The Finder pod: Analytics storyteller Neil Paine

The Finder With Tom Haberstroh

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The Finder pod: Analytics storyteller Neil Paine

The man behind many of your favorite metrics at ESPN and FiveThirtyEight opens up about his career and lessons in stat storytelling.

Tom Haberstroh

Feb 14, 2024

Transcript

Cross-post from The Finder With Tom Haberstroh

I am super excited to have joined Tom on The Finder podcast to talk about our similar careers in using numbers to tell stories, which teams have secret advantages that show up in the data, how stats have changed in the NBA (and beyond) since the early 2010s, and what we learned from our not-so-finest moments of making analytics content. -

Neil Paine

You might have seen the Patrick Mahomes stat that went viral this week. The man behind that stat,

Neil Paine

, joins us this week at The Finder.

An old colleague from the ESPN days, the whip-smart proprietor of Neil’s Substack talks about using numbers to do premium storytelling, his final days at the now-defunct The Messenger, Denver’s altitude as a superpower, the full-circle response to his “infamous” Andrew Wiggins story, reimagining the Kobe Bryant clutch debate, his recent post on an NBA efficiency paradox and what he learned while working in the Atlanta Hawks’ basketball operations.

Really great to catch up with Paine. Follow my lead and subscribe to his Substack!