📝 The Week That Was (February 24-28, 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.
🏒📈 When Will Alex Ovechkin Break Wayne Gretzky's NHL Goals Record? - To track one of the most monumental record chases in sports — Ovechkin’s pursuit of the Great One’s 894 goals — I created an interactive that runs 1,000 simulations after every Washington game to estimate Ovi’s chances of tying or breaking the record, by any particular date, over the remainder of the 2024-25 regular season.
⏱️ Which Sports Provide the Best Return on Your Time Investment? - Using the idea of shorter NBA games as a jumping-off point, I looked at each major sport’s ratio of time to action, and why basketball may just need a few specific tweaks rather than a radical overhaul to be at its most entertaining.
🏀 The Sixers Are the NBA’s Loudest Circus — But the Pelicans Are the Real Sideshow - Going into this story, I fully expected Philadelphia’s failed superteam to be the biggest bust of the 2024-25 NBA season… but, somehow, New Orleans’ miserable year is arguably just as disappointing from a statistical standpoint (if nowhere near as high-profile a collapse).
🏒🏆 Keith Tkachuk Was a Damn Good Power Forward - I finally brought back the ✨ Hall of Pretty Damn Good Players ✨, my old 538-era tribute to non-Hall of Famers who were nonetheless great. This edition focuses on Keith Tkachuk, who is now known best as the father of U.S. stars Matthew and Brady, but was a damn good player in his own right.
🏒 How the NHL Standings Would Change If Teams Stuck with Their Original Talent - My Friday post was a bit of a silly idea, but I wanted to see what we could learn if we reconstructed the 2024-25 NHL standings with teams only being able to use value from players who originally debuted with them (regardless of where they play now).
🏁 The greatest thing since ‘sliced bread?’ What to expect from Zilisch’s Cup debut - 18-year-old phenom Connor Zilisch is set this weekend to become the youngest driver to debut in the NASCAR Cup Series since Joey Logano (one of the most hyped prospects ever) in 2008. What can we expect from his early races?
🏁🎧 From A(tlanta) to Z(ilisch) - This week on
, and I talked about Christopher Bell’s controversial win at Atlanta — talk about “vultures” btw, he only led the final lap — then pivoted to chatter about Zilisch’s potential (he has shockingly strong odds to win his debut) and the other favorites this weekend in Austin.
🏀 Programming Note: Be sure to check out ESPN’s Bubble Watch to find my ongoing analysis of teams vying to make the NCAA tournament, and consult the NCAA Tournament Meta-Forecast 📊 for the big picture across a bunch of different models.
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.
🏈 His Year: Josh Freeman 2010 by
🏀 The Key To Your Bracket: Relative Ratings by
🏀 Is there any precedent for this disastrous Sixers season? by
🏀 Beware of the Perennial March Madness Sleepers and Underachievers by
🏀🎧 Not All NBA Offenses Are The Same by
⚾️ A Deep Dive into Quality Starts by
⚾️ The Most Valuable Player That Received Zero MVP Votes For Every Year by
🏒 Top 10 Picks in the All-Time Draft on HFBoards.com by
🏁 1,000 Greatest Drivers: Alain Prost by
🏆 How to Save Youth Sports: A Manifesto by
🛹▶️ The History of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater - FULL MOVIE by 616Entertainment
🙏 Be the One // Cultivating a better world by
🔥▶️ The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022) by Werner Herzog
Neil’s Substack Throwback of the week
Nomar Garciaparra’s Full Career Wasn’t Enough For Cooperstown — But It Was Still Damn Good
If you’d told a Red Sox fan in the summer of 1997 that Boston would win three World Series in the next 16 years — well, first, they’d be beyond ecstatic; the team had infamously not won a title since 1918. And second, they’d have been sure that shortstop Nomar Garciaparra would be the main reason for tha…
Old YouTube game of the week
March 23, 1994 Los Angeles VS Vancouver Canucks Full Game
Music to play us out
“Underground” by Ben Folds Five
Filed under: Weekly Round-up
I’m at neil[dot]paine[at]gmail[dot]com.
It's not you...really it isn't.
Apologies in advance, but an observation based on the "Basketball Intelligence" piece offered purely as a public service announcement for awareness. It’s a global comment of a tiresome trend on Substack that I see popping up regularly that we should all agree to stop in the interest of everyone's IQ.
There is probably no better example of the Mandela Effect than the recent Substack NBA community's assertion that suddenly "everybody is saying that NBA teams play the same way" quickly followed by a pedantic discussion of pick and roll rates and other granular statistical minutia to "prove" that what people aren't saying isn't true.
See, no one is making that assertion - literally.
Nobody I've read or heard has said something like "you know the Nuggets with Jokic play exactly the same way as Anthony Edwards and the T-Wolves" or "Boston plays exactly the same way as Giannis and the Bucks" or "LeBron and the Lakers play exactly the same way as Brunson and the Knicks."
It's not happening because a team's granular style of play tends to reflect their roster, which is...different than everybody else’s. It’s precisely why teams like LA make trades…to change their roster which in turn changes their style of play. A casual observation would yield that not a single person is suggesting the Lakers today play exactly the same way as everyone else, or the way they played before the trade. This is understandable since to do so would be obviously nonsensical.
This line of argument is what is known as a "straw man"...where you put up a false or misleading argument as a straw man and then pretend that argument is pervasive. Then, you show intellectual superiority by easily knocking the straw man over by proving that what was never asserted is not true. When you do that to the "other side" - which doesn’t exist - you look smart.
So, what are people saying?
What I see fans saying is that there are too many 3-pointers in the NBA and that has made the game less interesting and less pleasing on an aesthetic level as a fan...at a higher viewer level. What I've also read is that the NBA is on pace to set another record of 3-point shot attempts, which have exploded over the past 10 years across the League. Oh, and I also read somewhere that 7'4" Victor Wembanyama – the new face of the NBA it seems - was pace before his injury to shoot over 700 three points shots.
So, the argument that's part of the actual discourse - that there are now too many 3s - not only speaks for itself but would make for a much better discussion topic on Substack. Which we can get to I suppose when everybody stops saying that everybody else is saying that everybody plays the same way.
Thanks for letting me vent.