📝 The Week That Was (April 21-25, 2025)
A roundup of what I wrote, read, watched, etc. over the past week.
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.
What I did this week
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 the NFL Draft Has Evolved — And What 2025 Tells Us About Football's Future - Ahead of the NFL Draft, I looked at changing allocations of draft capital by position over time, as a way of visualizing changes in the perceived importance of each role:
⚾ Team Timelines: How the Oakland A's Played Moneyball - It was finally time for another installment of my Team Timelines series, in which I look at the eras of a team’s rise and fall based on the share of its core that was together each year. The subject this time: the Moneyball Oakland A’s.
⚾ Baseball Bytes: Pete Alonso and the Mets Belong Together - This week’s baseball column focused on Alonso and the Mets’ hot start, which stands in contrast with the frictions between player and team last offseason (and even earlier). Plus, I looked at which ex-player broadcasters had the best careers, and I pay tribute to MVP Baseball roster updates.
🏒 Can the L.A. Kings Finally Get Their Revenge on the Oilers? - The Kings are leading their series with Edmonton, but it’s their fourth straight matchup — and they’ve lost each of the previous three. How often has that happened in major pro sports history?
🏀 2025 NBA playoffs: Stats that could sink title contenders - At ESPN, I looked at the relationship between various regular-season stats and a team’s odds of making the NBA Finals — then applied those relationships to 2025’s playoff teams.
🏒 The Avs and Stars Meet Again — Just Like Old Times - Dallas and Colorado’s first-round matchup in the 2025 NHL playoffs reminds us of a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the Cup went through the Stars and Avs (and Red Wings! Can’t forget them) literally every year.
🏁 Who will break through at Talladega? – For NASCAR.com, I power-ranked the drivers who haven’t won yet in 2025 but might end that trend this weekend at ‘Dega (if they can survive the chaos that is sure to happen):
🏁🎧 Who’s Due at ‘Dega? - In the absence of a Cup race to break down this week, Tyler and I chatted instead about the reported possibility of a rotating championship-race location for future seasons — which tracks would be in our dream rotation? Then, in the spirit of the NFL Draft, we held a mini-draft of the winless 2025 drivers most likely to stop that trend at Talladega this week and made our one-and-done picks.
Programming Note: Check out the ⚾ 2025 MLB Elo Power Rankings 📈 page for your baseball forecast needs all season long. And now, I’ve also added 2025 WAR rankings according to JEFFBAGWELL — the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists — plus a spreadsheet of data for paid subscribers.
Some interesting things I read/watched this week
A collection of articles (with a heavy focus on my fellow Substackers), videos and other media that I enjoyed and/or found thought-provoking over the past week. I don’t always 100% agree with what’s linked here… but that’s also sort of the point.
🏈 Thinking Football #0: Maximizing Travis Hunter by Alex Varghese
🏈 The NFL Draft is a lottery. Travis Hunter is two tickets. by Rodger Sherman
🏈▶️ NFL Teams Know How To Draft - Why Don't They? by Michael MacKelvie
🏈 Random Draft Graphs & Things I’m Using During The Draft by CFBNumbers
🏈 How Lee Corso the coach gave us Lee Corso the TV personality by Craig Meyer
🏀 Is Wins Above Bubble the future, or merely a committee one-off obsession? by Will Warren
🏀 Can Luka Dončić Break the American Ceiling? by Ethan Strauss
🏀 Eight Charts That Kind Of Explain The NBA Playoffs by Owen Phillips
🏀▶️ The Deserved Downfall of Kevin Durant's Legacy by Alvini Linguine
🏀 Caitlin Clark By Herself Is WAYYYYYY More Popular Than Formula 1 // But the WNBA Isn’t Getting Paid Like It by Entertainment Strategy Guy
⚾️ Hustle is Free: The Ball Doesn’t Owe You Anything // Ego, Effort, and the Myth of the Sure Thing by Doug Glanville (Note: Doug was one of my favorite players during his career, and is one of my favorite commentators now, but this piece is elevated further by the lesson he passes on from Shawon Dunston, another of my absolute favorites growing up.)
⚾️ Do Strikeouts Really Increase Pitch Counts and Shorten Outings? by Down on the Farm
⚾️ MLB Regression Candidates - For Better or Worse by Sean Beney
⚾️▶️ The new WEIRD thing baseball's best pitchers are doing by Trevor May Baseball
⚾️ Strikeouts are boring but an out is an out // Soft pop-ups and weak ground balls are no more interesting than strikeouts by Mark Kolier
⚾️ The Diamond King // An inside look at the new film with director Marq Evans. by Patrick Glancy (Note: I adored these cards as a kid, so this seems like a cool project to check out.)
🏒 Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin Are the Underrated Storyline of This Year's Playoffs by Robert Tiffin
🏒 MAPLE LEAF GARDENS / I didn't realize how deeply I had buried the memory of the most painful moment of my inglorious sports career. by Gare Joyce
📧 The Substack Bubble? // Will the explosion of interest in the newsletter platform be its very undoing? by Jeff Inman
Old YouTube game of the week
Brewers vs Athletics (6-11-2002)
Music to play us out
Steely Dan - “Your Gold Teeth”
Filed under: Weekly Round-up
I’m at neil[dot]paine[at]gmail[dot]com.
Thanks for the mention. Also, not sure how I missed Glanville was writing on here, so thanks for pointing me in that direction. I was a big Dunston fan too. WGN ruled!
Thanks again for the shoutout. Glad my humiliation entertained. Seriously though, yours and Michael Weinreb’s are my appointment SubsStacks on the perspiring arts.