Mike Gesicki - Yahoo Canada Sports | Canada News Media
Connect with us

Science

Mike Gesicki – Yahoo Canada Sports

Published

 on


The Canadian Press

Welcome back, NBA: Here’s 10 things to know about the season

And … it’s back.
The NBA’s new season starts Tuesday with a pair of games; Kevin Durant and the Brooklyn Nets welcoming Durant’s former team in Golden State, while the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers open with the Los Angeles Clippers in the renewal of rivals who share a building.
For the first time since March, all 30 NBA teams are playing this week. When the season resumed in July, only 22 teams went to the NBA bubble at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. So, for eight teams — Golden State, Minnesota, Atlanta, Charlotte, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland — games will be played for the first time since March.
For others, it’s the first time since August. Others, the first time since September. And for the Lakers and Miami Heat, who met in last season’s NBA Finals, the off-season only started in mid-October.
The league has had 30 teams since 2004, and on Monday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver suggested that it might be time to consider expansion once again. Extra teams would figure to mean extra revenue, and while nothing is imminent — really, it’s years away if it happens — Silver did say that it is something under advisement.
“It’s an economic issue and it’s a competitive issue for us,” Silver said. “So, it’s one that we’ll continue to study, but we’re spending a little bit more time on it than we were pre-pandemic.”
For now and for the foreseeable future, though, the NBA is 30 teams. The first half of the season goes through March 4, the second half starts March 11 and runs through May 16, the play-in tournament goes from May 18 through May 21, the playoffs start May 22 and the last possible date for the NBA Finals is July 22.
All that is pandemic-permitting, of course. Everything is subject to change.
But Opening Night, at least, has arrived. Here’s some of what to know going into this season:
MVP GIANNIS
Larry Bird, Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain are the only players in NBA history to win three consecutive MVP awards.
Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo has a chance this season to join their club.
The Bucks’ star from Greece — and proud owner of a newly signed supermax extension — is already the first two-time MVP hailing from Europe and joined Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and LeBron James as the only players to win the award twice before turning 26.
LEBRON’S STATS
LeBron James is about at the point where every game he plays creates a new entry in the NBA’s record book.
He enters this season with 995 consecutive regular-season games with at least 10 points scored, the longest such run in NBA history and in position to reach the 1,000 double-digit games in a row milestone when the Los Angeles Lakers play at San Antonio on Dec. 30 — which just happens to be James’ 36th birthday.
The last time James didn’t have at least 10 points in a regular-season game was Jan. 5, 2007, when he was held to eight at Milwaukee.
Other milestones within reach for James this season: He’s six triple-doubles shy of 100; 654 assists from 10,000; 759 points away from 35,000; and 1,448 minutes from 50,000.
WELCOME BACK
Stephen Curry played in only five games last season with Golden State, part of the long list of injured players that derailed any chance the Warriors had of being competitive.
Curry returns this season and likely won’t need long to move into No. 2 on the all-time 3-pointers made list. He enters with 2,495, just 65 away from Reggie Miller’s total of 2,560.
Ray Allen holds the all-time mark of 2,973 makes from 3-point range. At Curry’s current career pace of 3.6 made 3’s per game, he would need 134 more games to catch Allen — which means the record could be his in the latter stages of the 2021-22 season.
WALL’S RETURN
Houston’s John Wall is scheduled to return to the court Wednesday, in what will be his first game since Dec. 26, 2018.
To put in context how much time he’s missed while recovering from heel and Achilles injuries: Danny Green has appeared in a league-high 158 games since Wall’s last appearance, 114 of them wins; Rockets guard James Harden has scored 4,887 points since Wall’s last game; Nikola Jokic has handed out 1,085 assists (and LeBron James has 1,079 going into Tuesday); and Giannis Antetokounmpo has grabbed 1,664 rebounds.
ALL OR NOTHING
The Miami Heat are either going back to the NBA Finals or missing the playoffs entirely.
That is, if the trend from the last seven seasons holds true.
Starting with San Antonio’s loss in the 2013 finals, teams that lost the title series one year either go back to it the following year or completely miss the post-season. Of the last seven runners-up: The Spurs won the 2014 title, the Heat missed the 2015 playoffs, Cleveland won the title in 2016, Golden State won the title in 2017, the Cavaliers lost the finals in 2018 and missed the playoffs in 2019, and the Warriors missed the playoffs last season.
MILESTONE 3
Sometime in the coming days — possibly as early as Wednesday, more likely during the Christmas games Friday — someone will make the 500,000th 3-pointer in NBA history, including regular-season and playoff games.
There have been 499,549 made 3’s in NBA history. At last season’s pace of made 3’s, with teams combining for almost 25 per game, the 500,000th would come during the matchup between the Dallas Mavericks and Los Angeles Lakers on Christmas night.
So far, 2,337 NBA players have made at least one 3-pointer; that’s 72.9% of the players who have appeared in the league since the league added the shot in the 1979-80 season. Of the 530 players who appeared in at least one game last season, 463 — or 87.4% — made at least one 3-pointer.
FOR OPENERS
Toronto enters the season with the longest active streak of season-opening wins; the Raptors have started 1-0 in each of the last seven seasons.
Brooklyn is the other end of the spectrum; the Nets have started 0-1 in seven consecutive years.
Another note on opening games: San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich and Detroit’s Dwane Casey are pretty much automatic.
Popovich is entering his 25th season as coach of the Spurs, a stint he started 18 games into the 1996-97 season. He’s coached 23 season-openers, going an absurd 21-2 in those games. Casey has gone 10-1 in his openers with Minnesota, Toronto and Detroit — with wins in his last seven.
CLOSE GAMES
Something to watch this season: how the Los Angeles Clippers handle close games without coach Doc Rivers.
Over the past three seasons, the Clippers went a league-best 22-8 in one-possession games, including both regular-season and playoff matchups. That .733 winning percentage is the best in the league over that span, well ahead of No. 2 Denver (33-16, .673) and No. 3 Cleveland (22-15, .595).
Rivers is coaching Philadelphia now. The 76ers ranked 21st in the NBA in three-points-or-less games over the last three years, going 20-23 (.465). Could Rivers change that? Time will tell.
The team that has struggled most in games decided by three points or less? Dallas. The Mavericks are 12-27 in those games over the last three seasons and lost a league-high 11 such contests last season. As Luka Doncic’s game keeps evolving, as it will, expect that to change.
THE OG
Miami’s Udonis Haslem — he’s 40, turning 41 in June — is the oldest player in the NBA to start the season, now that Vince Carter is retired.
Jamal Crawford played one game last season; like Carter, he’s older than Haslem but isn’t currently under contract.
The youngest player in the league right now is Oklahoma City’s Aleksej Pokusevski. If he plays in the Thunder opener on Wednesday at Houston, he’ll be able to say he debuted in the NBA at 18 — the Serbian rookie doesn’t turn 19 until Saturday.
Pokusevski could become the 28th 18-year-old in NBA history. He won’t come anywhere near the record for games played before turning 19; that one is held by Kobe Bryant, who appeared in 80 games for the Lakers as an 18-year-old in 1996-97, including playoffs.
Sekou Doumbouya played in five games as an 18-year-old for Detroit last season. He was the first 18-year-old in the NBA since Dragan Bender played nine games at that age for Phoenix in 2016.
VIDEO RULEBOOK
The NBA doesn’t expect fans to like every call. The league also won’t mind if fans study the rules a bit deeper as well.
A video rulebook site with hundreds of videos that explain the nuances of certain rules of the game has been revamped and relaunched in recent weeks. The league says it offers “a deeper look at some of the game’s most misunderstood rules and violations.”
___
More AP NBA: https://apnews.com/NBA and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Tim Reynolds, The Associated Press

Let’s block ads! (Why?)



Source link

Continue Reading

News

Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

Published

 on

 

More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

___

Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Source link

Continue Reading

Science

‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

Published

 on

 

It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

Published

 on

 

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending

Exit mobile version