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    Bristol City and the Soccer Streak That’s ‘Just Statistically Ridiculous’

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    Bristol City has gone 65 games since its last penalty kick, a drought that has baffled the team and its fans. It has to end eventually, right?LONDON — Maybe it’s bad luck. Maybe it’s unconscious bias. Maybe it’s subpar skill. Maybe it’s conscious bias. Maybe a new strategy is needed. Maybe it’s a far-reaching conspiracy. Maybe the fates are cruel and unknowable.The maddening streak currently playing out for Bristol City, a mainstay of English soccer’s second-tier league, the Championship, since 2015, has defied explanation for everyone involved, and the sense of grievance stacks higher with each passing game.It has left the team and its fans wondering: Will Bristol City ever earn a penalty kick again?Though every team and its supporters can point to injustices they believe referees should have corrected with the award of a penalty, that surest of soccer’s goal-scoring opportunities, Bristol City’s drought has long passed inexplicable and is nearing record-setting. It has been 65 games, or 461 days, since Nov. 6, 2021, the last time a Robins player lined up to take a penalty kick.Matches Since Last Penalty KickBristol City’s current penalty-kick drought is more than twice as long as any other team in England’s Championship (the league one tier below the Premier League):

    Source: Football referenceBy The New York TimesThe team’s mystified manager has complained to the board that oversees referees. Fans have assembled videos of questionable calls. Amateur statisticians have created charts to demonstrate how ludicrous the streak has become. For a team that has never been a member of the Premier League, hasn’t played in England’s top division since 1980, and which is currently 17th of 24 teams in the tightly packed Championship standings, the statistical anomaly has become, somehow, a new form of pain to endure.Championship teams are typically awarded a penalty kick about once every nine games, according to Rob Fernandes, a Bristol City fan who crunched the numbers on a website dedicated to tracking the drought. Even before the current streak, Bristol City had lousy penalty luck: The Robins had a 46-game streak immediately before the current one, meaning they have been awarded only one penalty kick in their last 111 games.Fernandes said that his research shows the team isn’t out of the ordinary on metrics that might be associated with penalty kicks — it is in the middle of the statistical pack in touches in the area and fouls awarded, for example — but for whatever reason, whistles have stayed silent when it most counts.“I still don’t believe there’s something untoward going on,” he said. “It’s just statistically ridiculous.”How statistically ridiculous?No official statistics are kept on the subject, but in 2018, The Guardian uncovered a 72-game streak by the Irish team Galway United. Since then, Port Vale, a team in England’s third tier, played 73 games without a penalty kick in 2021 and 2022.In October, the CIES Football Observatory, a research group in Switzerland, ranked Bristol City dead last among hundreds of teams in 31 European domestic leagues, averaging 1,834 minutes played per penalty kick since 2018.Marton Balazs, an instructor at the University of Bristol’s school of mathematics, approached the question as a matter of probability. If teams can expect a penalty in one out of every nine games, the odds of going 65 games without one are one in 2,113, he said.Now imagine you watched a soccer team’s first match, and you wondered how many games you would have to watch before seeing them play 65 games without a penalty kick. You would be waiting on average 19,009 games for the feat, he said.Bristol City fans have shared theories and statistics about their team’s unusual penalty drought.Steven Paston/PA Images, via Getty ImagesThe staggering numbers give credibility to the sense of bafflement from Bristol City supporters, but Balazs said the statistical event itself is not unexpected.“There are lots of clubs out there, and there are lots of games played every year,” he said. “The fact that somewhere in the world something like this happens is not that unlikely, because these games are going on all the time, everywhere.”That is likely to be little comfort at Bristol City, where fans are waiting impatiently for the big moment. The next chance comes Saturday, when Bristol City hosts Norwich City.Ryan Morgan, who runs the team’s social media accounts, said he has had the tweets for when the penalty finally arrives written and saved for months, with a few different possibilities, depending on the game situation.The team’s fans have been mostly lighthearted about the phenomenon, he said, but they are “very, very aware of it.”Paul Binning, a 45-year-old fan in Cardiff, said Bristol City fans already had plenty of reasons to feel aggrieved. A four-decade absence from the top tier of English soccer will do that: Being a Bristol City supporter, Binning admitted, requires a certain sense of gallows humor.“There’s an element of feeling that these things go against us, and these things just don’t happen to us for whatever reason,” he said.About 130 miles north of Bristol in Stoke-on-Trent, there’s a fan base that understands the feeling.Mark Porter, the chairman of the Port Vale Supporters Club, was in the stands on Oct. 8, 2022, when his seemingly cursed team ended its 73-game streak with not one, but two penalty kicks. Even though the team was successful during its penalty kick drought, earning a promotion to League One, “the longer it goes on, the worse it becomes,” he said.When the referee whistled for a penalty to end the streak, “the fans were overjoyed,” he said. But, deep down, everyone knew what was coming: The penalty kick sailed wide.So when the second penalty came in the second half, a lot of the fans couldn’t bear to watch, Porter said. Some dug their face in their hands, while others turned around completely.When Ellis Harrison put his shot in the back of the net, “you could see the relief” among the players, Porter said. Asked what advice he would give Bristol City fans as their excruciating wait goes on, he said they should do their best to stay calm, for the team’s sake.“Whatever will be will be, that’s it,” he said. “The more you worry about it, the more you stress about it, the more the players pick that up.” More

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      Herb Turetzky, Nets’ Official Scorer for 54 Years, Dies at 76

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      He recorded the statistics of more than 2,200 home games for the team in both New York and New Jersey, and in both the American and National Basketball Associations.Herb Turetzky, a passionate basketball fan who was the official scorer for nearly every home game played by the nomadic Brooklyn Nets franchise from its inception in 1967 until his retirement last year, died on Monday at his home in Whitestone, Queens. He was 76.His wife, Jane, said the cause was primary lateral sclerosis, which causes nerve cells in the brain that control movement to fail. In recent years, he attended games in a wheelchair.Over 54 years of meticulously keeping statistics, Mr. Turetzky recorded the field goals, rebounds, assists, fouls and free throws of Nets stars like Julius Erving, Rick Barry, Buck Williams, Jason Kidd and Kevin Durant. He became a forever Net, the team’s de facto historian and a gregarious friend to players and the news media.He took his seat at center court with his scorebook for more than 2,200 Nets home games, first when the team was in the American Basketball Association and later in the National Basketball Association, after the leagues merged.“He brought so much class and care to the scorer’s table, not a place where you necessarily look for that,” said Mr. Erving, who led the New York Nets to A.B.A. championships in 1974 and 1976. “The job is drudgery for some people, but not for Herb. He cared so much for it, and his reputation preceded him everywhere.”Mr. Turetzky was a senior at Long Island University in Brooklyn in 1967 when he took his future wife, Jane Jacobs, to the Teaneck Armory in New Jersey to see the first game in the team’s history. Then called the New Jersey Americans, they were playing the Pittsburgh Pipers in a matchup of two storied forwards from Brooklyn: the Pipers’ Connie Hawkins and New Jersey’s Tony Jackson, who, like Mr. Turetzky, was from the Brownsville neighborhood.“We had no money and he had free tickets, and we were going to watch the game,” Mrs. Turetzky said by phone.Before the tip-off, Max Zaslofsky, the Americans’ coach and general manager, noticed that the scorer’s table was empty and spotted Mr. Turetzky. He knew Mr. Turetzky from his attending games of an Amateur Athletic Union team that Mr. Zaslofsky had coached. He asked him if he could keep score.“Max, I’d love to,” Mr. Turetzky recalled saying, as quoted in a Sports Illustrated profile last year. “I’m here, so why not?” He added, “I’ve never left that seat since.”After one season in Teaneck, Mr. Turetzky followed the Nets to Long Island, where they played in three arenas, including the Nassau Coliseum; then to three homes back in New Jersey, including the Prudential Center in Newark; and finally to Barclays Center in Brooklyn.Between 1984 and 2018, he scored 1,465 consecutive games.“When I did my 900th straight game, they covered it on NBA TV,” he told the New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2012. “Charles Barkley was on, and when they made that comment to Barkley, all he said was: ‘Nine hundred straight Nets games? Boy, that man’s seen a lot of bad basketball.’”“I have seen some bad games,” he added, “but I’ve seen some great ones.”In 2020, when all the bad and great games — and those in between — added up to 2,206, Guinness World Records certified them as the most by an official scorer in N.B.A. history.Mr. Turetzky was inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004.Herbert Stephen Turetzky was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 19, 1945. His mother, Rose (Pearl) Turetzky, was a bookkeeper for the maker of Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup. His father, Sam, was a plumber. Herb played basketball at the Brownsville Boys’ Club (now the Brownsville Recreation Center), where he also learned how to run a scoreboard and maintain a scorebook.After he graduated from L.I.U. in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he was a teacher and then a principal at a Brooklyn elementary school. After that, he worked as a grants writer for the New York City Board of Education and owned a trophy business. He earned two master’s degrees, in education and in administration and supervision.All the while, Mr. Turetzky was traveling to Nets home games. His longest break from his scoring duties began in November 1968, when he was driving to a game in Commack, on Long Island. He lost control of his car on the Long Island Expressway, crossed a grass divider and crashed into an oncoming car. The driver was killed.“I was in a coma for about six weeks and broke my entire left side up, creating some muscular damage, had a concussion, broke my jaw,” he told The Asbury Park Press in 2005.He returned to the Nets the next season and rarely missed a game after that. Along the way, he and his family became part of the fabric of the team.He was pushed, fully clothed, into the showers at Nassau Coliseum and doused with champagne as the team celebrated its 1976 title. His family hosted the guard Levern Tart, known as Jelly, at their Thanksgiving dinners. The team’s mascot, Duncan the Dragon, was a guest at the bat mitzvah of Mr. Turetzky’s daughter, Jennifer. His son, David, was a Nets ball boy.In addition to his wife, Mr. Turetzky is survived by his daughter, his son and two grandchildren.Jennifer Turetzky recalled listening to her father call in the box scores of Nets games to the Elias Sports Bureau, the N.B.A.’s longtime official statistician.“A box score has a certain direction, and he delivered it in the same cadence, with each player on both teams, starting with minutes — say, 37 — then 5-for-12 and 6-for-9,” she said by phone, describing the field-goal and free-throw statistics. “Then the big number at the end, 45 points. He did it all through my childhood.” More

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      His Job Is Counting Stephen Curry’s 3-Pointers. You’d Retire, Too.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The NBA SeasonThis Is for Stephen Curry’s CriticsAre the Knicks Back?A Year of Kobe and LeBronMarc Stein’s Fearless PredictionsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHis Job Is Counting Stephen Curry’s 3-Pointers. You’d Retire, Too.On the heels of Curry’s 62-point explosion (and after 57 years in his role), Fred Kast is retiring as the Golden State Warriors’ official scorekeeper.Fred Kast, 81, stumbled into his role as the scorekeeper when he went to see the Warriors’ Wilt Chamberlain in the fall of 1963.Credit…Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesJan. 8, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETFred Kast has seen plenty of basketball in his 57 years as the official scorer for the Golden State Warriors — some good, some bad, some amazing. After Stephen Curry scored 62 points for the Warriors on Sunday night, Kast got a telephone call on Monday morning from one of his closest friends.“You know, after every basket that Curry made, I could hear him shouting, ‘Thank you, Fred!’” Kast recalled his friend telling him. “He was pulling my leg.”Kast, who will turn 82 this month, has recorded every field goal, every free throw, every foul and every timeout in nearly every Warriors home game since 1963-64. He jots the stats into an N.B.A.-issue, spiral-bound notebook that goes to the league office at the conclusion of each season. In a league that has seen its share of technological advances, the official scorer — the person who logs each game’s most vital elements — is a throwback, and every team has one. Somewhere in the N.B.A. archives, there is a small library of Kast’s handiwork.Kast has refined his craft through about 20 coaching changes, 23 playoff appearances and four championships, manning the scorer’s table at no fewer than six arenas, including the Cow Palace, the San Francisco Civic Auditorium and Oracle Arena. But nothing lasts forever, and Kast is set to retire after the Warriors’ game against the Los Angeles Clippers on Friday night. As the news began to circulate among his friends and colleagues this week — Kast wanted to keep it quiet — they tried to register what it meant.“It’s a shock to the system,” said Brett Yamaguchi, the team’s longtime senior director of game operations. “He’s been such a part of the fabric of Warriors basketball.”Kast had not planned on stepping away this season, but disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic made him realize that it was time. Staff members who sit at the scorer’s table this season need two virus negative tests, collected 24 hours apart, in the three days before a game. That means Kast sometimes must make an extra three-hour round trip from his home in San Jose, Calif., so that he can be tested at the arena.Fred Kast’s most recent N.B.A. scorebook.Credit…Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesA page from the scorebook from Sunday, when Stephen Curry scored 62 points.Credit…Courtesy Golden State Warriors“And my night vision isn’t what it used be anyway,” Kast said.The pandemic has been difficult for him in other ways. His wife, Nita, is ailing and lives in a skilled nursing facility. Because of coronavirus protocols, Kast has rarely been able to see her, he said, and when he does, it is through panes of glass. They have been married for 41 years.“If I could change places with her, I would gladly do it,” said Kast, who has two stepchildren and three grandchildren.Ahead of retirement, Kast has kept busy, working three home games already this week. He will be replaced by Kyle McRae, who has spent 30 years as a Warriors statistician. Kast has been tutoring Kevin Chung, who will assist McRae, providing Chung with copies of his work from a few recent games so that he could study them — and a couple of blank pages so that he could practice on his own.“The game is not going to stop because you don’t record something right,” Kast said. “It’s not an easy thing. But it becomes easier the more you do it.”Before he became the N.B.A.’s executive vice president of basketball operations, Kiki VanDeWeghe was a high-scoring forward whose own stats were documented by Kast on multiple occasions.“He helped set the model for how to do the job of official scorer at a high level,” VanDeWeghe said. “I’ll miss seeing him in his seat at center court.”Growing up in Rahway, N.J., Kast may have gotten his basketball genes from his mother, Marie, who played a half-court version of the game as a young woman. His father, Fred, worked at a brokerage firm on Wall Street and kept his car in a garage that had a basketball hoop nearby.“So I would go shoot hoops while my dad was washing his car,” Kast said.Kast was predisposed to the game for one other reason: He was tall. By the time he reached high school, he was nearly 6-foot-6 and a promising low-post presence. He eventually left for Duke on a basketball scholarship, helping the team win its first Atlantic Coast Conference championship. He also had a memorable matchup with Jerry West, who was then starring for West Virginia.“I think he scored something like 30 points in the first half,” Kast said, “which gives you some clue as to how effective I was on defense.” (Kast was being somewhat modest; West scored only 29 points in that game.)After graduating, Kast left for California to work in sales for a medical supplies company. As much as he loved the game, he thought his only connection to basketball moving forward would be as a fan. He was about to stumble into a part-time job that would keep him closer to the action than he could ever have imagined.“Just unknowingly being in the right place at the right time,” he said.In the fall of 1963, not long after relocating to the Bay Area, Kast bought a ticket to watch the Warriors — and Wilt Chamberlain, whom he had once met at a summer basketball camp — at the Cow Palace, the arena that was housing the team after its cross-country move from Philadelphia. Before Kast reached his seat, he bumped into a college friend who was working at the scorer’s table. The friend asked Kast if he would be willing to help.“Sure, I’d be glad to do that,” Kast recalled telling his friend. “Where would I be seated?”“Right at midcourt,” his friend said.Kast, in the mask at the top left of the image at the scorers’ table, at the start of the game against the Sacramento Kings on Monday.Credit…Jeff Chiu/Associated PressKast said he became the team’s official scorer later that season. For four seasons, he commuted from Sacramento, battling late-night fog on his 90-mile drive home. After he retired from his sales job of 37 years in 1999, he continued scorekeeping, a gig that he treated with painstaking professionalism.“Well, I’ve been that way with everything that I’ve done,” he said. “My view is, if you’re going to do something, do it right or don’t do it at all.”Yamaguchi, who is in charge of non-basketball entertainment for the team, got a sense of Kast’s meticulous nature when he sat next to Kast at the scorer’s table in his early days on the job. They made an odd pair. While Kast sat with his pad and pens, Yamaguchi supervised “all the craziness,” as he put it.“Fred is such a purist,” Yamaguchi said, “and I just remember hearing, ‘Hey, can you turn down that music?’ And I’m like: ‘OK, Fred! Definitely!’”People who get jobs on the scorer’s table for the Warriors tend to keep them. Jim Maher has worked for the Warriors in various capacities for over 50 years, most recently as their game-clock operator. Lori Hoye has been the team’s chief statistician since 1989, and now leads a four-person crew that tracks in-game stats on a computer system.Hoye, 61, has long worked closely with Kast, whose scorebook is the official record and whose penmanship is precise. (“What happens if the computers break down?” Kast said.) He uses two pens: a black one to take notation in real time and a red one to compile totals at the end of each quarter.“We’re all trying to make sure we have the same numbers,” Hoye said. “Coaches get in your way. Players get in your way. And we’re always trying to figure out the refs’ fingers when a foul is called. The worst thing is to have players with the Nos. 45, 54 and 9 on the court at the same time.”She laughed and added, “It’s not going to seem real when Fred isn’t here.”Kast will continue to watch the Warriors from home — and “Dancing With the Stars,” one of his favorite television programs. In some ways, it might be easier for him to enjoy the team’s theatrics now that he no longer needs to pay close attention to his work. He marvels at the speed of the modern game, and at the skill of players like Curry.“His shotmaking ability is uncanny,” said Kast, who never thought he would have a front-row seat for so long.He is grateful that he had one at all.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More