The Week That Was (June 23-27, 2025)

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

Jun 28, 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.

Special Programming Note!

I’m going to be off traveling next week, which means a slightly different schedule here on the site: I’ve got 1 brand-new post coming out on Monday that I think you’ll really like — then, for the rest of the week, we’re going to resurface a few older favorites that are either still timely (think about what “holiday” next Tuesday is 🤔) or still hold up… and maybe a few that flew under the radar the first time around. Daily stat pages and forecast updates will also still be rolling along as usual, and regular programming resumes the following week!

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.

🏒 Alexander Mogilny's Hall of Fame Evolution - With news of Mogilny’s induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame (on his 17th try) on Tuesday, I took a deep dive into a career that saw Mogilny constantly reinvent himself and prove his doubters wrong.
🏀 The Thunder Finally Struck - OKC finished off the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of the NBA Finals and took their place among the league’s all-time dominant single-season teams (whether you look at it by point differential or just total wins). I paid tribute to the team Sam Presti built, and what its future might hold.
⚾ Baseball Bytes: Cal Raleigh and MLB’s Greatest Career Years - The baseball world spent this week buzzing over Raleigh’s amazing year, so my contribution was to compare his big breakout to other single-season improvements over previous career WAR highs at the same age. Then, I checked in on teams who’d improved their win pace the most since preseason, and picked my all-time top Peñas in honor of Jeremy’s great season.
🏀 The NBA Draft Matters More Than It Used To - Ahead of Wednesday’s draft, I found a surprising trend: the amount of draft capital (i.e., the aggregated expected value of your picks) a team spent in the half-decade of 2016-2020 was fairly positively correlated with wins from 2021-25 — a huge reversal from the ‘90s and ‘00s, when it was pretty negatively correlated. In other words, actively stockpiling picks or otherwise focusing on the draft is more correlated with winning than ever.
🏁 Which lower-seeded drivers can make noise in the In-Season Challenge? and Drivers, start your brackets! Meet the favorites, sleepers and spoilers of NASCAR's first in-season tournament - It’s an auto-racing double feature from me at NASCAR.com and ESPN! At both sites, I used my driver rankings and race-level forecast model to simulate the odds of each driver winning the new In-Season Challenge (see below). ESPN’s story provides a big-picture overview of who to watch, while the NASCAR story digs into 6 drivers who could be bracket-busters in the new tournament.
- 🏁🎧 You Just Gotta Beat One Guy - In this week’s episode of Podracing,
  Tyler
  and I broke down Chase Briscoe’s brilliant fuel-saving victory at Pocono, and then we deep-dove on NASCAR’s first-ever In-Season Challenge, which kicks off this week in Atlanta. Based on the bracket matchups and my tournament odds model, who has a dream path, who drew the short straw, and which Cinderellas might crash the party? And then, we made our one-and-done and betting picks as the knockout rounds begin.
🏀 The Pacers Almost Gave Us a Totally New Championship Blueprint - No, the Pacers didn’t win the championship. Did I write a whole feature on them in case they did? Yes. Did I take a lot of the findings from that piece and repurpose them into this piece? Yes. Because, let’s be honest, Indy would have been a wild, utterly paradigm-breaking champ if they’d won, and that deserves further examination even in defeat.

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.