📝 The Week That Was (May 27-31, 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.

• 🏀 NBA Finals Predictions! - I was one of the NBA writers

  Royce Webb
  asked to provide my prediction for the Finals — and since the final tally of picks was 6 to 5 in favor of the team I picked, I suppose you could consider me the deciding vote 😉

• 🏀 It’s Way Past Time for these Celtics to Win a Title - By the end of the NBA Finals, Boston will either have one of best single-season teams of all-time… or one of history’s most disappointing runs, in terms of playoff wins in an 8-year span without an NBA title. (And there’s no in-between.)

• 🏀 The Western Conference Was Stacked. Dallas Won Anyway. - There were some Western Conference teams with hugely impressive statistical résumés this season. There were also the Mavs. And Dallas was the team that prevailed.

• ⚾ Including stats of the Negro Leagues changed MLB’s record book. Here’s a look at those added. - For the Philly Inquirer, I looked at just how much the leaderboards of major batting and pitching rate stats changed with the official inclusion of data from the Negro Leagues.

• ⚾ The Yankees Have Baseball’s Perfect Stars-and-(No)-Scrubs Roster - New York’s star power is only part of why the team is succeeding this year. The other part? Even their worst players aren’t that bad.

• ⚾ Nick Castellanos Is Having an All-Time “Bad Player on a Great Team” Season - With the Phillies off to a strong start but Castellanos playing poorly, it sets up a potentially historic season for a bad performance on a great team.

• 📰 Numlock News: May 31, 2024 • Niners, Boston, The Stanley Cup - I guest-wrote

  Numlock News
  on Friday (with some of my own stories from above, but some new items as well!)

Some interesting things I read/watched this week

• 🏀 How to Predict When a Championship Window is Open by

  Austin Cornilles

• ⚾ Limits: How the MLB Can Save its Pitchers by

  Alex Varghese

• 🏀 Luka Doncic and the Lobgoblins by

  Mike Shearer

• 💸 Amateurism Is (Officially) Dead by

  Huddle Up

• ⚾ No, Shohei Ohtani Shouldn't Give Up Pitching by

  Molly Knight

• 🏀 The Postseason Trifecta: Luka Doncic is pulling a Nikola Jokic -- already by

  Tom Haberstroh

• 🏀 Dynasties Are Dead by

  Trevor Lane

• ✋ The science of handedness by

  Zach Schonbrun

• ⚾ How the 1973 Oakland A's got me married by

  Steve Hull

• 🏒 Don't Make Me Turn This Team Around | The 1993-94 San Jose Sharks by Pinholes Graham

• 🏀 NBA Inside Stuff Review - No Excuses for Shaq by

  Chris Shorts

• 📊 Spotify's Former Data Guru Tells All: A Conversation with Glenn McDonald by

  Chris Dalla Riva

• 📉 What is the most urban state? and How much will Trump's conviction harm him? Watch low-information voters. by

  Nate Silver

• 📈 America’s best decade, according to data by Andrew Van Dam/WaPo

• 👀 How the Location of the Backrooms Photo Was Finally Discovered by Farrell McGuire

• 🎮 POPPY GAME INSULT TO OUR WAR DEAD by Ahoy

Chart of the Week: PWHL Minnesota's path to the Walter Cup championship

Day-by-day Elo ratings for the inaugural PWHL season — congratulations to PWHL Minnesota for winning the Walter Cup!

Old YouTube game of the week

2008 Finals G1 Lakers vs Celtics

Music to play us out

Blur - “There's No Other Way”

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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