These Sports Breakdowns of “Teen Wolf” & “Fresh Prince” are F**king Brilliant

What does this have to do with hip-hop? Not a damn thing...except I guess it's kind of about Will Smith, who before pimping out his ten-year-old daughter was a rapper. No, it doesn't actually have anything to do with rap, but these sports movie breakdowns the good folks over at DeadSpin did are f**king brilliant, and I can't help but recognize a kindred spirit who analyzes something completely insignificant way too closely.

It's a simple concept really. You take sports scenes in movies or tv shows and treat them like actual games, the more absurd the better. In the immortal words of Slick Rick, and here we go.....

Teen Wolf


The debate over Teen Wolf is at bottom a debate over the soul of basketball, and that's one reason even people who are not Bill Simmons talk about the movie today. Let's just state the question plainly. Who, statistically speaking, was the more effective basketball player in the end: the ball-sharing 5-foot-3 Scott Howard (played by Michael J. Fox) or his ball-hogging monster alter ego, Teen Wolf?

Before answering this question, we have to provide some context. To start the movie, Howard is the starting point guard on an inept Beacon Town Beavers squad that hasn't won in three years. We know they play 12-game seasons, and that they start the present season with a loss to the rival Dragons. That means 37 losses in a row. Considering the Beavers are really bad, let's assume they have a one-in-four chance of winning each game (as opposed to a 50-50 shot). Even then the probability of losing 37 games in a row is (0.75)^37=0.0000238 — in other words, the Beavers, like the Caltech team of the same nickname, are historically bad. Read more....

Fresh Prince


Before Will Smith got his big break as the title character in Hitch, he was a little-known television actor on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a gritty early-'90s drama about class and race in America, starring Alfonso Ribeiro of Extreme Ghostbusters fame. As we learn in the credit sequence, William "Fresh Prince" Smith was known to shoot some b-ball from time to time, and, indeed, an episode in the first season, "Courting Disaster," finds the Fresh Prince shooting some b-ball for the heretofore-atrocious Bel Air Trust Funds. Using some advanced statistical metrics, I've taken a close look at the Fresh Prince's game and at what it has to teach us about optimal shot distribution.

Our story begins with Will's introduction to the basketball coach, whose moral fiber implies previous employment in the '80s SMU athletic department. Will instantly becomes the star, singlehandedly turning the team around by taking and apparently making every basket. He gets delusions of grandeur, beating guest star and current shadow GM Isiah Thomas in a one-on-one dream sequence that culminates in Zeke's signing him to the mid-level exception. Read more....

And if that's somehow not enough, they also broke down "BASEketball", "Space Jam" and "Hoosiers".

Have fun reading these instead of working. (Your boss hates me.)