Jumu’ah mubarak! The Friday Fill-in is The Athletic Ummah’s weekly news roundup. If you have a story or athlete you’d like to pitch for it, email us at TheAthleticUmmah@gmail.com.
The Headlines
Dennis Schröder blames former rep for declining $84m Lakers contract: In a recent interview with Yahoo Sports’ Jake Fischer, Dennis Schröder revealed that it was his former agent, Alex Saratsis, who advised him not to sign a reported 4-year, $84m contract extension with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2021. “And I would have signed it,” said Schröder. “I would never just leave money on the table. My mom didn’t raise me that way.” Schröder is currently in the first season of a 2-year, $26m contract with the Toronto Raptors.
Mehdi Taremi first Iranian to be nominated for EA Sports’ Team of the Year: FC Porto forward Mehdi Taremi is among 27 attackers to be nominated for the Team of the Year (TOTY), on EA Sports’ latest iteration of the Ultimate Team game mode. He is the first Iranian to be nominated for a TOTY card since the game mode’s conception in 2008. Other Muslims nominated for the TOTY include Mohamed Salah, Karim Benzema and Riyad Mahrez. Voting for the final roster began on Monday, Jan. 8, and closes on Monday, Jan. 16 in most parts of the world.
Anthony Joshua, Francis Ngannou to box in Saudi Arabia: Boxer Anthony Joshua and mixed martial artist Francis Ngannou have struck a deal for a heavyweight boxing fight in Riyadh, as announced on social media by Turki Alalshikh, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority. The fight will take place on March 8, according to ESPN.
What You Might’ve Missed
Researchers in Pakistan are building AI that can detect violence in video footage — and they used footage from the National Hockey League (NHL) to help develop the software.
The researchers — Muhsin Khan, Dr. Muhammad Qasim Khan, Dr. Fazal Malik and Muhammad Suliman — are part of the Department of Computer Science at Iqra National University in Peshawar. In their paper, the researchers said addressing violence detection is a prevalent concern in human-on-human violence recognition, particularly in surveillance videos.
But fatigue, worker boredom and natural breaks in observation make human oversight unreliable in these situations, so the potential for AI technology (like the one they’re developing) is there. One example of its benefit is the technology that could deploy police sooner when violent acts are captured on CCTV.
Their proposed system employs a Transfer Learning approach for violent scene detection, utilizing the Inception-v3 Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) pre-trained on an ImageNet dataset that includes 1,000 classes.
Their methodology involved two main phases. One was an unsupervised learning approach used to remove redundant frames from video datasets, and the other saw the CNN model undergoing transfer learning by updating its architecture for the specific task of violence detection.
How does hockey play into their research? The proposed model was evaluated on two benchmark datasets, one of which was a Hockey Fight Dataset. This dataset contains 1,000 videos taken from the NHL — half classified and half as non-fighting. Each clip includes approximately 40 frames with 360×288 of resolution, and a moving camera captured all of the images.
The Hockey Fight Dataset was important for validating the proposed violence detection system in a real-world context, as it provided diverse examples of violence and allowed for a comprehensive evaluation of the system’s performance.
According to the results, the proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an accuracy of 73.86% for the Hockey Fight Dataset. In other words, it was able to accurately distinguish between violent and non-violent actions during a hockey game in about 3 of 4 situations.
(For additional context, the proposed model also used a “Real-Life Violence Situation Dataset” for evaluation, in which it achieved an accuracy of 78.61%.)
According to the researchers, violence detection is a very important area of real-time human activity recognition and surveillance, but timely, robust, and accurate detection is critical to potentially save lives. As the research in this field grows, it’s interesting to know that ice hockey clips had a role to play.
Muslim Athlete of the Week
How much is 600 points? According to ice hockey YouTuber Steve “Dangle” Glynn, that kind of career points total would put a player among the top 4.8% of point-scorers in the NHL’s 106-year history.
The math doesn’t lie, friends. Calgary Flames centre Nazem Kadri is statistically among the top 5% of players in NHL history.
Thanks to a week that saw Kadri score two goals and assist three others, the 33-year-old entered the illustrious group of 600-point scorers. Only 370 other skaters have ever scored 600 points, and not one of them was a Muslim, making Kadri part of an elite group.
Kadri’s race for 600 points started on Sunday in a game against the Chicago Blackhawks. Needing four points to hit the milestone at the star of the game, Kadri proceeded to score twice on the road to bring him up to 598 points.
The goals, which included a sharp-angled snipe late in the third period, were Kadri’s 255th and 256th of his career.
Two days later and with his dad in attendance, Kadri made history at home against the Ottawa Senators. With the game tied 3-3 in the third period, Kadri delivered back-to-back secondary assists to hit the milestone.
The second assist, which was career assist no. 344, was particularly nice. Kadri used the boards to help bring the puck into the Senators’ zone. He then pulled up and used his body to shield the puck from his marker, before he wired a pass to Noah Hanifin to set up the next part of the play.
Thanks in part to Kadri’s two secondary assists, the Flames won the game 6-3. The win snapped a two-game losing streak and officially welcomed Kadri into the 600-point club.
Kadri wrapped up his historical week by adding another helper in a 6-2 win over the Arizona Coyotes on Thursday, giving him 5 points on the week (with one more game left to play on Saturday, Jan. 13.)
The Canadian, who’s currently on a 5-game point streak, now has 601 points in his career. He currently sits 368th in the NHL’s all-time points ranking, though he’ll move up a few more spots by the season’s end (barring any major injuries.)
It’s hard not to feel extremely happy for Kadri whenever he achieves something like 600 career points. Ever since he was drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2009, Kadri has been one of the most beloved athletes in North America’s (and especially Canada’s) Muslim communities.
That showed in 2022, when Kadri won the Stanley Cup — the NHL’s greatest prize — with the Colorado Avalanche, becoming the first Muslim to do it. He celebrated it by bringing the Cup to the London Muslim Mosque in London, Ont., where he was met by a sea of fans.
“These are the streets I grew up on, this is the mosque I used to come to, and everything has just seemed to come around full circle,” he said at the time.
“I’m very appreciative, very privileged and honoured to be the first Muslim to bring the Stanley Cup to the mosque. It’s a big deal. That’s something that I’m always gonna respect and remember.”
Fast forward to today and Kadri is still inspiring the North American Muslim community, while hitting heights a select few players — Muslim and non-Muslim — have been able to conquer.
For crossing 600 career points during a 5-point week, Kadri is our Muslim Athlete of the Week.
Headline image credit: SNstats/X