📝 The Week That Was (April 7-11, 2025)

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

Apr 12, 2025

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.

🏀 Is the NBA Going Through a Post-Parity Panic? - What’s up with the weird trend of NBA teams shaking things up drastically with mere days left in the 2024-25 regular season? I have my theory, and it has to do with the landscape of the league right now.
🏒 NHL Urgency Index: Who needs to win the Stanley Cup now? - At ESPN, I rated each team on a 0-10 scale in a bunch of categories pertinent to their urgency for winning the Cup in 2025, then added them up to see where the Leafs (and sure, other teams) rank.
🏀 These Are the Best Detroit Pistons Since Their Shoulda-Been Dynasty Era - Amidst all of the negative coverage that seems to follow the league around, the NBA’s best story might be the return of the Detroit Pistons to relevance for the first time since their mini-dynasty of the mid-2000s.
🏒 Wayne Gretzky's Goals Record Was Unbreakable. Alex Ovechkin Broke It Anyway. - Within seconds of the fateful 895th goal — proud of that! Lol. — I hit “publish” on this piece about Ovechkin was able to hunt down a record that few thought would ever fall not too long ago.
⚾ Baseball Bytes: Giant Steps - Baseball Bytes is SO back, with a look at the S.F. Giants’ surprising start and Kyle Tucker’s Alfonso Soriano season in the making.
🏀 Florida Navigated the NCAA Tournament's Toughest Path to Win It All - The latest men’s college basketball champions did things the hard way, both in terms of their tourney schedule strength and the fact that they trailed for the majority of the game in four of their six wins:
🏁 Which NASCAR records could fall? - In honor of Ovechkin’s new NHL record, this week’s NASCAR.com column was all about the racing records that might fall next — or might not, in the case of pretty much every page of the record book that Richard Petty owns.
- 🏁🎧 Denny Does Darlington - This week on Podracing,
  Tyler
  and I talked about Denny Hamlin’s second consecutive win, NASCAR records, and we looked ahead to the weekend’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway.
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.
Another home run for JEFFBAGWELL.

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.