📝 The Week That Was (November 18-22, 2024)

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

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.

• 🏈 Football Bytes: The Detroit Lions Are on the Hunt for History - Forget the Chiefs, the Bills and the rest. It’s the Lions who’ve been kicking everyone’s ass — to a historic degree — this season:

  

• 🏀 The Sixers’ Season From Hell Continues Unabated - After Paul George’s latest injury, it’s worth asking if the Sixers are already doomed. History and their 2024-25 stats think so, even if the betting market still has hope.

• 🏀 NBA panic meter: 11 teams already worried about playoffs? - Along similar lines, I looked at Philly and 10 other teams who’d lost playoff odds since preseason, judging them by the BPI and ESPN BET odds to see how panicked they should be feeling.

• 🧊 Hockey Bytes: Why Are the Red Wings, Sabres and Senators Still Stuck in Playoff Purgatory? - Detroit, Ottawa and (especially) Buffalo are currently on some of the longest playoff-less skids in NHL history. So after years of rebuilding, why are they still all below 35 percent to make the playoffs this year?

• 🏀 Basketball Bytes: The NBA Players Who Are — And Aren’t — Their Usual Selves This Year - Using my similarity score method, I looked for the players who are most — and least — similar this year to their previous incarnations from a year ago.

• 🧊 Jim Montgomery’s Bruins: The Full NHL Coaching Experience in 2+ Seasons - The Bruins fired Montgomery 513 days after he won the NHL’s Coach of the Year award, so I looked at how he managed to speedrun what is already one of the most fastest firing coach-processes of any sport. As a bonus, check out this comparison chart looking at the relative speed of firing coaches across sports (comparing average tenure to the amount of information about true talent in a team’s record):

  

Some interesting things I read/watched this week

At the request of reader Ori, I’m going to be organizing these by sport from now on, with miscellaneous items at the bottom.

• 🏈 The Bills Beat the Chiefs. Does It Matter? by

  Michael Hendricks

• 🏈 The Old Man and the Sun by

  Rodger Sherman

• 🏈 How dare you gatekeep being a sports fan! // Girls are allowed to love sports too. by

  Annika

• 🏈 The Jets Are Running a Fake Offense by AlexRollinsNFL

• 🏈 The Five: The Whims of the Voters (1949) by

  Michael Weinreb

• 🏈 The Biggest One-Off QB Seasons Since 1980 by

  Robbie Marriage

• 🏈 The 5 Seed in the College Football Playoff is OP and Power 4 Class of 2025 Rankings: Week 12 by

  Conor McQuiston

• 🏀 How differently do NBA teams play today? by

  Mike Shearer

• 🏀 When NBA Teams Show Their True Colors: Four Decades of Data Reveal When Teams Really Become Themselves by

  Peter Merrill

• 🏀 What We Talk About When We Talk About Basketball Statistics: A Glossary by

  Will Warren
  (Note: This isn’t brand-new, but it is really useful!)

• 🏀 13 Takes: What's the NBA Vibe Right Now? by

  🏀 5x5 | Royce Webb

• 🏀 The Blueprint: Cracking The Defensive Shell and The Zion Williamson & New Orleans One... Feat. Christian Clark by

  Marc Campbell

• ⚾ Baseball's Copa Shot by

  Sam Miller

• ⚾ Is This How the Strikeout Era Ends? by

  Lewie Pollis

• ⚾ A tribute to Dave Sims, Mariners legend by

  Patrick Leary

• ⚾ The Most BS and IMPOSSIBLE Game Mode in Any Video Game by GameDay

• 🧊 Into the weeds with Corey Sznajder's microdata on the Dallas Stars by

  David Castillo

• 🧊 The Red Wings could fire Derek Lalonde, but what would that even do? by

  Sean Shapiro

• 🧊 Time to give Minnesota its history back by

  Ralph Strangis

• 🧊 A history of the Islanders Fisherman Era by Sideline Archive

• 🏁 TMW: NASCAR Silly Season Rolls On by

  Aaron Bearden

• 💰 Inflation vs. Prices by

  John H. Cochrane

• 📝 Athletes Doing the Trump Dance, Sports Journos Going to BlueSky // What's with the rift between sports and sports journos? by

  Ethan Strauss

• 🎙️ Advice for young sports broadcasters - 2 by

  Ralph Strangis

• 🚗 The Loneliness of a Solitary Bumper Car by

  Ryan Nanni

• 💀 The Strangest Heist in Music History: Gram Parson's Body and How Jeopardy Botched the Search for a New Host by A Grain of Salt

• 🎵 Eat My Shorts 6: Steely Sabrina / Dan the Carpenter, Questionable Marriages, and God by

  Mills, ℭ𝔬𝔫𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔟𝔩𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔔𝔲𝔞𝔩𝔦𝔞
  (Note: Tipped off to this Steely Dan/Sabrina Carpenter mashup by
  Omar Khalid
  , I decided to waste time spend my Friday well by making additional SD/Sabrina mashups.)

Chart of the Week: McDavid’s Path to 1,000 Points

When Connor McDavid notched his 1,000th career point last week, he became the fourth-fastest NHL player to reach the milestone. That had me wondering: Where would McDavid rank through his age-28 (current) season if we era-adjusted and prorated his numbers?

Music to play us out

Girl Talk - All Day (Full Album)

(Note: As long as I have mashups on the mind, we may as well pay tribute to the GOAT album of the genre.)

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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