The Week That Was (Mar. 18-22, 2024)

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

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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

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.

• 🏀 March Madness: Caitlin Clark, Iowa's difficult Final Four path ($) - For ESPN+, I wrote about why the odds of seeing Caitlin Clark and Iowa in the Final Four again this year are surprisingly low.

• 🏀 The NBA’s Midseason Scoring Crackdown Also Made Games Less Predictable - Piggybacking off the work of

  Tom Haberstroh
  and
  Ethan Strauss
  , I looked at how the NBA’s sudden change in scoring environment affected our ability to predict game outcomes.

• 🏁 Is Chase Elliott Finally Ready to Win Again? - With NASCAR set to race at its first road course of the 2024 season this weekend, this could be the perfect chance for its biggest fan-favorite driver to finally snap a nearly 40-race winless streak.

• 🏒 The Philadelphia Flyers Will Probably Be a Playoff Team. They Don’t Look like One. - With John Tortorella getting especially testy about his team recently, I dug into why the Flyers are frustrating him so much despite being very likely to make the playoffs.

• 🏒 Does It Matter That the Oilers and Stars Don’t Beat Good Teams? - The Edmonton Oilers and Dallas Stars are 2 of this season’s leading Stanley Cup contenders… but their records against winning opponents (compared with losing ones) raises questions about their championship mettle.

• 🏀 Which NCAA Men’s Tournament Teams Are Better (Or Worse) Overall Picks than Their Seed Indicates? and Which NCAA Men’s Tournament Teams Are Better First-Round Picks than Their Seed Indicates? - A couple of men’s March Madness previews, in which I used KenPom ratings to identify teams that might go deeper into the NCAA tourney (or not) than we’d expect from their seeds.

• 📈2024 MLB Elo Ratings & Playoff Odds⚾ - Not a story per se, but I relaunched the baseball Elo ratings to reflect the opening games in South Korea this week.

Some interesting things I read/watched this week

• 🏀 When Brandin Podziemski plays, the Warriors outscore their opponent by a lot. Is it a fluke? by Nami Sumida, SF Chronicle - I was happy to be a resource and help with this exploration of Brandin Podziemski’s surprisingly outsized plus-minus impact on the Warriors this season.

• ⚾️💰 A LOT of things about the Shohei Ohtani Gambling Scandal:

  • Why did Shohei Ohtani allegedly wire $4.5m to a bookmaker? by

    Nate Silver

  • We Are Living in a Sports Gambling Scandal by

    Ethan Strauss

  • The Problem with Shohei Ohtani by

    Ross Barkan

  • Shohei Ohtani's Gambling Story Doesn't Make Sense by

    Joe Pompliano

• 🔦 ‘I want people to subscribe and discover something new every day’ by

  Austin Tedesco
  and
  Tom Haberstroh

• ⚾️ Who's Throwing The Wrong Fastball, Revisited by

  Drew Haugen

• ⚾️ Rough Start // The perils of the soft launch by

  Sam Miller

• 🏀 The shape of things to come // The NBA's spike in late-season injuries isn't recency bias, it's routine. by

  Katie Heindl

• 🏀📺 Upsets Are Surging in March - Here’s Why by Michael MacKelvie

• 🎵 Which Artists Have the Most Diverse Concert Setlists? A Statistical Analysis by

  Daniel Parris
  and
  Chris Dalla Riva

• 🏀 NBA Inside Stuff Review - Terrific Trio by

  Chris Shorts

• ⚾️ Late Bloomers: Tony Phillips by

  Paul White
  (Phillips was one of my favorite players growing up!)

• ⚾️ The Angels adjust to life after Shohei Ohtani: ‘Like being kicked out of the band’ by Sam Blum and Brittany Ghiroli

• ⚽ Just wanted to give a special shout-out to

  Melissa Jacobs
  , who has a great newsletter about youth sports:
  Good Game

Stat of the week

🏀 The first week of the men’s NCAA tournament provided a golden opportunity for two potential first-time tourney winners: Boise State, who had the most losses without a win of any program in NCAA history; and Nebraska, literally the only major-conference team to never win an NCAA game in their history.

Both the Broncos and Cornhuskers were in winnable games — Boise State in the 10-seed play-in against Colorado, Nebraska as an 8-seed against No. 9 Texas A&M. But tragically, BOTH goose-egg streaks will continue for at least another year: The Broncos fell 60-53 on Wednesday night, and the Huskers lost 98-83 on Friday.

Old YouTube game(s) of the week

Valparaiso vs. Ole Miss: 1998 NCAA tournament

Music to play us out

“As” by Stevie Wonder

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

1. I’m at neil[dot]paine[at]gmail[dot]com.