That Not So Fresh Feeling

I captured a few grainy videos on my digital (picture taking) camera while I was at Game 6. I’ve thrown them up on YouTube as all the kids are doing these days.

Check them out for a little glimpse of what it was like that night …

GINO Time! Complete with Paul Pierce dancing on the table:

The last few seconds before the Celtics were officially NBA Champs:

I’ll post a couple of more when I have time. For now, enjoy (much like 750 other people have enjoyed my Gino video!)

I don’t have much to say. I’m exhausted. What an amazing night!

The Celtics just won a ridiculous game 4 in the NBA Finals.

I have tickets to game 6.

If there is one, this is what I’ll be wearing:

Oh yes. Just like this guy:

I think I love this commercial more and more

My Hokies played a horrible 32 minutes, followed by a pretty solid 8 minutes, to pull out a 54-52 victory over Illinois. I hope to hell they work on free throw shooting all evening.

The good news (besides the victory) is that they got a game under their belts and got a bad game out of their system. They’ll need to bring it when they play the second round game against either Southern Illinois or Holy Cross.

EA calls it! Virginia Tech to win the NCAA Title during March Madness. Go Hokies!

Last week, the Hokies go into Cameron and beat up on the #5 ranked Duke Blue Devils.

This week, #1 ranked UNC came to Blacksburg. New team, same result. The Hokies upset UNC 94-88. That’s flat out awesome.

The best win I saw while I was in Blacksburg was probably a last second win over a mediocre George Washington team. Since then, the Hokies have beaten Duke twice and knocked off UNC. If they can keep it together, there’s no doubt in my mind they’ll be in the tourney this year.

I get to post this every couple of years. Virginia Tech 69 - Duke 67. At Duke. In Cameron. With all of the little annoying crazies bouncing around pretending like they don’t smell like fish.

Awesome.

For a while now, I’d been keeping in the back of my mind that Harvey Danger was coming to Great Scott on a Thursday night. I was all jazzed to see them, but I also knew that I might have a basketball game that night, when we’d already be short players. So I didn’t buy a ticket ahead of time.

Thursday rolls around, my game is at 7pm, and the show is at 9pm (which means HD probably don’t go on until 11:15 or so). I get out of work and fight traffic to get down to Waltham on time for the game. It’s the first game of the season, so it’s always a bit of an adjustment to get back into the flow. I also have a tendency to be overly critical of my own play. However, I rocked. Probably the best I’ve played in a few years, which I think was directly related to the fact that the other team constantly kept throwing passes that I could just rip and start running the other way for easy hoops. So, it’s probably a whole lot less my good than the other team’s bad. But whatever. I’ll take what I can get.

After our victory (a narrow 1 point win because we were short players and played 4 on 5), I drove home and checked out the Great Scott website just to make sure the show wasn’t sold out. Of course, they just can’t tell me, so I call them and the fellow answering the phone is nice enough to let me know that they’re definitely not sold out yet, but it looks like the crowd is starting to get there. So I should hurry.

I hop into the shower and remember that I’m out of shower wash or body wash or whatever you call it. So I squeeze out a couple of handfuls of the anti-bacterial hand soap that’s on the bathroom sink and use that. I’ll smell like hand soap, but I’ll be germ free. I throw on my rockin’ Dear Leader tee and my nerd glasses and get into the car, realizing that I’ve yet to eat dinner and I’m certainly not going to eat it at Great Scott. Needing money, I stop at Walgreen’s to hit the ATM and grab some quick food. I buy a fruit punch Gatorade, some weird caramel nut balance bar, and a bag of Jelly Bellys. Quite frankly, if I pass a bag of Jelly Bellys, I have to buy them.

Guzzling Gatorade and eating something that passes as chocolate, I head down Fresh Pond towards Soldiers Field Road. My normal route takes me up Market St. then back down Cambridge St., but only because I’ve never figured out which road crosses the two (I now know which one!). I turn down Harvard Ave. for parking, before realizing I’m about to park to go into Harpers Ferry. It is just now, right about 9pm, that I realize I don’t remember exactly where Great Scott is.

Making my life more ridiculous, it’s at this moment that I crack open the bag of Jelly Bellys and pull out the first one … which I get into my mouth only to realize it’s plum, the bastard child of all Jelly Bellys. I hate plum.

Thankfully, I notice some people walking and realize that I’m not insane and Great Scott is just another block down. I slide down, hang a left on Comm Ave., just hoping I can luck into a parking spot.

And I do. About a block from Great Scott. Things are looking up. Haven’t hit another plum bean and I found free parking in a great spot like a block away.

I head up to the door, walk in, pay for my ticket, and get a Sam Adams Octoberfest. It’s a decent crowd, though when you’re in Allston and school is in session, it’s hard to gauge how many folks are there for the show versus how many just decided they wanted to hang out for the evening. As I’m looking around, Sean Nelson, the lead singer of Harvey Danger, walks by. He’s not a small man. Probably 6′2″ or 6′3″.

The opening band, Harris, is just getting ready to start, and I find myself a nice spot on the wall where I can lean and not be too much in the way. Harris starts off and their guitarist closest to me is just all over the place and really fun to watch. As local bands go, these guys were pretty good. They obviously have a little bit of a base, as they had some folks there singing along with them. They had one song, “Carousel“, that stuck in my head and could easily be on the radio. The rest of it still seemed a bit rough around the edges. But, apparently they’d had a shakeup in the band and people were playing different instruments. They seemed like nice guys, too. A pretty decent opener and the set break allowed me to go get another Octoberfest.

So Many Dynamos followed up Harris. They’re out of St. Louis and they play music that I don’t generally find enjoyable. Except they rocked. They are an indie rock/pop/electronic band; it’s not really my genre, so I wouldn’t even know who to compare them to. And, quite frankly, if I heard that album, I’d probably be pretty disinterested. But they were just so fun on stage, bouncing around, bantering wittily (”We’re halfway through the set. I’m feeling pretty good: I only feel like we’re a third of the way through”), and just having a good time. It was infectous.

If you’re wondering, most reviews seem to compare the band to The Dismemberment Plan and as a punkier Hot Hot Heat. I’ve sadly never heard the former, and can sort of see the latter comparison. Very “sort of”.

Smartly, I took a moment between songs to go grab another beer and hit the bathroom (except in reverse order). If you’ve ever been to a show at a place like Great Scott or TT the Bear’s, you know why.
When So Many Dynamos finished, things got crowded fast. All of the folks who were only there to see Harvey Danger, sort of stormed to the front. I don’t mind so much when it’s people who seem to actually dig the band (in this case, it was mostly those type of fans). I do mind when it’s people who’ve heard one song and think that entitles them to push their way to the front. Which always reminds me of the night at a Fountains of Wayne show when I saw two college aged girls try to push their way to the front, bitching at people left and right. One of them tried to push past the wrong people and got laid out (right in front of me!). It made my night.

I digress.

I had my spot, had a beer, and was ready for Harvey Danger. I have a tendency to check out band sites before a show to get an idea of what the set might be like, and I’d learned that the aforementioned Mr. Nelson had been having some throat/voice issues. As he took the stage, he acknowledged as much and said they were going to start out with a quieter song to get warmed up. He breaks into “Pike St./Park Slope”, which is a fantastic song and helps to illustrate some of the, shall we say, verbose lyrics that Harvey Danger utilizes.

Maybe we could run away and start a little repertory moviehouse or something.
She said, “sorry but I think you might be just projecting on to me. Why don’t you try LA?”

Repertory. Awesome. I mean, come on, this is a band that can work the word interminable into a song. How can you not dig that?
After that, I don’t really remember the setlist. They played a great mix of stuff off of all 3 CDs, and sounded pretty amazing for a band that hadn’t toured in 5+ years. They turned a song off of the re-released version of Little by Little called “Picture Picture” into a crowd sing along, which was lead into by a very funny 60 second or so monologue describing the “sacred covenent between an audience and performer” in a call-and-response chorus. There were even helpful cue cards to make it easy. That sounds like it could be very pretentious or even cloying, but it wasn’t. It was really cleverly done. The band worked into “Little Round Mirrors”, which I enjoy a lot, neatly working the chorus from Guns-N-Roses “Paradise City” into it.

At some point, I can’t remember if it was during the normal set or as part of the encore, they pulled up a woman onto the stage (she was a friend of the band, it seemed) and she did the female backing vocals to “Old Hat”, which is probably my favorite Harvey Danger song. Just an all around great set, with no discernable voice problems, no discernable jackasses, no problems at all.

They finished the set with “Flagpole Sitta”, which is the song that they’re most famous for, but, as you’d expect, has a tendency to bring out the douchebags. And bring out the douchebags it did, as someone decided it was a good opportunity to start a mosh pit. But, my faith in humanity was restored when his girlfriend yanked him down to the floor by the back of his shirt. Ah, I loves the rock.

After that, I made the quick walk back to my car, and headed home. I had some Jelly Bellys on the way home, and even the plums tasted ok.

(Image from Flickr via splunkton who I don’t know, but I found the image then followed to his website which is ridiculously awesome. Seriously. Check it out.)

For the past year or so, I’ve been dorking around with some of my friends with the idea of a basketball statistic that attempts to measure what a player brings a team. You know, take his points, his assists, rebounds, blocks, etc., and throw them all into one big number. It’s been a fun diversion, and an excuse to think about math and some web programming again.
The idea is based on the work done at sonicscentral.com towards something that’s been called Points Created (an attempt to parallel Bill James’ baseball stat “Runs Created”). It’s not perfect, but I’ve had some dorky fun, and, quite frankly, the ratings have come out moderately ok.
Recently, when I realized I could dynamically update this from the web rather than doing it via Excel, I set out to create a Perl script that would enable me to run it, have it grab the latest stats from the invaluable dougstats.com, and then generate the stats for everybody in the NBA.

A few hours later, I had something working.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;
use CGI;
my $query= new CGI;
print $query->header;

The basics: the hash-bang, and includes for LWP (to get the data over the web) and CGI (so I can pass in parameters).

my %Data;
my @row;
my @PlayerStats;
my $PlayerName;
my $PlayerStatsString;
my $url = "http://www.dougstats.com/05-06RD.txt";

my $PointsCreated = 0;
my $PCperG = 0;
my $PCper48 = 0;

Here we set up all of the variables. A hash to contain the player data. Arrays for handling a row of data and a row of player statistics. Scalars for the player name, the string of text representing the data, the URL to get the data, and then some internal values for calculating statistics that aren’t in the downloaded data.

my $sort = $query->param('sort');

my $stats = get($url);
die "Couldn't get data" unless defined $stats;

@row = split(/n/, $stats);

shift @row;

Here we get the data. We grab the sort parameter (so I can determine which value to sort on — more on that later). We go out and get the data (or die, if we can’t get it). We split the data on new lines into rows of data in the array—each array element is a full row of text data. Finally, we shift off the top row, since it’s the category text and we don’t want that in our stats.

foreach (@row) {
($PlayerName, $PlayerStatsString) = split(/s+/, $_, 2);
@PlayerStats = split(/s+/, $PlayerStatsString);

my $DefRebs = $PlayerStats[11] - $PlayerStats[10];

$PointsCreated = $PlayerStats[18] + (0.75 * $PlayerStats[12])
+ (1.03 * ((0.75 * $PlayerStats[10]) + (0.25 * $DefRebs)
+ $PlayerStats[13] + (0.5 * $PlayerStats[15]) - $PlayerStats[14]
- (0.71 * ($PlayerStats[5] - $PlayerStats[4]))));
$PCperG = $PointsCreated / $PlayerStats[2];
$PCper48 = ($PointsCreated / $PlayerStats[3]) * 48;

$Data{$PlayerName} = [@PlayerStats, $DefRebs, $PointsCreated, $PCperG, $PCper48];
}

delete $Data{"Player"};

Ok - here’s where some of the magic happens. I iterate through each row of data, and split the row into components: the player name and then the combined player stats. Then I split the player stats into individual stat buckets. I build some of the intermediate stats that aren’t in the dataset—defensive rebounds, and then the Points Created and Points Created per Game and per 48 minutes.
Toss everything into a big hash, with the hash key set as the player name, and just make sure there’s not an element that is the row of column headers (the delete line). I could probably toss this last line …

I won’t get into the details of the Points Created formula right now, but there’s some (limited) intelligence behind those coefficients. Basically, it’s an attempt to quantify how many possessions a player creates or loses, turn that into points, and then add in the points the player actually scored to come up with a final total. I’ve been working on a more refined version with some other folks that better integrates assists and the fact that not all hoops are created equal.
Quite frankly, that’s about it. The rest of the script is just output, dumping the data in a simple table to the screen, and throwing in some links to allow some basic sorting. If you check out the Points Created display (or the possibly improved adjusted Points Created), you can see the results of the work.

The basics: both metrics say that LeBron James has created the most overall points this season. The adjusted method has Allen Iverson edging out James for PC/G, whereas the original has James edging out Iverson. The adjusted method likes point guards a lot more than the original method. Part of me thinks it likes them too much, but what do I know.

In summary: I’m a dork, but not a big enough dork to do this stuff as anything more than a part-time hobby.