Where to Find My Stats, Rankings, Content, Models and Data 📈 👀
A clearinghouse of all the different cool/useful stuff I keep on Substack.
It can be difficult to keep track of all the different things that get posted to a Substack — to say nothing of the things I’m always updating in the background — so I’m hoping this can serve as a useful navigational tool, as well as a place to share data and content that you may not have seen or known about. (That’s especially true since I am now back on Substack in a more regular capacity.)
(Note: This will be a living document that I’ll add to as I create more stuff.)
Table of Contents
⏱️ = Interactive/data updates daily (or near-daily)
Featured Story
Basketball 🏀
NBA Forecast (explainer) ⏱️
NBA Estimated RAPTOR player ratings and Wins Above Replacement (data) ⏱️
Hockey 🏒
NHL Meta-Forecast ⏱️ (FYI: this is where I combine a bunch of forecasts into one)
PWHL Power Rankings and game forecasts (explainer)
Football 🏈
NFL team Elo Ratings (data) ⏱️
Note: The next 2 might make a comeback, but maybe not.
Baseball ⚾
Wins Above Replacement data via the JEFFBAGWELL* method ⏱️
Auto Racing 🏁
NASCAR driver stat leaderboards(I plan to update this more regularly in 2024)
Other Stuff 🤷
Weekly Round-Ups (This is where I collect all the things I wrote from the previous week, plus my favorite things that I read/saw/listened to/played.)
My playlists of old games/sporting events on YouTube:
NBA Consensus Plus/Minus data (This is old, from before I calculated Estimated RAPTOR, and I probably won’t be updating it.)
Statgeekery: One of my favorite tags from the old PFR Blog, I reserve the right to put the especially geeky content here.
Where to find me 😊
Neil’s Substack (that’s here!!)
Filed under: General
Neil:
I get Stathead daily emails from Sports-Reference, and something has been puzzling me about the NBA this season, and I'm wondering if you have the time to make a post to explain this to me (and anyone else who might be interested).
Chet Holmgren is having the strongest season of any rookie this year. (8.2 Win Shares - leads all rookies, Derek Lively is second with 4.6!) He's ALSO leading all rookies at 3.2 VORP. That, again , makes sense to me. Usually, ranking highly in one of those statistics means ranking highly in another.
But there's a puzzle. Because the second-leading VORP among rookies belongs to Victor Wembanyama, at 3.0 VORP. Now, when I look at that number, and I see how much Wemby has played this season (63 games, 29 minutes per game; compares favorably to Holmgren's 70 games and 30.1 minutes per), I'm left to wonder: what on earth is that Win Shares is or isn't capturing in Wemby's performance that has him at a relatively miserable 2.8 Win Shares? His Box Plus-Minus (4.4) is actually better than Holmgren's (4.0), and while he hasn't played AS many minutes, it's not like he's sitting out half the games. So what gives?
Any chance you are publishing a 2024 march madness forecast? I relied on the 538 bracket forecast for over a decade. My 538-based brackets were usually in the top 85th+ percentile nationally, and I won several local contests.