Author: scatty

While on the surface sports seem like a competition to see who the fastest and strongest are, there are a lot of life lessons that can be learned when participating in a sport. Perhaps no sport teaches more life lessons than basketball, where you rely on your team to help get you to the mountaintop of whichever league you’re participating in.

To become the best both on and off the court, every basketball player needs a great coach. Coaches do more than make you run sprints and have you practice free throws until the sun comes up. They teach life lessons at all levels. Out of all of the great basketball coaches, here are five of the biggest life lessons that everyone can take away.

5. Empower Everyone

In basketball, much of the team may revolve around a single person who has the most talent. However, not even the best players are able to play every minute of every game. People get tired or hurt, just like in real life. With that in mind, it’s important to empower everyone on the team so that when it’s their opportunity to contribute, they have the confidence to deliver. If a coach hasn’t done a good job of building up that confidence, that player is more likely to become overwhelmed with the situation since they don’t feel like a part of the actual team. Draymond Green noted that this is Steve Kerr’s strong point, saying “it’s on everybody to come together and empower that next man.”

4. Leaders Care

The late, great Dean Smith of North Carolina basketball said that “The most important thing in good leadership is truly caring,” adding that this is true in all aspects of life. “The best leaders in any profession care about the people they lead, and the people who are being led know when the caring is genuine and when it’s faked or not there at all.” So whether you’re in the NBA Finals or leading a team of salespeople, you have to care to lead.

3. Don’t Coast On Success

We’ve all had that time where we’ve had success, only to get a bit complacent or develop an ego instantly. When this success happens, people tend to think that they were the biggest reason behind a team’s success, it can be by pure chance that all of the right pieces fell into place. You have to continue to grow as a person. As hall of fame coach Pat Riley said, “Success is often the first step toward disaster.”

2. Communicate With Trust

Communication is more important than just about any aspect of life when building relationships both professional and personal. If you can’t communicate and do so with trust, then you’ll lose those around you in a heartbeat. Duke legend Mike Krzyzewski said that you don’t get to that level of trust “when you look each other in the eye and tell the truth. If you do that on a consistent basis, the element of trust is developed…and that becomes part of your culture.”

1. Success is Measured By Effort

The final lesson to take away is that you don’t have to reach the pinnacle of success to truly succeed. Too often, people are hard on themselves because they aren’t the best in the world at what they do. Even if you’re not the best at something in your building, you’re still succeeding if you’re doing one thing: giving the best that you can. The best college basketball of all time, UCLA’s John Wooden, said that “Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you were capable of becoming.” Wooden won 10 NCAA Championships, but all he remembered was the effort given, not the end result.

Perhaps more than batting, pitching is something that’s very fleeting. Seemingly out of nowhere, a pitcher comes through and dominates for a year and then can fade into obscurity or completely burn out of the league. A big part of this is due to injuries sustained by pitchers. If even so much as a fingernail is just a nanometer too short or long, it can seemingly affect a pitcher.

There were some dominant years that took place in the 2010s for pitchers. Some of them really stood out as being all-time performances, too. Let’s take a look at the best individual seasons for pitchers during one of baseball’s most exciting decades.

Kershaw’s Dominance

Throughout the 2010s, no pitcher was as dominant overall as Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Of the top 11 pitching seasons of the decade, four of those belonged to Kershaw. Two seasons sit at the top as the best of his career, with 2014 and 2015 taking the fourth and third spots overall, respectively. In those two seasons combined, Kershaw finished with a record of 37-10 and a combined 16.5 wins above replacement.

Cy Snubs

Speaking of Kershaw’s 2015 season, he surprisingly didn’t win the National League Cy Young Award that year. That honor belonged to Chicago Cubs starter Jake Arrieta, who surprisingly had the 14th-best season of the decade. Those who watched Arrieta that season know that he had one of the most dominating second halves in MLB history. Arrieta finished 22-6 that year with an astonishing 1.77 earned run average.

Having the highest WAR total doesn’t always translate into a Cy Young. In addition to Kershaw, there were several other pitchers that led the league in that category without winning the Cy Young. In the National League, this includes Roy Halladay in 2011, Matt Harvey in 2013, and Max Scherzer in 2018. As for the American League, Chris Sale (2017) Gerrit Cole (2019), Cliff Lee (2010), and Justin Verlander (2012) were some of the Cy Young snubs.

Strikeout Kings

There were a total of 11 pitchers that had seasons where they struck out at least 12 batters for every nine innings pitched. Max Scherzer accomplished this three times. Gerrit Cole, Robbie Ray, and Justin Verlander did it twice while Jose Fernandez (2016) and Chris Sale (2017) did it once each. Justin Verlander (2019) and Max Schezer (2018) were perhaps the most impressive as they were the only two pitchers to accomplish this feat in 220 or more innings.

The Two Best Seasons

While the assumption is that the best single-season performance of the 2010s probably belongs to Clayton Kershaw, his top season actually registered third overall on Fangraphs. The number two spot belongs to the late Roy Halladay when he was a member of the Philadelphia Phillies. Halladay didn’t blow anyone away in terms of strikeouts but also didn’t let batters get good contact or take walks.

Halladay helped get the Phillies to 100 wins on the season thanks to his 19-6 record with an earned run average of 2.35. Kershaw would end up winning the Cy Young Award that season in what was considered the eighth-best individual season of the decade by Fangraphs.

The top season of the 2010s belonged to a pitcher entering his prime and surprisingly only finished with a record of 10-9. That, of course, is Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom, and the record certainly doesn’t indicate just how good he was in 2018. deGrom had the lowest ERA for any qualifying pitcher at 1.70 and a strikeout rate of 11.16 per nine innings. For deGrom, it was the first of back-to-back Cy Young wins, with his 2019 campaign ranked as the 15th best of the 2010s.

In the 21st century, baseball became more analytics-focused thanks to the advent of the internet and mathematicians determining what traits were more valuable for players. With that, new statistics were created thanks to websites and companies like FanGraphs. One statistic that has gained a lot of traction over the years is wins above replacement, or WAR, for short. FanGraphs uses a system to determine WAR, and some of the finest seasons for a batter in baseball history have come during the 2010s. A few, however, really stood out above the rest over the decade.

The Brilliance of Mike Trout

Of the 15 best individual seasons of the 2010s, Mike Trout was responsible for an amazing seven of them. The lowest of the bunch was Trout’s 2014 season when he put up an impressive 8.3 wins above replacement. He even outdid that season in 2019 despite playing in 23 fewer games. The most impressive feat for Trout, however, came in 2013.

It was then that Trout had the second-best season of the decade, posting a batting average of .323 with 27 home runs and 97 runs batted in. When you add in 33 stolen bases, terrific defense, and an on-base percentage of .432, it’s easy to see why Trout was considered to be the best player of the 2010s by a longshot. Sadly, despite his individual success, the Angels made just one postseason appearance in the decade and the team was swept by Kansas City in the American League Division Series.

No Triple Crown

Surprisingly, when Detroit Tiger Miguel Cabrera won the American League’s triple crown in 2012, his season wasn’t even top 30 of the decade in terms of WAR. Instead, it was the following season when he nearly repeated his triple crown performance that ranks highly, landing at number 11 in the decade.

Varied at the Back End

With Trout taking up four of the top 10 spots of the decade, there weren’t many spots left open, but nobody else had more than one season, making it a varied list of names. At the 10th spot is Josh Donaldson’s 2015 campaign with the Toronto Blue Jays when he mashed 41 home runs and hit for a .297 average en route to an MVP season.

Aaron Judge’s 2017 season was one to remember with 52 home runs for the Yankees, placing him in the ninth position. Trout’s 2015 then appears at eighth, but that same year, Bryce Harper was just a little bit better with the Nationals. That year, Harper hit an impressive .330 with 42 home runs to win the National League’s MVP award. Rounding out the bottom half of the top 10 was Jacoby Ellsbury’s 2011 season. Boosted by his stellar defense and power-hitting, Ellsbury finished second in MVP voting that year behind Justin Verlander.

Best Non-Trout Seasons

The top three batting seasons of the 2010s indeed feature Mike Trout, whose previously mentioned 2013 was his best. The third overall spot was taken by catcher Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants. Hitting .336 on the season with 24 home runs and 103 RBIs, Posey got a big boost from his impressive defense behind the dish to launch him to an MVP win.

The best batting season of the 2010s, though, belongs to Mookie Betts while he was a member of the Boston Red Sox. Winning the American League’s MVP award that year in a landslide, Betts collected 10.6 wins above replacement while batting .346 with 32 home runs. Though he had just 80 runs batted in, Betts crossed the plate a whopping 129 times and stole 30 bases. Add in a walk rate that was almost higher than his strikeout rate and you can see why this was the best season of the 2010s.

In the NFL, teams are often rolling the dice when looking for a new head coach by giving someone a chance that has never been a head coach in the league before. Between 1983 and 2015, though, the New York Giants were never led by someone with zero prior head coaching experience at any level. That changed with the hiring of Ben McAdoo in 2016, but he was relieved of his duties the following year. Nearly five years later, the Giants named another head coach with no prior experience at the position when they announced that Brian Daboll would be the franchise’s 22nd head coach.

Daboll seemed to come out of nowhere leading up to his hiring, too. How did he go from relative unknown to leading one of the biggest sports franchises in the United States? Well, first you have to look outside of the country. Daboll was actually born in Canada (Welland, Ontario), making him the second NFL head coach from the country. Daboll was raised just outside of Buffalo, though, becoming familiar with football at a young age.

After attending the University of Rochester where he played the sport, Daboll’s coaching career got started at the college ranks when he was with both William & Mary and Michigan State University to round out the 1990s. In 2000, the New England Patriots hired the now legendary Bill Belichick, and Daboll was part of his inaugural staff as an assistant.

Daboll was promoted to the position of wide receivers coach for several years before taking on the quarterbacks coach job with the rival New York Jets for two years. Finally, Daboll got a big break when he joined the ranks of offensive coordinators in the NFL. He was first with the Cleveland Browns for two seasons before taking the same position with the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs for one season each.

Unfortunately, Daboll’s offenses struggled and changes in head coaching regimes caused him to return to familiar territory. Daboll took a demotion in his return to the Patriots, this time as the tight ends coach. After racking up two more Super Bowl wins, Daboll got back into being an offensive coordinator, this time returning to college with Alabama for one season where the Crimson Tide won a national championship.

In 2018, Daboll returned home to Buffalo where he would finally start getting recognition as a potential NFL head coach. Daboll took the Bills’ offensive coordinator position and was given a project quarterback in the form of Josh Allen. After some growing pains in their first season together, Daboll and Allen found success, with the Bills becoming one of the league’s elite teams.

Following the success of Buffalo’s 2021 season in which they almost reached the Super Bowl, several teams wanted to speak with Daboll about him potentially becoming their new head coach, including the Chargers and Jets. However, it was the New York Giants that interviewed him on January 21, 2022, and announced that he was going to be the team’s head coach exactly one week later.

There were a lot of ups and downs along the way for Daboll in his coaching career. Things looked rather bleak for Daboll’s career after departing from three franchises in three years. During those three years, all three of the head coaches he worked for were fired when the teams had a collective record of 13 wins and 35 losses.

Daboll has learned a lot along the way, as highlighted by Giants general manager Joe Schoen pointed out. “Brian’s ability to develop young players, his leadership qualities, his football acumen, his communication skills, and his ability to bring an organization together were all traits that really stood out,” Schoen said.

There’s a lot of excitement when you finally get the FIFA Ultimate Team that you want with all of the players that you’ve been working so hard for throughout the entire season. Then, like clockwork, the new FIFA is released and you have to start your team over again from scratch. It can be a little disheartening, especially as fewer and fewer people play the previous year’s release, essentially forcing you to move into the newest version. It doesn’t mean that it has to be a hassle, though. You can still win matches and build your ultimate team quickly by following the right steps.

Inevitably, you’ll run into some teams that have a boatload of talent when playing online. Due to EA Sports releasing packs that can be purchased with real money, those that don’t want to pay extra are already at a disadvantage. Still, having good players on a squad doesn’t make the person controlling them any better than you. It’s all about playing to your strengths and the opponent’s weaknesses. 

The first thing that you’ll want to do is assemble a squad that’s at least capable of scoring goals and keeping you competitive against higher competition. Early on in the season, gold players will become easily obtainable. While these aren’t superstar cards that have 99 ratings across the board, they can still get the job done. Focus on the objectives each day and you’ll have a formidable squad in no time.

The other main aspect of building your team is to make sure that there’s good chemistry amongst your players. Good chemistry means that the players get a boost to their attributes, so even an 80 overall card can play like an 83 if the chemistry is right. EA has introduced these types of rating boosters through all of their sports games so that the focus is on building a team that gels instead of just superstar names thrown together and completely out of their real-life positions. You wouldn’t want Cristiano Ronaldo playing goalkeeper in real life, would you?

Before hopping online, get some practice in against the computer. Game modes such as Moments and Squad Battles can get you ready for the fiercest competition, especially when playing on the highest difficulty. By doing this, you’re also getting a lot more rewards that can make your squad that much stronger. 

With your squad assembled, it’s time to get onto the pitch in an online match. More than anything, you’ll want to be extremely patient when playing an online match. It’s tempting to try and score a quick goal in hopes of getting your opponent to quit, but bad things can happen if you don’t net that goal. Sprinting toward balls in the open field will drain your stamina and make goal-scoring opportunities harder to come by later in the match.

Sprinting also takes away from your dribbling ability, so it’s best to focus on working your way around a defender rather than blowing by them with speed. The other biggest aspect is all about positioning. Too often, players online will get out of position defensively to chase a pass, leading to an open look. With that in mind, keep the ball moving with passes to try and get your opponent to leave their zone throughout the match.

Instead of trying to sprint in straight lines, be very meticulous about each movement your players make. This saves a lot of energy, and if you give a goal early on that doesn’t mean you should quit. Continue to play the matches in which you’re trailing, and you can still prevail simply by having more energy left over in the second half than your opponent. Take all of these tips with you, and you should start seeing the number in the win column increase drastically.