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Steve Kerr hints that Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry's injury was a result of overexertion

Steve Kerr hints that Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry's injury was a result of overexertion

Time of India2 days ago

Image credit: Getty Images
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr has indicated that Stephen Curry's hamstring injury in Game 1 of the NBA's Western Conference semifinals was a result of the tight NBA playoffs schedule, which doesn't allow players enough time to recover from fatigue.
This was Curry's first hamstring injury in his 16-year-long basketball career and ultimately cost the Warriors the championship. He could have returned to the court to play against the Minnesota Timberwolves, but the team was eliminated too early, before even reaching Game 6.
Steve Kerr talks about the NBA schedule
Steve Kerr told Yahoo! Sports' Tom Haberstroh in the latter's feature, 'I think all the complaints of the wear and tear, and the scheduling, are all valid.
But they all fall on deaf ears because of the dollar sign. I don't think the league's constituents are willing to give up any money, that's the problem. But we all know this is not healthy or sustainable if you want guys to survive out there and not have injuries.'
The feature includes a conversation Kerr had with Golden State Warriors' director of sports medicine and performance, Rick Celebrini, about the cause of Curry's injury.
It mentions that when Kerr asked Celebrini, 'Do you think Steph pulling his hamstring has anything to do with playing 48 hours after logging 46 minutes of Game 7 in Houston?' Celebrini replied, 'One hundred percent. If he had an extra day or two … we can't prove this, but I have no doubt based on our understanding of the scientific literature that the hamstring injury was the result of inadequate recovery and fatigue.
'
During the playoffs, both Draymond Green and Jimmy Butler had expressed confidence in the team's ability to succeed even without Curry, but the results made it clear that his absence came at a high cost.
Amid rising expectations for his return, Curry told @andscape, 'Even if I wanted to be Superman, I couldn't.'
Also Read:
'They only had to win one': Fans react after Golden State Warriors' Playoff exit as Stephen Curry says everything was aligned for Game 6
Stephen Curry ultimately got all the rest he needed to recover from the injury. He is currently spending the offseason with his wife Ayesha Curry and their four kids. The family recently walked the red carpet at the Time 100 Impact Gala as well.
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‘I've got to be bowling': RCB's Josh Hazlewood says IPL stint will help him in WTC final vs South Africa
‘I've got to be bowling': RCB's Josh Hazlewood says IPL stint will help him in WTC final vs South Africa

Indian Express

time35 minutes ago

  • Indian Express

‘I've got to be bowling': RCB's Josh Hazlewood says IPL stint will help him in WTC final vs South Africa

Royal Challengers and Australia pacer Josh Hazlewood said that the time he spends on the field for RCB will hold him in good stead when he joins his national side for the World Test Championship final against South Africa, set to take place at Lords from June 11. Hazlewood, who had not played for RCB for one month due to a shoulder injury, showed that he did not lose a step when he took 3 wickets against Punjab Kings in Qualifier 1, helping RCB reach the IPL final. '…I've got to be bowling, you know wherever I am in the world, I've got to be bowling getting ready for that game (WTC final) anyway. There's no better place than I think out in the middle, obviously you've got to bowl more, more hours of training from time to time to build up for a Test, but to get that intensity right up, there's no better place than the IPL,' he said. Hazlewood has been one of the brightest sparks in RCB's IPL campaign, having snapped up 21 wickets in 11 matches at an average of 15.80. '(I have) worked really hard the last few weeks on the shoulders to get back and got some good overs into it the last sort of 10 days, and yeah it is feeling good to be back…So, I was happy with tonight, the wicket helped obviously didn't it? Not having to bowl fast yorkers or anything like that. So yeah it is feeling good to be back,' the Aussie said. In Thursday's match, RCB defeated PBKS by eight wickets in Qualifier 1 to enter the final of the Indian Premier League. RCB bowlers justified skipper Rajat Patidar's decision to field first by packing off PBKS for a paltry 101 in just 14.1 overs. Marcus Stoinis was top-scorer with 26. Young leg-spinner Suyash Sharma (3/17) did the star turn for RCB by picking up three wickets while pacers Hazlewood (3/21), Yash Dayal (2/26) and Bhuvneshwar Kumar (1/17) left PBKS reeling at 50 for five in the seventh over. In reply, RCB romped home, scoring 106 for 2 in 10 overs with Philip Salt scoring 27-ball 56.

Big data has changed cricket
Big data has changed cricket

Mint

time36 minutes ago

  • Mint

Big data has changed cricket

The 2025 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) has been anything but typical—how could it be, with the armed conflict between India and Pakistan forcing a week-long hiatus in May. Yet, the tournament remains a barometer for cricket's overarching trends. Even a casual glance at an IPL broadcast tells us the direction in which the game is heading—scientific, data-backed and underpinned by professional analytics. The pre-match show is punctuated by bursts of data specific to the venue—average scores, average degree of spin/seam movement, the average and economy rates for every single style of bowling. Two opposing players are pitted against one another in 'matchups", and we have ball-by-ball data about which batter fared poorly against which bowler. Former players plot the dismissals of key batters, keeping the bowlers of the day in mind, while broadcasters quickly back up their arguments using ball-tracking data. 'If you're a professional cricketer today," says former India wicketkeeper-batter Deep Dasgupta, 47, 'and you're playing for your country or you're playing in the IPL, you know that the other teams will have seen hours and hours of footage of you at play. There will be people whose job it is to go over the data, analyse your every weakness and figure out how to capitalise on it." Every team in the IPL knows that their key players are being deconstructed; massive datasets are being pored over by professional analysts; players are aware they will be 'figured out" sooner rather than later; they have to keep finding new and creative answers to questions being posed on-field—all of which has changed the game at the day-to-day level. 'One of the main things is the ball-tracking system," says Dasgupta, who has been a part of the commentary and pre/post-match analysis teams for IPL broadcasts. 'Everything flows downwards from there. If you're a batting coach, you can use the ball-tracking data to tell your batters which lengths and lines are troubling them. If you're a bowling coach, you can use the same data to make specific plans for the opposition's best batters." In Sanjay Manjrekar's playing days—the late 1980s and the 1990s—international teams didn't invest heavily in analysts. In recent years, however, teams have reaped the benefits of astute data analysis. According to the former India batter, young cricketers have been quick to adapt. 'Previously, if the captain or the coach wanted one of their players to make an adjustment in their game, they'd have to rely on what they've observed with their own eyes. But now, with the data and the analytics and everything, it has become very easy to convince players—and also fans, actually. The subjectivity has reduced." Cricket's new backroom Ahead of the 2024 T20 World Cup, held in the US and the West Indies, Team India analyst Himanish Ganjoo figured out that the explosive English opening batter Phil Salt was susceptible to deliveries angling in to him, deviating further inwards after pitching, targeting the stumps. The findings were presented to team India coach Rahul Dravid. Sure enough, in the eventual India vs England semi-final, India's Jasprit Bumrah produced a precision-guided missile along these lines, beating Salt's forward prod and crashing into the stumps. 'Rahul Dravid knew precisely how to use the information I presented, how to effectively communicate those points to the players," Ganjoo, 32, tells Lounge. 'It was a great feeling to make whatever small contribution I could—let's say 2-3%—to a World Cup victory for India." Ganjoo, a cosmologist by training, has produced cutting-edge cricketing analysis over the last four-five years. In January 2022, he published a Substack article on what made Indian left-arm finger-spinner Axar Patel a unique threat to batters, especially on Indian pitches, using data from HawkEye's ball-tracking technology. Without delving too much into the technical details, we can say this: the article presented compelling proof that Patel's height (at 6ft, 1 inch, he's taller than other elite spinners like Rashid Khan, Varun Chakravarthy and Sunil Narine) and angle of release made him far less predictable than his peers. The article led to Dravid bringing Ganjoo on-board. 'We had a workflow wherein I would analyse several different types of data for each batter we were facing," says Ganjoo, who is currently based in Paris. 'For every batter I prepared five-six slides, detailing, with graphs and charts, which shots they like to play the most, which shots they are least in control of, what are the kinds of deliveries they seem to be struggling against. Their performance against different lines, lengths, speeds and kinds of movement were analysed. We would present these slides to the coach (Dravid), who would then make game plans." What Dravid had taken note of wasn't Ganjoo's original article, but rather a YouTube breakdown of the same in February 2022, delivered by Australian cricket writer, podcaster and analyst Jarrod Kimber, who runs the popular Good Areas YouTube channel. A trained filmmaker, Kimber has a knack for storytelling and breaks down sophisticated, data-based arguments into actionable bits of cricketing wisdom. 'Ahead of the 2018 Caribbean Premier League, I had been hired as the analyst and assistant general manager for St. Lucia," recalls Kimber, 45, who lives in London. 'I thought I would work with the coaches, work on anything Kieron Pollard (then St. Lucia captain) wanted. Within a couple of hours of arriving I was asked, 'Are you ready to give a team talk about strategy?'. I asked for the video footage from previous seasons—there was no video. I asked if anybody had been collecting basic stats—there was nobody doing that either in the CPL." The CPL was hardly alone in its faltering first steps towards professionalisation. Issues like logistics, finances and a lack of structure were widespread roadblocks in the early days of professional analytics, explained Kimber. One morning Kimber found himself at a Durban bed and breakfast, manually chopping up hours-long game footage into usable clips, patchy internet notwithstanding, for Team Scotland. Powering the T20 age In the context of a franchise team, 'analyst" is ideally a full-time, year-long job, not just during the weeks and months before the tournament begins, not least because the analysts can help with auction strategy too. This is a simple reflection of the fact that T20 cricket has changed rapidly over the last decade and analytics has changed the way we look at the game. In T20, increasingly, we look at required runs and immediately start thinking of the number of sixes it would take to achieve the target. The six has become the primary currency of T20 cricket, in other words. Freddie Wilde, an analyst for the England and Royal Challengers Bangalore men's teams, described this process in the 2019 book Cricket 2.0: The T20 Revolution (co-written with Tim Wigmore). 'The growth of the six in T20 mirrored the ascent of the three in the NBA, which have more than doubled since 2000. The six, like the three in basketball, has a 50% greater pay-off than the previous highest scoring shot, more than making up for it being harder to execute. Both the six and the three represent the marriage of the athletically spectacular and the analytically shrewd. Increased use of data analysis in cricket has been one of a number of factors... to cause a surge in the rate of six-hitting in T20. In 2012 a six was hit every 28 balls. By 2018 that had fallen to one every 20 balls." Over the last decade, a number of companies have built up databases for cricket and developed predictive mathematical models. The rise to prominence of firms like London-based CricViz, and Chennai-based SportsMechanics began in the late 2010s, with T20 leagues starting around the world. A host of deep-pocketed new investors entered the game, eager to see their recently purchased teams being run professionally. Accordingly, a number of cricket writers, journalists and stats people transitioned into professional sports analysis. One of the reasons these changes feel significant is that cricket has been resistant to change. A number of concurrent phenomena in the 1990s, however, turned things around. One of them was the birth of Cricinfo in 1993, which introduced its popular StatsGuru tool by 2000. Then there was the emergence of live cricket as a lucrative category of TV programming. State broadcaster Doordarshan, which reached 60% of the Indian population in the 1990s, broadcast every match played at home. Suddenly, Indian TV screens lit up with 'wagon-wheels" (a diagram of the field with coloured lines indicating where batters are hitting the ball), 'run-worms" (line graphs representing cumulative runs scored across every phase of the innings) and complex fielding charts. This was the Indian viewer's first exposure to analytics in real time, and it whetted our collective appetite. This was already a passionate and involved fanbase. They were crying out not just for data but also for visualisations that communicated it in a lucid, engaging way. The rise of laptop coaches The enduring image of Bob Woolmer, coach of the South Africa team from 1994-99, is him hunched over a laptop screen, watching replays. 'The laptop coach", as he was dubbed, was one of the first international coaches to make extensive usage of computer-based analytics. Woolmer used the contemporary stratagem of 'matchups" back in the 1990s to stymie run-scoring in 50-over cricket. In the 1999 50-over World Cup, Woolmer used wireless earpieces to communicate with South Africa captain Hansie Cronje during the game. The practice was swiftly outlawed but proved, nevertheless, Woolmer's embrace of both technology and the spirit of innovation; two of the things that drive cricket analytics to this day. Woolmer died in 2007 at 58, less than a year before the first-ever T20 World Cup was played. One suspects he would have been a tactical giant in the game's most abbreviated—and analytics-friendly—format. For in the first decade of T20 cricket (2007-16), not many teams, national or franchise, were especially good from a tactical point of view. Most batters approached the 20-over game as though it were a 50-over game, only scrunched up. But where the latter format rewards batters minimising dot-balls (deliveries where no runs are scored), T20 rewards maximal four-and-six hitting. The West Indies men's team won the 2012 and 2016 T20 World Cups, largely on the back of its muscular six-hitters like Chris Gayle, Kieron Pollard and Andre Russell. Several factors through the 2000s—new statistical tools, the influx of money in T20 leagues, and legacy teams getting outflanked in a turbo-charged version of the game—have brought us to this current moment in cricket, where analytics and professional analysts have well-defined roles. Not just gameplay but also everything that happens off the field—training, conditioning, nutrition, etc.—is now a little more scientific, a little more organised. According to IPL commentator and former team India fast bowler Varun Aaron, 35, data and analytics can contribute to the fitness and well-being of fast bowlers (notoriously, the most injury-prone), not to mention improve their skills. 'A year ago, I was working with the MRF Pace Academy in Chennai, designing a new high-performance centre for fast bowling. I put a lot of data-driven processes in place. The data is intended for the coaches, not the players; it's important not to clutter their minds with too much data," says Aaron. 'At the same time, if I tell a young fast bowler to make a technical change in their action, the data helps me prove my point with evidence, it shows the young players exactly where they can make a change that will improve their pace." Aaron, who is currently pursuing a sports science degree at the Centre for Sports Science, part of Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research, Chennai, is representative of this new cricketing landscape, where ex-cricketers are using increasingly scientific methods to train the next generation. Of course, this comes with its own set of challenges. Effective analytics begins with widespread data-gathering and not every corner of the cricketing world is similarly blessed in this regard. In the women's game, for example, collecting enough footage and data can be a challenge. Women's games, especially domestic ones, are very often not broadcast live, or in some cases, captured with a single-camera setup that is, of course, inadequate for professional analysis. 'If you look at this year's men's IPL there are some teenaged players performing very well, about whom the average fan does not know a lot," says Krithika Venkatesan, who works for the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) women's team. 'The likes of Vaibhav Suryavanshi and Ayush Mhatre; YouTube already has so much footage of them playing junior-level cricket and club cricket and so on, stuff that nobody would watch live. But when it comes to the women's game, analysts find it difficult to source footage even for international players. Also there have been only three seasons of the Women's Premier League so far, so analysts have a relatively small sample set to work off." Another potentially tricky area cricket might have to negotiate in the near future is the intersection of professional analysis and organised betting. Within the super-popular fantasy sports app Dream11, for example, there is a paid tier where users can access tips by pro-analysts, and look at their finished teams and compare notes. Twitter threads by the likes of Kimber and Ganjoo have been circulated in betting circles while discussing an upcoming matchday's potential trajectories. The legal status of betting on cricket is wildly variable among cricket-playing nations: in the UK and Australia, for instance, it's legal and centrally regulated, whereas it is illegal in India and Pakistan. Former cricketers also mention another problem: over-reliance on data. Teams run the risk of over-thinking their approach and good old-fashioned cricketing 'wisdom" could be ignored. As Manjrekar notes, 'Teams should remember that the human mind is the most sophisticated analytical tool." 'I always say that cricket is like a performing art," says Dasgupta. 'There is the scientific aspect. But there's also the artistic aspect or the cricketing sixth sense, which should never be underestimated. Ideally, both should go hand in hand." What Dasgupta is describing here may well be the foundation on which analytical teams are assembled in the future, with professionals from various walks of life working in tandem towards cricketing goals. Kimber hypothesises a future picture of the global game along similar lines. 'In the long-term future, I expect many more former players to get involved with analytics, especially younger ones who retired prematurely due to injuries," he says. 'Ideally, you don't want your analytics team to be just four kids from IIT or Cambridge or wherever, who are good at analysis but have never spoken to a cricketer in their lives. What you want is a bunch of different types of people—maybe one of them used to be a journalist, another is a junior coach, a third is a former player, a fourth guy who is the math whiz." As the IPL and other T20 leagues around the world carve out increasingly large chunks of the cricketing calendar for themselves, the visibility and responsibility offered to professional analysts will only increase. This will affect the game but also how cricket is presented. If you're a fan, what would a more data-inclusive game look like? A clue might lie in how the NBA is consumed. It begins with the way the sport produces and organises stats for fans. On the official NBA website, you will get a 360-degree statistical summary of the player you're looking up—points, rebounds, assists, and so on. Now imagine a cricket scorecard where you can see what percentage of false shots played by a batter, or a bowler's economy rates and averages against right versus left-handed batters. Compared to the data presentation of an average NBA or English Premier League broadcast, there's a long way to go. Cricket has some catching up to do to rival the statistical sophistication of other major team sports like basketball and football. The good news is, everyone—players, coaches, franchises and broadcasters—seem to agree that analysis is the future. When data points start to look like runs saved or wickets taken, you know the game has truly changed. Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi. Also read: Fantasy leagues are making cricket viewing transactional

Gujarat Titans vs Mumbai Indians Live Score, IPL 2025: GT take on MI in the knockout contest
Gujarat Titans vs Mumbai Indians Live Score, IPL 2025: GT take on MI in the knockout contest

Time of India

time40 minutes ago

  • Time of India

Gujarat Titans vs Mumbai Indians Live Score, IPL 2025: GT take on MI in the knockout contest

30 May 2025 | 05:14:13 PM IST Live Score GT vs MI IPL 2025 Qualifier 2: Gujarat Titans and Mumbai Indians fight it out in a knockout game, toss time is at 7 pm, while the match begins at 7:30 pm. IPL 2025 Gujarat Titans vs Mumbai Indians Score Live: While Gujarat Titans bottled an opportunity to finish in the top two by losing their last couple of matches, Mumbai Indians will be pleased to have made it to the knockout stage after having won just one of the first five matches. The journey of the team losing today ends, while the winner lives on to play another day and challenge Punjab Kings in the Qualifier will host the match, where the ball seamed and swung yesterday. Conditions could remain similar today as led by Shubman Gill, has been dependent on four key players this season, including the top 3 of the captain, Sai Sudharsan and Jos Buttler. Sherfane Rutherford and Shahrukh Khan have made a few contributions in the middle order. However, the departure of Buttler will be a massive miss for the team. The bowling has been carried by Prasidh Krishna as he sits second on the most wickets list. He has been supported occasionally by Mohammed Siraj. Sai Kishore has done well in patches, while Rashid Khan finds himself in the middle of his worst IPL season. For MI, Suryakumar Yadav has been the main man with the bat. Rohit Sharma and Tilak Verma are searching for form, while Hardik Pandya has played a couple of cameos. The team will miss the services of Ryan Rickelton and Will Jacks at the top of the order. Jonny Bairstow and Charith Asalanka have been named as their replacements. The bowling has been led by Jasprit Bumrah, while Trent Boult and Mitchell Santner have been amongst the wickets. The form of Deepak Chahar, however, remains a concern. Show more

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