After the 2nd round of the US Open, journalist Dan Rappaport asked Rory Mcilroy, “It’s kind of a funny statistic, but I don’t think you’ve yet won a tournament where the winning score was single digits under par. Do you feel like this [LACC] setup plays into your hands where you have to go out and get it?” Rory Mcilroy was quick to shut his question down: “If I had shot single digits at Congressional I would’ve won. If I would have shot single digits at Kiawah, I would’ve won. So I think it’s a flawed statistic.”

Ingeniously, I managed to create a new excuse: the early wake-up call. I felt as if I hadn’t actually woken up by the fourth hole, and I even managed to take a quick five-minute nap at the turn. My poor play had to be a result of an unusually dawning round of golf.

So, is there any truth to my hypothesis?

Perhaps Butler and the Heat just happened to get the hot hand at the right time. Perhaps. Or maybe Milwaukee simply underperformed. It’s important to note that Giannis missed the first two games of the series. Perhaps the Bucks were never supposed to be the favorite, despite being seeded 7 spots ahead of the Heat. Interested, I wanted to see if perhaps Miami was a better team than we had thought, or if Milwaukee was perhaps undeserving of their first seed.

While most fans take the former approach as well, it’s often tempting not to at least attribute some correlation to Spring Training and Regular Season (if not postseason) results. So surely the success in Spring training has some relationship to success in the regular season…or perhaps even in the playoffs?

Growing up, mathematics and backyard sports were like oil and water. When playing outside playing pick-up or playing wiffle ball the last thing I would think about was my overdue math homework, and when inside starting up on my two-week overdue algebra packet, the only thing I could think about was rallying the neighbors to set up a quick game of pre-dinner wiffle ball.