Research on touchy teams is alarming news to men

According to actual scientific research by actual scientists, basketball star Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics has been known to reach out and touch four other guys within 600 milliseconds of shooting a free throw.

This is three-fifths of a second, roughly the same amount of time that other actual scientists have discovered it takes the average person to translate a thought into speech. Some people do it in less time, but this is usually not a good idea.

Back to Garnett: He makes 81 percent of his free throws, so it's safe to assume he begins reaching out to touch people the millisecond the ball leaves his fingertips. He has very long arms, so he can easily use both hands to touch guys on both sides of the lane simultaneously.

But unless it's a crash-the-boards scenario with just split seconds left on the clock, at least one of the four other Celtics players on the court would have to be back on defense, meaning that at least one of the guys Garnett was touching was an opposing player or a referee. The man is a menace.

The actual scientific research, conducted by Michael W. Kraus of the University of California-Berkeley and his colleagues and quoted by Benedict Carey in the Feb. 23 edition of The New York Times, concludes that in the National Basketball Association, teams whose players touch each other most frequently enjoy greater success than less-touchy teams.

How did they amass this research? They taped a bunch of NBA games involving all the teams in the league and counted every touch, slap, butt-pat, back-pat, high-five, low-five, chest bump, hug and noogie. And people wonder why young Americans aren't pursuing careers in science.

The touchiest teams were the Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, also two of the winningest teams. The least touchy were the mediocre-at-best Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.

You're thinking, the Celtics have Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce and the Lakers have Kobe Bryant. The Kings have Spencer Hawes and the Bobcats just added Theo Ratliff. Maybe that has something to do with it.

But no, says Mr. Krause. Even allowing for talent differential, touchiness seems to be a success predictor, Mr. Kraus told The Times, though he admitted, "We still have to test this in a controlled laboratory environment."