Posts Tagged ‘NBA’
“It’s all part of life’s rich pageant”*…
There’s an arms race of sorts now taking place in sports arenas. Hence, the Quad.
The Quad is the world’s biggest t-shirt cannon. The massive, four-barreled gatling gun resides in the bowels of the Milwaukee Bucks’ home arena. At some point during each home game, Bango, the Bucks mascot, rides it onto the court like Patton riding a tank into battle. Then he fires off 186 shirts in about 15 seconds, amid a cloud of cryo and shrieks from all the fans wanting something free.
The weapon of mass distraction is the latest brainchild of Todd Scheel, a former wedding DJ and Milwaukee-area businessman who now reigns as the Oppenheimer of arena armaments…
The NBA has invested much more than any other major sports league in “dead-ball entertainment,” or whatever you want to call the sponsor-friendly efforts to keep ticket buyers occupied during game breaks: “How The Milwaukee Bucks And A Former Wedding DJ Won The T-Shirt Cannon Arms Race.”
* Inspector Clousseau, A Shot in the Dark
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As we make ourselves targets, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that carpenter and cough syrup manufacturer Pearle Bixby Wait trademarked a gelatin dessert called Jell-O; his wife May and he added strawberry, raspberry, orange, and lemon flavoring to granulated gelatin and sugar.
Gelatin, a protein produced from collagen extracted from boiled bones, connective tissues, and other animal products, has been a component of food, particularly desserts, since the 15th century. It was popularized in New York in the Victorian era by spectacular and complex jelly molds. But it was Wait who launched gelatin into the mainstream… where, with some ups and downs, it has remained– though slightly tarnished as a family product by the 1980s advent of Jell-O shots and Jell-O wrestling. As of 2016, there were more than 110 products sold under the Jell-O brand name.
The lay of the land…
March Madness is here, and the NBA is lumbering through the second half of its season; roundball is all around us. Happily, there are infographics to help…
Kirk Goldsberry, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis and an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State, has created Courtvision, a series of graphic analyses like the one above aimed at better understanding the battles on the boards.
Readers will find it crammed with insight (e.g., the most effective 3-point shooter in the NBA? Stephen Curry, of Davidson and the Golden State Warriors)…
Perhaps Dr. Goldsberry will follow fellow sport-data geek Nate Silver into politics…
[via Flowing Data]
As we dribble, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that the Cincinnati Royals announced the move of their NBA franchise from The Queen City to The Paris of the Plains, where the following season they played as the Kansas City Kings. (Actually, they were briefly “the Kansas City-Omaha Kings,” but “Omaha” was dropped after two years…) At the time of the announcement the Royals– once the home of such greats as Wayne Embry, Jerry Lucas, and Oscar Robertson– were on the way to concluding a 30-52 season and missing the play-offs for the fifth year in a row. It may be evidence of karma that the franchise has, since 1985, been the Sacramento Kings.
Final home of the Cincinnati Royals (source)
… Or should we be celebrating (and using) Tau instead?
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