his ankle five times while playing in 26 games the following year.
If his 2012 surgery failed, he was faced with the bleak prospect of inserting tendons from a cadaver into his ankle in the hopes that they would function better than the ones nature provided for him.
Luckily for Curry, the NBA, and anyone who ever wished that Steve Nash and Pete Maravich would have an And1 basketball baby, his last surgery is looking like it could be his last ankle surgery.
Steph’s problems were actually a pretty easy fix, as they were due to a mess of scar tissue, bone spurs, chips, and cartilage filling his joints “like crab meat.”
Dr. Richard Ferkel essentially vacuumed it all out, and the next face of the NBA was reborn.
“I feel like I’ve been doing nothing but rehabbing for two years. I feel like I’m never going to be able to play again. This ankle thing is not gonna be my life.”
Photo Credit: Golden State Warriors/ Facebook
Curry took advantage of as many resources as he could to fuel his 2nd chance in the NBA. Before every game now, Curry straps on his Zamst ankle braces (designed for post-sprain activity) and a pair of Under Armour sneakers created specifically for his feet.
Every team is looking for an edge somewhere in keeping players healthy and consistent. It is an accepted fact that this is the new market inefficiency in sports. But few organizations pursue this avenue with the vigor and resources of the Warriors.
They hired Australian sports science guru Lachland Penfold this offseason, and according to owner Joe Lacob, the goal is to “have like, a video game fatigue meter. A guy like Lachland will be able to go up to Bob and Steve [Kerr] and say, ‘Guys, he’s at a 77, and our threshold is 75 for Safe to Play.'”
The NBA’s new SportVU cameras that track and measure almost any movement on the court have combined with the GPS trackers the team wears in practice to give the Warriors unprecedented insight into their players’ health and its relation to their game.
The Warriors place a premium on their players’ mental acuity as well. Steve Kerr has made it a team goal to reduce personal stress, and the Warriors run complex drills to test their nervous system, as Curry described in an interview with Tech Insider:
“We overload our sensory system, nervous system, in our training with different lights. There are little beams that we have on the wall, and I’ll be doing dribble moves and reading the lights that are associated with different moves. Different colors mean to do a different move, and you have to make that decision in a split second and still have control of the ball.”
What do Steve Kerr, Chip Kelly, the Vancouver Canucks, and Jason Bourne all agree on? As the line from Robert Ludlum’s famous 1990 book goes: “Rest is a weapon.”
Photo Credit: Golden State Warriors/ Facebook
Before Kelly even arrived in Philadelphia three years ago, the Vancouver Canucks signed a deal in 2009 with Fatigue Science.
No professional squad has a more brutal travel schedule than the northwesternmost team in North America; the Canucks traveled one third of the distance to the moon en route to their 2011 Stanley Cup Finals loss, so it’s only natural that they would be interested in the effects of sleep, or the lack thereof, on the body.
A 2012 Harvard Study placed Fatigue Science’s armbands on orthopedic surgical residents and found that they averaged 5.3 hours of sleep per week, and because of this, the risk of medical error increased by 22%. Significant fatigue basically has the same effect on the body as being drunk.
Kelly has said that he believes that “an elite athlete needs between 10-12 hours [of sleep] a night.”
He was a college football pioneer in so many ways at Oregon, and he was practically the only college coach who was seriously investing in sport science.
As Chris Brown wrote for Grantland in 2014 about the basis of Kelly’s research (which was conducted on Australian-rules football):
“Many of those studies used heart rate, GPS, accelerometers, and gyroscope monitors worn by players in practice to determine how to train for peak game-day performance and how to prevent injuries. These studies also tracked the movements that players made in games so teams could mold practices and training to what players did on an individualized and position-by-position basis.”
The Eagles were 18th in Football Outsiders’ adjusted games lost to injury metric the year before Kelly arrived.
They invested a ton of money in his programs, placed trackers on their players’ wrists in practice, and finished 1st and 2nd in his subsequent seasons. Kelly has since been fired from the Eagles and is now the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
Top 10 teams at managing injuries over the past 5 seasons, with @ManGamesLostNFL data pic.twitter.com/Vj97MFmrWx
— Rich Hill (@PP_Rich_Hill) January 27, 2016
Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan used to show up for work before sunrise. But things have changed for him.
“I thought that showed dedication and work ethic. I don’t do that anymore, because I realized it is more important to be rested and ready than it is to beat everybody to work.”
Pete Carroll has long embraced the importance of sleep, and the Seahawks now schedule their travel and training schedules to maximize their players’ sleep efficiency.
Richard Sherman has become one of Carroll’s acolytes on this issue, emphasizing how the head coach’s focus on good sleep was central to their Championship season of 2014 in an open letter for Sports Illustrated.
The pace of innovation in sports is accelerating. The Moneyball Era opened the floodgates for a reevaluation of everything.
Once available only to elite athletes, this technology that monitors players’ health and performance and helps explain their inextricably linked relationship is becoming more widespread and affordable.
If these advances could help alter the course of Steph Curry’s career, and thus, the history of the NBA, imagine the possibilities they could create in neighborhoods across the country.
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Poland Is Swiftly Drifting Towards Authoritarianism And It Could Put Us All In Danger
Poland’s ruling party, the Law and Justice Party (PiS), has been the source of controversy in Poland and throughout Europe nearly since their arrival to power in October of 2015.
This has been driven by the party’s Euroskeptic agenda, questionable legislation, and generally hostile behavior. As a result, the strategic readiness of the entire Euro-Atlantic area is compromised due to growing fissures between European allies.
The Party’s platform in regards to Poland’s relations with other states emphasizes expansion and modernization of Poland’s military, as well as strong cooperation with the UN, NATO, and in particular the United States.
They are wary of integration with the EU than NATO, but not outright opposed like other European right-wing parties like UKIP in the United Kingdom. It should also be noted that PiS favors further centralization of Poland’s government, which is the source of PiS’s disruptive effect on alliance readiness and cohesion.
The troubles began in December, when PiS moved to replace 15 judges on the Constitutional Court, the primary check against the Parliament.
The troubles began in December, when PiS moved to replace 15 judges on the Constitutional Court, the primary check against the Parliament. This resulted in weeks of protest from concerned Poles.
Shortly after this affront to checks and balances, military police were dispatched to replace officials at a NATO Counterintelligence Center in Krakow.
This change of staff was not relayed to other members of the alliance, including Slovak officials charged with cooperatively coordinating the facility who chastised the move, though no changes were made to the Slovak staff.
From (L to R) the Polish Flag, EU flag, and the NATO flag. Photo Credit: Pawel Kabanski/Flickr (CC by S.A.2.0)
On Jan. 7 of this year, President Andrzej Duda (who resigned from PiS after being elected last May to serve as an independent) signed into law new supreme powers for the Treasury Minister over appointments and firings from state media, as opposed to the previous system of contests hosted by the National Broadcast Council.
This was followed by further protests against the government, and the first of its kind investigation by the EU of PiS’s undemocratic legislation. In the most extreme circumstances this can lead to Poland having its voting rights in the EU Parliament suspended.
The Polish government has responded to this inquiry with aggression at the perceived source of this hostility (Germany) with attacks.
This includes drawing allusions to Nazi Germany in both print, depicting Chancellor Angela Merkel in the garb of Adolf Hitler, and a tough letter from Poland’s Justice Minister aimed at the German EU commissioner.
“You demanded that Poland be placed under supervision. Such words, spoken by a German politician, have the worst possible connotations for Poles,” Poland’s Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said in a letter to the German EU commissioner Gunther Oettinger according to the Financial Times.
This verbal jab is in spite of relations being so warm in 2014 that Germany and Poland agreed to an exchange of commanders of battalions, a German commanding a Polish unit and vice versa, in order to better understand how their allies work.
The military exchange is set to occur in mid 2016. This kind of exchange is critical to belaying atrophy in a highly critical region of NATO’s frontier. If relations deteriorate to the point that this kind of mutually beneficial cooperation is cancelled, it would be a bad signal to Euro-Atlantic security.
These continued worrying actions in affairs, both foreign and domestic, will likely only further isolate Poland from its allies, which in turn damages the readiness of the entire alliance.
While these effects are likely short-term, and may be rectified due to the popular discontent of the Polish people, and pressure from the EU, serious disagreements are a real possibility. Allied states being unwilling to train together would present a much weaker deterrent to any hypothetical Russian adventures in the Baltic Region, due to the much weaker unit cohesion.
With NATO’s 2016 Warsaw Conference coming up, frosty relations may limit the effectiveness of any measures taken at the conference. This would be in stark contrast to the highly productive 2014 Wales Conference, which established the Very High Readiness Joint Taskforce (VJTF), a multinational brigade that can be deployed within 48 hours to respond to a crisis, preceding the full force of the 40,000 man NATO Response Force (NRF).
Thus, it is in the best interest of a party that claims to value Poland’s NATO membership to repair these ties, and perhaps reevaluate how much it values NATO’s deeply entwined sister organization, the EU.
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Cover Photo Credit: Dennis Jarvis/ Flickr (CC By 2.0)
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On Father’s Day This Group Made Miami’s Homeless Dads Smile
What’s News In This Story?
–Valencia Gunder and her non-profit organization Make The Homeless Smile made a special effort for Miami’s homeless dad’s on Father’s Day.
–Gunder, who spent nearly a month homeless in 2009, started the organization in 2014 to give back.
–Gunder said that she knows that Father’s Day can be sad for dads who live on the streets because many of them aren’t in touch with their children.
–25 volunteers spent a few hours feeding over 100 people under the shadow of the Freedom Tower in downtown Miami.
–An organization from Tallahassee called Coach’s Closet brought sneakers to give to the homeless and a barber was on hand to give out free haircuts.
–Gunder and her group do this every third Sunday of the month at the same spot on NE 1st Ave and 6th St.
——Here’s Something Completely Different: ——
La Gringa For Miami: How A Special Election Is Changing Politics In South Florida
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Does the Philippines Have A Dictator Now?
The president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte has become an internationally known figure in a remarkably short amount of time.
Oh course, so has Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
While only being in office for 253 days (as of March 10, 2017) Duterte has become an alarmingly important figure in global politics due to his awful human rights record and a penchant for bucking the status quo.
Some, including Duterte himself, have even started calling him by a new name- dictator.
Duterte was recently quoted as saying, “I will be a dictator against all bad guys, evil, I will do it at the cost of my position or my life. I won’t stop. That’s a solemn commitment.”
The world should probably start listening to him.
Human Rights Watch, an American-founded international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights, believes that Duterte may have committed crimes against humanity by, “inciting killings during his bloody antidrug campaign.”
Crimes against humanity aren’t something to scoff at, and it certainly isn’t something to take lightly.
Other high-profile political people who have been indicted for crimes against humanity include the now dead Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad, the current President of war-torn Syria.
Duterte meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2016.
Some people might look at what Duterte is doing for his country as an act of patriotism.
His stated goal is to rid his country of drug lords, their dealers, and anyone who is addicted to drugs.
Of course he is not creating massive amounts of new treatment facilities or encouraging other public health fixes, instead he is literally telling people to murder those who abuse drugs.
So has he already crossed the line from democratically elected leader to dictator?
The answer is obviously yes.
No one would argue against the fact that drugs and the trafficking of drugs are a global issue that has had disastrous ramifications for so many communities, but Duterte’s policy of slaughtering his own people in the name of reform cannot be tolerated by the people of the Philippines or the international community.
In the short time span of Duterte’s presidency, thousands of people have been killed by police or vigilantes, and the killings will only continue if no one is willing to speak up and demand a stop to an unjust judicial system.
The reason that many developing countries look to the west for a guiding hand in the building of their countries is for our rule of law.
A belief that all individuals are innocent until proven guilty in a court of justice.
Photo Credit: Bro. Jeffrey Pioquinto, SJ/ Flickr (CC By 2.0)
The people of the Philippines are not being given this fundamental human right, and they are suffering in silence.
The principle of human rights is universal, and it is the basis for all democracies.
What Duterte, a democratically elected official, has done is spit in the face of democracy.
He has turned around and made the Philippines his own personal killing field, and “his people” are the targets.
The saddest part about the current situation in the Philippines is that by Philippine law, the president has immunity from prosecution while in office.
What this means to the rest of the world is that it is now our solemn duty to hold Duterte and his cronies responsible for their systematic attack against the civilian population.
The International Criminal Court and the U.N. have an obligation to launch an expedient investigation into this matter and stop these policies from continuing.
How many more people must die from extrajudicial killings before the rest of the world opens their eyes and sees Rodrigo Duterte for what he truly is: a malicious dictator?
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