Weekend Links [RandBall]

Another week, another RandBall column. This week's subjects: the great writers of the Twins blogosphere, soccer mascots, and - of course, and most importantly - Olympic hockey.

Also, if you're around at 3pm today, Mr. Rand will be hosting a three-hour show on KSTP, AM 1500 in the Twin Cities. I have my suspicions that it will be tremendous.

Moving On, Despite the Riot [American Cricket]

The USA cricket team was in Nepal over the past few days, getting a start on the process of qualifying for the 2015 Cricket World Cup. It all came down to the final match of the group stage; the Americans needed to beat hosts Nepal to qualify.

They got the win. But first, they had to wait out the riot.

According to the reports from DreamCricket reporter Peter Della Penna, a 10,000+ crowd grew increasingly agitated as the USA, batting second, got closer and closer to victory. Finally, as the USA's Sushil Nadkarni batted the Americans within a handful of runs of the win, everything exploded. To quote Della Penna:

Fans heading out of the ground in droves as a riot is about to break out. The riot police are trying to keep fans from coming onto the field. Mayhem here. Absolute mayhem and it's quite scary. The players have all left the field. Rocks, big ones are being thrown onto the pitch. Not 100% positive but I think tear gas was fired into the crowd as things got out of hand. I've never seen 12,000-13,000 people sprint out of a stadium setting so fast in my entire life... There are rocks everywhere on the field. Both teams were rushed into their dressing rooms.

Eventually, they did manage to clean the rocks off the field and resume the match, albeit after cutting down the number of runs the USA needed to score to win. The Americans got those runs in short order, then had their celebration cut short by another volley of rocks.

Now here's the part that is amazing. By losing to the USA, Nepal was in danger of finishing third behind Singapore, based on run rate (the cricket equivalent of goal differential). But because the riot forced the shortening of the match, the USA scored fewer runs, and thus Nepal finished second - and qualified for the next round - by the slimmest of margins. In other words, the riot worked. (UPDATE: Here's a good article on this.)

Anyway, the USA moves on to the next phase of qualification, to be held in Italy in June. I imagine that this will be more fun, for the American players, than batting in a hail of rocks in Nepal in February.

UPDATE: Commenter Daniel was there, and has this short take on the game and riot.

The Darko Era Begins [T-Wolves Blog]

I haven't written anything at the T-Wolves Blog for a couple of months, only because there has been little to say. But now, Darko Milicic is here - and amazingly, I'm actually glad.

(I'm not the only one, either. We've all been so beaten down by Al Jefferson's lackadaisical, awful interior defense that Darko is a breath of fresh air, merely by trying on defense.)

Olympic hockey proves we need a baseball equivalent

Over at Twinkie Town, I'm all caught up in Olympic hockey fever - and I want a baseball equivalent. It's time for baseball to get serious about an international championship.

Weekend Links [RandBall]

Another edition of the weekend links is hot off the internet presses. This week: curling, statistics, and Oxford - plus much more.

Waiting for Joe to sign [Twinkie Town]

We're a week away from the beginning of Twins spring training - meaning that we expect Joe Mauer to sign a long-term deal in the next seven days. My reasoning why is over at Twinkie Town. (Warning: speculation and regional psychology at its worst is on display.)

Weekend Links [RandBall]

We're back with another edition of the weekend links, over at the RandBall blog. Today's subjects include scrappiness, "WITH NO REGARD TO HUMAN LIFE!", and dodgeball.

Nick Punto Day [Twinkie Town]

It's Nick Punto Day in the blogosphere, as Twins writers far and wide talk about the shortest, scrappiest Twin.

Of course, I can't resist the opportunity to make jokes, so here's my effort: A Day in the Life of Little Nicky Punto

(My kickoff post for all of Twinkie Town's Nick Punto Day coverage is here, as well. If you're looking for all of the Nick Punto Day coverage, this Twitter search page should direct you to most of it.)

Afghanistan wins, USA headed home [American Cricket]

There's still plenty of work to be done for the American cricket team; they just don't have the quality to be consistently competitive among the second tier of cricket nations.

This was confirmed earlier this morning, as the Americans went down to Afghanistan, losing by 29 runs. Afghanistan batted first, and while the USA held them to a respectable 135 runs, the American batting never looked like besting that total. The opening batsmen for the USA couldn't score runs at a decent clip (though they managed to keep from getting embarrassed, as they did against Ireland), which put major pressure on the following batsmen to get the needed runs in the space allotted. In the end, they could only manage 106 in the 20 overs.

The loss, combined with Ireland's win over Scotland, place the USA third in their group - better than anyone expected, but not good enough to progress to the knock-out rounds.

The team has little time to rest, though - they next head to Nepal on February 20th to take part in the very early stages of qualifying for the 2015 World Cup. I'm not making that up - that's how far down the ladder American cricket has fallen. We have to start qualifying five years in advance.

(And with that, enough cricket talk for awhile, don't you think?)

The Irish Restore Normality [American Cricket]

Fresh off the excitement of the USA's win over Scotland at the qualifying tournament for cricket's Twenty20 World Cup, the Americans went out on Wednesday and... got killed. Ireland beat the USA by 78 runs, which in a T20 match is the equivalent of losing by seven touchdowns in football.

Ireland batted first and put up 202 runs, their highest-ever total in a 20-over match. The Americans responded by batting like they were blindfolded. Three of the USA's first five batsmen were out without scoring; the other two put up a grand total of four runs. At one point, the Americans had lost five wickets for a shocking total of 11 runs - in just twenty deliveries. You could go a long time in cricket without seeing a team make five outs in the space of twenty balls.

Anyway, the wonderfully-named Aditya Thyagarajan saved some face with what commentators might usually call a "swashbuckling" 72, which got the USA out of "horrifying loss" territory and into the realm of mere embarrassment.

So now, the USA are in quite a bad way, in terms of qualifying for the next round. They take on group leaders Afghanistan tomorrow at noon local time (2am our time), and would need a win, plus some help, to get into the top two in Group A. They would either need Ireland to lose to Scotland - unlikely - or to beat Afghanistan so badly that they finished second on run differential, which seems equally unlikely.

Of course, most commentators are focusing on the political aspects of the match, given that there are currently plenty of Americans in Afghanistan. Frankly, I think the cricket aspects are much more interesting.

America 1, Haggis-Lovers 0 [American Cricket]

This week, the USA cricket team is in Dubai, attempting to qualify for the World Twenty20 Cricket championships later this year in the West Indies. The American team was invited to the qualifier as a wild card, in what was seen by most as a cynical attempt to get the world's biggest cricket-ignoring country involved - especially since team USA has played so poorly over the past few years.

Early this morning (around midnight local time), the USA played its opening match, against Scotland. The Scots are not exactly world powers at cricket, but they qualified for the last World T20 championships last summer, and nearly beat a pretty good New Zealand team while they were there. They were expected to win; most expected them to battle Ireland for the top of Group A, with a possible challenge from Afghanistan. The USA was mostly expected to show up and lose every match.

This made it all the more surprising to check the score this morning and see the results: a six-wicket win for the USA. [Recap here]

Scotland batted first, but the USA put together a team effort to hold them to a meager 120 runs. Usman Shuja started them off by taking a wicket with his second delivery, Kevin Darlington took a couple of wickets, and Sudesh Dhaniram held Scotland to just 12 runs in four overs of bowling. Seven Scottish wickets would eventually fall in the 20 overs, with the Scots scoring just 120 runs.

Usually this would be the cue for the Americans to collapse for about 43 runs, but for once, it didn't happen. The USA's first batsman, Sushil Nadkarni, was out after scoring just one run, but this brought the partnership of Lennox Cush and Carl Wright to the crease.

I think we can all agree that guys named "Lennox" and "Carl" cannot possibly fail to do great things together, and so it was this morning; the two took the Americans from 17 runs to 114 in the space of 14 overs, with Wright eventually scoring 62 and Cush, 41.

From there, the USA had four overs to score seven more runs, and while they attempted their traditional collapse - Wright, Cush, and Timroy Allen all were out without getting another run - eventually Dhaniram and captain Steve Massiah nudged the Americans to 121 and the victory, with one over left to go.

The Americans will attempt to continue the upsets when they take on Ireland early tomorrow morning (4am Central time, 2pm Dubai time). The Irish have their backs against the wall already, having lost to Afghanistan by 13 runs on the first day of the tournament; they will not be able to afford another loss.

What an accomplishment it would be for USA cricket if the Americans could hand them that loss.

Weekend Links [RandBall]

Once again, it's the weekend links. Lots today, including Twins, hockey, cricket - and other such nonsense.

NSC Minnesota Stars: Not sure how to react to the team name

Fooling everyone, the new Minnesota soccer team is named the "NSC Minnesota Stars," which takes the interim name, "NSC Minnesota," and slaps a nickname on the end.

The details, and the dark blue and gold logo, are here.

The team wanted to tie into the old "L'Etoile Du Nord" history of the state with the star, which I suppose makes sense except that this was done far better by the North Stars. (I often still wish that the Wild would change their name, and go back to the old kelly green and gold, but I suppose this is a pipe dream.)

As for the logo itself, my immediate reaction was that this has been done before - and not too far away, either. You have to head down to Richfield, though:



Yes, it's the same nickname - and nominally the same colors - as the Academy of Holy Angels Stars.

So, not exactly anything groundbreaking, and nothing that we haven't seen before. It could have been worse, though.

Northstar FC, Probably: New Minnesota soccer team to be officially named today

The National Sports Center will be announcing the new name of its soccer team today at 1:00, live on http://www.nscgamecast.tv/, replacing "NSC Minnesota," the current placeholder name.

Informed speculation (okay, message board rumors) predict that Northstar FC, one of the six choices available as part of the naming contest, will be the easy winner. I've never particularly liked the American tradition of naming soccer teams akin to their European counterparts - the worst offender here, of course, is MLS team Real Salt Lake, which makes less sense than the Utah Jazz and the Calgary Flames combined.

This said, the NSC press release mentioned "trademark issues," which of course sent me to the US Trademark Search website. Below, a few findings:

• Interestingly, I found two possible names that were registered by the National Sports Center in November: the Minnesota Strikers and FC Minnesota. Clearly, the folks in Blaine were thinking ahead.
  
• Of the five other suggested naming possibilities, "Minnesota Voyageurs" and "Minnesota Northern Lights" were finalists in the naming contest for the Minnesota Wild, and as such, were trademarked in the late 1990s and then abandoned.
• I couldn't find any trademarks for Minnesota United or for Northstar FC, though the word "Northstar" is trademarked six ways from Sunday, in just about every line of business you can think of.
• Minnesota Kicks is registered to a random company in Texas, as far as I can tell.

Whatever the fans voted for is the likely name, and right now indications point to that being "Northstar FC." Still, interesting that FC Minnesota, or the Minnesota Strikers, is trademarked and ready to go...

A Better NHL Standings Representation

The way that we currently represent team won-loss records in the NHL bothers me. Every newspaper and website in the world shows five columns in the standings: GP-W-L-OT-PTS. When mentioning a specific team's record, sources will usually either report merely W-L-OT, or perhaps W-L-OT (Pts).

This is a problem, for four reasons:

1. The ultimate determinant of a team's success is points, yet it's listed fifth. If the standings also list expanded statistics, like goals against and goals for, then points is buried in the middle of the standings despite being the most important.
2. Fans are conditioned via other sports to think of a ".500" record as depending only on the W and L columns. Unfortunately, this is incredibly misleading; as I write this, only five teams in the entire league are "below .500," which is of course impossible.
3. Reporting individual team records as (for example) 27-25-4 is similarly misleading, and if points are included, i.e. 27-25-4 (58 pts.), then this includes redundant information.
4. Records are not transitive. For example, the Wild is 1-0-1 against Detroit, but Detroit is 1-1 against the Wild. Teams often have a "winning" record against each other (Team A could be 1-0-2, while Team B is 2-1, against each other).

Clearly, the problem here is the representation of the overtime/shootout loss; it is worth one point, a win two, and so we're conditioned to think of an overtime loss as "half a win." This isn't correct; it's a loss with a "loser point" tacked on top.

We need to stop thinking of the overtime/shootout loss this way, and the fastest way to do so is to change how it's represented in the standings. Here's how I'd like to do this.

First, the PTS column in the standings would be given primary importance, and be moved up to second in the order. The L column would include all losses, not just regulation losses, and the OTL column would be eliminated completely (or at least moved away from the main standings.)

Here you can see what I mean, with Tuesday's Northwest standings:

Team	GP	Pts	W	L	Overtime
Vancouver	55	70	34	21	4-2
Colorado	54	66	30	24	5-6
Calgary	56	62	27	29	5-8
Minnesota	55	58	27	28	8-4
Edmonton	54	40	17	37	4-6

With the same number of columns, we represent more information (how many overtime games has a team played) without losing any information. We correct the problem of inflated records. And we move points, the most important factor, up to the beginning. (NOTE: Some representations shade or otherwise highlight points in their current representation; do that, and I can see them staying to the right of losses, though I feel strongly that they'd have to be to the left of the overtime record.)

With regard to specific teams, I'd like to see W-L (Pts) become the standard. For example, Minnesota would be referred to as 27-28 (58 pts). This, as you can see, does not lose any information - it's easy math to find the number of overtime/shootout losses - but weights wins and losses correctly. Records are shorter, and just as easy to understand.

Heck, if you want, you could invent your own punctuation system. A few possibilities:
27-28--58
58 (27-28)
27-28 -58-

And so on, and so forth.

Hockey is already seen by many Americans as the most confusing of the four major sports. Simplifying and improving the standings is a small step towards ending that confusion.

February Storylines [Twinkie Town]

Over at Twinkie Town, I'm taking a look at February's important dates and related storylines for the Twins. Consider it a preview of what we'll all be talking about for the next month (unless the Wild manage to get back into the playoff spots).