Welcome back listeners and all sports fans! In the third episode of The Bonehead Podcast, we discuss an exciting new study in the field of orthopedic sports medicine. This investigation generated four machine learning algorithms and compared their ability to predict the risk of lower extremity muscle strains to traditional logistic regression. This level III case control study by Dr. Yining Lu et al. from Mayo Clinic in Minnesota is titled “Machine Learning for Predicting Lower Extremity Muscle Strain in National Basketball Association Athletes” and was published in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine in July 2022. Here, we briefly break down the main points and the authors’ discussion about possible explanations for the variables, such as free throw rate and recent same-site injury, that they identified as significant contributors to risk of LEMS. In terms of this episode’s educational points, we cover the advantages of a case control design, as well as the utility of analyzing the “area under the curve” (AUC) to determine the most optimally performing model.