📝 The Week That Was (June 3-7, 2024)

A roundup of what I wrote, read, watched, etc. over the past week.

Jun 08, 2024

In this space on Saturdays, I do a weekly round-up of sorts: Sifting through what I wrote that you might have missed during the week, what I’ve been reading and watching myself, and some other fun things that have been going on. Let me know what you think about the format in the comments (or email me!1), and if there are running sections you’d like to see on a regular basis.

(Editor’s note: Today’s art is a throwback to my very first Round-Up post exactly a year ago this week…)

What I did this week

Stealing a bit from Will Leitch’s newsletter format, here are the things I wrote or podcasted about during the previous week, sorted in descending order by quality, popularity and/or current relevance.

🏒 How Panthers-Oilers mirror past Stanley Cup Final matchups ($) - At ESPN, I used playoff stats to find the most similar Cup Final matchups (including attributes of both teams) to Florida vs. Edmonton this season.
🏒 How Often Does the Best Player in the Stanley Cup Finals Win It? - Because this year’s Final features the NHL’s best player (Connor McDavid) against the best team (Florida Panthers), I looked at how often having either, or both, have led to winning the Cup.
🏀 Lakers Success for Dan Hurley Wouldn’t Be Unprecedented / But it would be unlikely- If UConn coach Dan Hurley becomes coach of the Lakers — and is that actually going to happen? Who knows? — he would be up against the history of unsuccessful college-to-pro coaching moves.
🏒 The Florida Panthers Are Trying to Be the Rarest Type of Repeat Stanley Cup Finalist - Because they lost in the Finals last year and are trying to win it this year, the Panthers are aiming for the most uncommon pattern for repeat Finalists in NHL history.
🏈 College football FPI release: Top teams, new playoff trends - ESPN released its college FPI ratings and projections this week, so I wrote about what they see in store this season — particularly with the expanded playoff taking center stage.
🏀 Ranking the WNBA's top 2024 rookies, by the stats ($) - Using my composite of different value metrics, I ranked the most productive rookies of the 2024 WNBA season so far. It’s very early, but the rookie we’re all watching was not where we might have expected her to be on the list.
🏀 15 Fresh Takes: The NBA Finals ... Going Forward - I was among the writers
Royce Webb
invited to give their takeaways from NBA Finals Game 1.
🏀 Daryl Morey is determined to find a third star. But which free agent best fits the Sixers roster? ($) - For the Philly Inquirer, I wrote about how the Sixers might get the requisite star power to build a championship core.
⚾ The Best Pitchers of 2024 Are Historically Weird - No, it’s not just you. The top pitchers in the league this year really do feature a bizarre list of journeymen, veterans who are leveling up, and other oddities.
⚾ In Case of Emergency, Break the Glass for Adam Duvall - I find the career of Adam Duvall — whom the Braves are asking to help replace Ronald Acuña Jr. again — to be fascinating, so I wrote about it this week.
🏀 Substack writers on their favorite '90s hoops memories -
Chris Shorts
asked us to remember the ‘90s, so naturally I went back to Nolan Richardson’s 40 Minutes of Hell Hogs.
🏀 NBA playoffs 2024: Ranking top players through conference finals ($) - I returned to the composite rankings for ESPN to rank the most valuable players of the 2024 playoffs through Round 3.