The Week That Was (June 17-23, 2023)

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

Jun 24, 2023

In this space on Saturday, 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!), and if there are running sections you’d like to see on a regular basis.

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.

⚾ This Is One Heckuva Surprising MLB Season - After years of relative predictability, the 2023 season is baseball’s weirdest in years. That’s especially true if we consider payroll, which has almost no correlation with winning percentage so far. What in the name of Steve Cohen’s hedge fund is going on??
🏀 Can The Suns Be Great With Bradley Beal? - With the Phoenix Suns trading for Beal, I looked at how hard it might be for him to shift gears from being the best player on a bad team to a complementary piece on a great one. And does Beal add enough star power to make Phoenix a real contender anyway?
⚾ The San Francisco Giants Are Defying Expectations, Again - The S.F. Giants have long been one of my favorite teams, going back to the days of Barry Bonds and Dusty Baker. So it was fun to see their weird dynasty form in the 2010s — and more recently, just as fun to see them defy expectations every time it seems like we have them figured out.
🏁 Handing Out The NASCAR Hardware For 2023 (So Far) - With the Cup Series on its midseason break, I gave out a bunch of awards for the season so far, from Driver of the (Half-) Year to Best Breakout, Biggest Disappointment and Best Race.
🏀 Settling A Michael Jordan Debate - Sure, this is a very niche, RealGM-message-boards style question. But it’s still fun to debate whether Michael Jordan’s time with the Washington Wizards was the failure most fans make it out to be, or an underrated chapter of MJ’s career story. I can see both sides, so I wrote out the arguments for both.
🏁🎧 The Best Driver To Never Do It - In this week’s episode of
Podracing
, Tyler Lauletta and I talk about 2023’s first-half highlights, pay tribute to the greatest #6 in Cup Series history — the indefatigable Mark Martin — and look ahead to the race in Nashville this weekend.
🏀📊 NBA Consensus Plus/Minus Data - For paid subscribers, I posted the historical dataset of “Consensus Plus/Minus” (CPM) that I used in my Bradley Beal and Michael Jordan stories. It features a weighted average of six different rescaled metrics to get a general sense of mutually-agreed-upon value for each player.

Some stories I didn’t post about this week

🏀 Victor Wembanyama went #1 overall in the NBA Draft on Thursday! I might write something about the Spurs’ French phenom later on, but in the meantime, my buddy Ben Taylor did a very interesting video about Wemby’s potential and why even a historically tall prospect (I’m told he’s 7’5” in shoes) has to have more tricks in his bag than any big man needed a generation ago.
🏀 Freshly-acquired Liberty forward Breanna Stewart is on a tear to start her career in New York. According to ESPN’s Stats & Info Group, Stewart is the first player in WNBA history with at least 200 points, 100 rebounds and 40 assists in the first 10 games of a season.
⛳ In just his third made cut at a major tournament, Wyndham Clark outdueled Rory McIlroy at the U.S. Open last Sunday, giving us one of the most golfer-iest named major winners ever — I mean, come on, “Wyndham Clark”?

Some interesting things I read and watched this week

🏈 Introducing the QB GOAT Series by Kevin Cole, Unexpected Points
🏀 Beware the quick fix by Henry Abbott, TrueHoop
🏈 Which Bill O’Brien did Bill Belichick hire? by Oliver Connolly, The Read Optional
⚾ How one baseball team could change MLB draft strategy forever by Kiley McDaniel, ESPN
🏈 EA Sports sued: What’s the future of the college football game? by Chris Vannini, The Athletic
🏁 The great Mercedes turnaround by Steven Walton, Musings on Formula 1
🤔 The Nostalgia Cycle Loop by Kyla Scanlon, kyla’s Newsletter
🏀 JJ Goes Off On The Chris Mannix Take About Jokic by JJ Redick, YouTube
🏒 ...But With A Whimper - Thrashers vs. Rangers, 2007 ECQF by Pinholes Graham, YouTube (RIP my poor, sad Atlanta Thrashers 😢)

What I played this week

In this blurb, I post either a video game/board game/etc. that I’ve been playing around with recently. Note: I am not sponsored by these games!

🏁 NASCAR Team Building Game

I’ve made a few Tabletop Simulator mods for Steam Workshop over the years, but one of my favorites is this NASCAR-themed re-skin of the Cryptozoic deck-building game engine. The goal is to win more races than the opponent by using your crew chief, sponsorships, drivers, skills and maneuvers to conquer various iconic tracks. I started out making this only for current drivers (as of last season), but then I got a little carried away and added a ton of extra drivers from different decades, plus additional sponsorships and more.