Meanwhile, in pregame interviews, certain words correlate with better performance. Players who use words like “fun,” “star,” “great,” “good,” “enjoy,” “fan” and “basketball” tend to top their average point tally from their previous three games. Also, players who use words related to aggression tend to commit more fouls. “A nice thing that happened here was that we didn’t tell the model that fouls mean aggression or anything like that,” Oved says. “The model deduced it.”