t of extra love involved in this one. So were very happy for him, and its great to have him here.This summer could end up being a reminder to the world just how good George really is. With no James or L

Im moneyballing, says Trent Woodhill. Find your way to any new-age cricket thinker - and Woodhill is as new-age as cricket will tolerate - and they will, at one stage or another, mention the title of Michael Lewis book on baseball sabermetrics. Its like crickets new thinkers are in a book club together, and they only ever discuss one book. If international coaches toy with the ideas behind Moneyball, it is the domestic T20 teams who truly obsess over them.Woodhill is by trade a batting and assistant coach. He must be pretty good, as his two personal clients are Steve Smith and David Warner. But his methods, and increasingly his willingness to talk openly about his complete disregard for crickets norms and its hierarchy of former Test players turned coaches (Woodhill never played first-class cricket, the cheeky monkey) mean that he isnt Cricket Australias (CA) batting coach, but Melbourne Stars. But its his job as Stars list manager that is most interesting.Moneyballs hero is Billy Beane, a man on the inside who thinks the entire system is wrong, and when faced with a choice, takes a new way over perceived baseball wisdom. Beane is a not a current player or a coach, as heroes often are in most sports narratives. He is the general manager, the man in charge of the list and day-to-day operations. To most athletes that might seem a pretty uncool role, but for people like Woodhill, Beane is about as cool as it gets. Woodhill is a devoted sports nerd, and when he gets excited, he might talk about Martin Guptills ball-striking or AB de Villiers hands, but he also gets just as excited about guys like Theo Epstein, the backroom genius who broke the Chicago Cubs title-drought, and even ESPN baseball writer Keith Law.Woodhill is not your typical Australian cricket coach. He is not a proselytiser of the baggy green, he never mentions it in our conversation, nor does he talk about Steve Waughs mental toughness. Recently he spoke out against sledging, and he doesnt bring up the glory days of Australian cricket every seven minutes. Instead, Woodhill quotes, verbatim, from the Big Short - another Michael Lewis book turned movie:Its time to call bullshit.Bullshit on what?Everything.Woodhill is calling bullshit on how cricket is played, coached and talked about. He isnt here to listen to former pros tell us how cricket has always been; he doesnt care about your Test record from 1974; he thinks most cricket coaches are living off their playing careers without helping much at all, and he believes crickets current stats are holding cricket back. His way of putting together the best list for Stars is to use science and hard facts in and around crickets steaming pile of opinion. If youve been out of the game for six years, you have no idea what is going on in the modern game.In a sport that still has a weird relationship with coaches and seems to actively distrust high-performance managers, Woodhills job will elicit punchlines from the moustachioed set. But in franchise cricket, someone needs to put the list together. The coaches swan from gig to gig, the captains often the same; each team has a GM or CEO, but often they are more in charge of running the franchise, not list curation.Woodhills job out of season is to assemble Stars the best 18 players he can find. Some of it is old school: he haggles with managers, talks to players about opportunities, but he is also looking beyond the perceived wisdom on a player, looking for the truth. He wants to know more about them than anyone else, so that when he makes a decision it isnt based on a recommendation, or on how they look, but on as many facts as possible.The problem is, for all the obsession cricket has with numbers, we havent yet moved on to a data obsession. Opta, perhaps the first big player in cricket data, still has a person at the ground mapping out where each ball was fielded, where it pitched, and if the batsman was in control of the shot. They dont map field positions, or how quickly fielders move to the ball, and at the moment they dont have their own cameras at grounds. Quite often the data that Opta gets ends up on apps and websites and not with the teams themselves. There are other providers such as Cricviz. But even then we are at the very beginning. Data just isnt something that cricket has invested in greatly yet.Where this plays out is when, for example, Woodhill wants to know if a bowler is good at the death and he doesnt want to rely on opinions that may be coloured by memory. Lets say he wanted to sign Sean Abbott. The conventional view might be that he isnt good at death bowling because Travis Head went all 4, 6, 4, 6, 6 and 1 in an over against him. But the fact of Abbotts death bowling isnt in one bad over or one good over; and its not always just in conventional death-bowling stats. Abbott may go at 8.5 over in those overs, but he might also concede 30% of those runs from edges, and there might be dropped catches and fumbles; or his fielders might not be as strong as those of other teams; perhaps he bowls on a smaller ground than others; or he has bowled more against bigger hitters. Woodhill moves to the best stats and data cricket has and then makes his judgement. He may not have all the facts he wants, but hes as far away from lazy misconceptions as he can get.When Woodhill talks facts, he isnt doing it in some post-truth 2016 way; hes actively trying to find out what is real and how to use it. Other teams have some of the same data, others perhaps have even more, but often those teams are run by people who still believe the old ways are the only ways. Or that they could deliver more in a team environment that backed their talent. They are also looking for a different kind of player, what Woodhill calls a three-tool player, which was something that the pioneering Bob Woolmer always liked. Someone who can help win them the game with batting, bowling or fielding.The bigger part of what Stars are doing is looking at cricket in a more forensic way. When John Hastings went down injured, they werent just interested in replacing him as a bowler who batted a bit; they delved deeper than the allrounder tag. While Hastings is known as a big hitter, for Stars he only got two hits last year, and only one of them came off. In his entire career for the team, he has batted in about half their matches, never scored more than 22, and has scored, in total, 139 runs. Hastings is for them a specialist death bowler. While cricket might see him as an allrounder, or rate his batting, says Woodhill, we have to deal with what he did for us, and replace it.Every time they need to fill a place they need to look at it in far more detail than looking at batsmen, bowlers, wicketkeepers and allrounders. How many six-hitters? How many strike-rotaters? How many slow-pitch tamers? How many new-ball seam bowlers? How many new-ball spinners? How many death bowlers? How various should the bowling options be? How many different wicketkeeping options? How many batsmen who are specialists against spin, or pace? How many boundary riders? How many players who spin it away from a right-hand batsman? How many batsmen who spin it away from a left-hand batsman?And these are just playing types, excluding the different personalities to consider. Players who have experience in multiple locations. Players with previous captaincy experience to help bulk out your strategic thinking. You might want a few leaders, or you might want a group where the leaders evolve naturally. You might want a diverse group of people, as diverse groups of people are better at problem-solving, or you might want a similar group of people, as they tend to work more smoothly. And all this before your team owner or chairman comes in and says, We need to you to sign a big name for marketing this year.Its a tough job to put a quality list together. And that means the gut in cricket selection will become more of a science. Many international sides still pick potential over performance. Franchise cricket is doing that less and less. That means picking older players, for whom teams can look at a data profile beforehand and know what they should expect.While the old-school baseball front office no longer exists, many cricket teams have barely started flirting with new ways of looking at the sport. It is often the T20 franchises that are doing the most adventurous work, because as a new franchise you need to win to guarantee your survival. New franchises, even the ones run by cricket boards, cant float for decades on legacy money and nationalist supporters. They are fighting for the best players, the best coaches, and all of crickets new fans. That means instant results, and teams will take them any way they can get them.While the Australian team will talk of picking Matt Renshaw and blooding him for the future, despite the fact he might not be seen as the best player now, in franchise teams they need the best here and now. Rob Quiney, who has been passed over by Victoria this year as they try new players, is a perfect fit for a franchise. They have data on what he can do, they know he is a seasoned pro who has played cricket overseas, and they have decided he will fit well into their side. T20 was first seen as a young mans game, but quickly it has become a game for older, more experienced cricketers whom traditional cricket often moves on from. Its also a common theme of sabermetrics: a young player simply doesnt have the data to mine; they are unknown where the old players have history.But it isnt all milk and honey for those older players. Franchise cricket cant afford to live on reputation. They need to win, so giving a player a romantic ride at the end wont happen. The players have to adapt to stay relevant. Often that is perfecting a shot they have never mastered, or learning a new delivery. Sometimes its by adding a new skill altogether. A 37-year-old former international who bowled offspin in his youth, but didnt need it at international level, might need it again if he wishes to cash in on the last few years of his career. His offspin might only be useful on three pitches a season, against certain types of left-handers who struggle to score quickly against spin, but even if he only bowls six overs, that adds to his versatility and makes him more desirable to a franchise. Six overs of mediocre offspin to a list manager can be the advantage that wins a game.Every list in the BBL has to produce a squad of 18 that has enough variation in batting and bowling, for the entire series. Because once the 18 names are signed, there can be no trades, and unless there is an injury, no replacements. So, unlike American sports, where you can add a player for a two-week stint at a whim, or trade when your team has deficiencies mid-season, the BBL is a static, closed league.If your team finds itself struggling against fast bowling coming up to a week where three of your opposition have the best fast-bowling attacks, instead of hiring a fast-bowling specialist for the week, like an American sport might, you will just have to wing it with your available list. Likewise, if after three weeks of the tournament, Perth Scorchers think they have too much batting and not enough bowling, and Hobart Hurricanes think the opposite, they cant make a trade to rectify that. And that is one of the ways that the Big Bash is still not fully formed.There are also no long-term contracts, perhaps in part because the players are still yet to sign what they hope will be a very lucrative new MOU. Perhaps more importantly there are no drafts or auctions. The original BBL teams were made up primarily of players from that state, and even now its first in, first served, and once served, you cant do a damn thing.Woodhill calls bullshit on this, and you can see why. He is trying to build the best list for his captain and coach to work with each week, and once the 18th contract is signed, he has no control. How does that ensure the best 88 players in the country are in action each game? How does that ensure that teams that had a bad start can fill holes in their rosters that might be caused by injuries, or national selections that are out of their hands? That makes it harder to Moneyball, or even use an old-school approach to list management.But perhaps the biggest hole in Woodhills plan isnt the access to open player markets but to the data. Baseball and basketballs evolution has come from sabermetrics, big data, and analysts taking over. Woodhill is not a data analyst; hes a batting coach. While he craves more data to factor in, cricket has barely touched the surface. What all forms of cricket need, perhaps none more than T20, is a wins-above-replacement stat, so we know good a player is compared to a standard replacement player for that position; or a plus/minus runs stat that allows us to know what real effect a player has on the game.For every player that Woodhill picks, or wants to pick, what he desperately wants to know is what impact they have on games. He can ignore batting averages and cling on to strike rates, but he needs far more than that. He needs balls per boundary, per types of bowler, perhaps per types of pitch, and whether their runs come in overs 1-6, 7-10, 11-15 or 16-20. He needs to know what teams win T20 matches on different kinds of pitches. Is the number of times contact is made with the ball more important? Or who plays fewer dot balls? Or the number of singles/boundaries? Should every batsman be a boundary-hitting monster, or should you be picking batsmen based on their ability to rotate strike? Woodhill says, All I want from some batsmen is to run twos so he can get the big hitter back on strike.A player like Sachin Baby may look out of place in a batting line-up like Royal Challengers Bangalore, but if his job is to ensure that Chris Gayle, Shane Watson, Travis Head, de Villiers and Virat Kohli face more balls, his value is greater than his runs. When Kohli smashed Australia in the World T20 this year, MS Dhoni wanted credit for all the twos he helped steal to add to Kohlis total and keep him on strike. At the moment, cricket is still trying to work out how many extra runs non-striking batsmen are worth, meaning that Woodhill is guessing, rather than knowing.And it isnt all we dont know.Which player in the Big Bash runs the quickest three? Which bowler has the most successful slower ball? Who has the fastest hand speed? Which player fumbles the least? Which fast bowler saves the most runs in the field? What is the catch/drop percentage of each player? Which players only hit boundaries when the ball is new? How many balls at the start of an innings does each player need to hit their first boundary? A lot of these are simple things that American sports, and even domestic sports like Australian Rules and Rugby League would have access to.And thats before you get to fun stuff like the probability of a player playing a good shot compared to a bad one. What kind of things can we learn about a batsman or captain using spatio-temporal pattern recognition? These are things that draft camps might tell you, that you would ideally want to learn before picking players, that cricket is still trying to find answers to. Woodhill doesnt have all the answers. Some he wishes he does, others he wishes he had the staff to prepare answers for him. CA still dont have a great big analytic lab. Most of crickets data comes from a few companies that have limited funding, and without open-sourcing of data, cricket cant have the big leap forward that baseball and basketball have had. MIT have the Sloan Sports Conference to move sports forward using science. Something like that would massively help cricket, but since the sport wont pay for its umpiring technology system, were a way off a yearly cricket science conference. For now, Woodhill relies on the tiny bits of data he gets and hopes that he finds things that other teams arent yet looking for.Without access to MIT scientists, Woodhill improvised by crowdsourcing via social media. He uses the new cricket media, from professional writers to amateur tweeters, to question his beliefs. Without a front office to bounce ideas off, he might do that with a random tweeter, or he might read a blog by someone that makes him rethink a belief he had. For his way to work, he needs not only to call bullshit on the old ways, but also on new ways of doing it that may just be wrong.Being that so many people in cricket are claiming to be moneyballing, and so many teams arent very good, it is easy for many critics to laugh at how often the term comes up. Most critics just think its all nonsense. There are bound to be missteps when you are mainly trying to use another sports evolution to force your own. Not every team has the intelligence of Andy Flower and Nathan Leamon. The two teams Woodhill works for, Bangalore and Stars, both came second last season. And his list for Stars was so good, they signed the same list again this year. And it is that list that has them as favourites for this years tournament.Right now crickets moneyballing is more Mick Lewis than Michael Lewis. Woodhill is one of a very small crew of list managers in Australia, and world cricket. He is just an amateur, playing with the beginnings of a professional structure, and he knows it. He has no idea if what he is doing is correct, but he is using the best current thinking to make his decisions. Which is at least a step towards a new age.Whether Woodhills methods will be proved right or wrong we dont know, but what he is doing has been working, and the more it works, the more list managers, hands-on general managers and data well see in cricket. The lazy ex-players might call bullshit on the new ways, but that is their opinion. Woodhills more interested in facts.Authentic Custom Rays Jersey . The 28-year-old from Calgary matched his career best after missing just one shot in his two rounds of shooting in the mens 10-kilometre sprint competition. Smith finished in 23 minutes 15. Evan Longoria Jersey Large . Vaives lawyer Trevor Whiffen claims the former 50-goal man wasnt provided with a copy of the claim beforehand and that he would not have agreed to the allegations made against the NHL had he been asked to review its contents. http://www.customraysjersey.com/ . -- Team after team passed on Andre Ellington in the draft. Custom Rays T-shirts . Spiller left Week 3s 27-20 loss to the New York Jets with a thigh injury, but fully practiced with the team all week and expects to be ready to go on Sunday. Cheap Rays Jerseys . The Montreal Canadiens announced on Friday that the veteran forward will return to the teams line-up on Saturday night when the Habs visit the Nashville Predators.LAS VEGAS -- It has been two years since Paul Georges life was inextricably altered during a USA Basketball exhibition game in which he snapped his right leg in gruesome fashion under the basket at the Thomas & Mack Center, an incident he now refers to simply as the injury.Hes back in Las Vegas this week. Back donning a USA jersey across his chest. Back among the games elite. Back fulfilling his reputation as a dominant talent on the court.George already restored his place in the basketball pecking order before this week, making third-team All-NBA and second-team All-Defensive in 2015-16 while putting up better overall numbers than he did for the Indiana Pacers in the season before the injury. Resuming his spot within Team USA just brings things full circle.It means a lot, George said after Team USAs opening practice of training camp in preparation for the Rio Olympics next month. This is like really a redemption to myself. All the bad that happened on that night, I owed myself this opportunity to come back out here and compete for my country.For all that has been made about stars such as?LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Kawhi Leonard bowing out of international competition this summer, Georges inclusion cant be emphasized enough.Its one of the great stories of this group, said Jerry Colangelo, USA Basketballs managing director. I mean, when you think about it, when you think back to the tragedy when the injury took place, no one could have projected where he would be. And was his career over? Was his career going to be limited because of the injury? Would he ever come back fully? And to see him back and to see what hes accomplished back in the league, its like he didnt miss a beat.While George has reclaimed his perch, its impossible not to notice all that has changed since that fateful night in August 2014, when he chased down Harden to foul him on a fast break and suffered an open tibia-fibula fracture after landing awkwardly at the base of the basket stanchion.Donald Trump went from reality TV show host to presidential hopeful; the Golden State Warriors went from a promising group to the league standard for excellence; Georges Pacers went from knocking on the door of the NBA Finals with consecutive Eastern Conference finals appearances to a new-look group thats hardly recognizable compared with what they were before the injury.Indianas core has been blown up: Frank Vogel now coaches the Orlanndo Magic; Roy Hibbert is on his second different team; David West is on his second different team; Lance Stephenson is on his third different team.ddddddddddddIt just goes to show the evolution of this game, George said. Im looked upon as the leader and the longest-[tenured] Pacer now. So its sunk in. I dont think it will officially sink in until training camps started, and Im looking around, and Im the face of it. So its just part of the game, and Ill deal with it.Indianas future, although its a promising one with the offseason additions of Jeff Teague, Al Jefferson and Thaddeus Young, is yet to be determined. What is certain is how George took a guarantee made by Colangelo shortly after the injury that there would a spot waiting for him on the 16 Olympic team, and went and proved he belonged anyway.It was meant to be an incentive for him, Colangelo said. But when you see its actually happened and hes earned it in every way, this is not a gift here. Hes literally earned this spot. Its just a lot of extra love involved in this one. So were very happy for him, and its great to have him here.This summer could end up being a reminder to the world just how good George really is. With no James or Leonard, hell team with Kevin Durant and Carmelo Anthony as the teams most versatile swingman.The way hes just handled everything: physically to be at the level hes at, emotionally, mentally ... coach Mike Krzyzewski said. I mean, wow. I remember being in a hospital with him. ... You try to envision and talk about, Well, in Rio, youll be there. And you hope that you believe that, you think you do, but then maybe thats not going to happen. And it is. And hopefully we win, and that would be an even better story.That story and the way it unfolds at the Olympics is the final march on Georges comeback tour.Now I know Im healthy, I know Im OK, I know Im 100 percent, George said. Im back to being myself. Its no limitations. Its no thought in my mind that Im limited to something. I kind of just feel like all the chains are off of me and Im free now.Unburdened by the injury, George is embracing being back at the scene where his progress was interrupted.Im just enjoying it, man, he said. Im just enjoying it. This trip is not about the injury. Thats behind me. It happened. Im over it. Its about preparing for a gold medal. ' ' '