📝 The Week That Was (November 25-29, 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.

• 🏀 Men's hoops trends: Kentucky's comeback, Rutgers on the bubble - In the first edition of what will be a recurring ESPN column, I looked at 3 big stories from the world of men’s college basketball — headlined by Kentucky’s early post-Calipari success.

• 🏈 Football Bytes: Saquon Barkley is Defying RB Gravity - Eagles RB Saquon Barkley appeared to be an unlikely pick for a dominant 2024 season — just look at how his similar RBs did at age 27 below — but he has enjoyed a remarkable performance instead this year.

  

• 🏀 Basketball Bytes: The Rockets' Ascent Continues - Already a team on the rise, the Houston Rockets are leveling up further with the help of their improving young core.

• 🧊 Hockey Bytes: Sam Reinhart and the Career Year That Wasn’t - Florida Panthers forward Sam Reinhart had the season of a lifetime last year. Those aren’t supposed to happen twice — by definition! — but that hasn’t mattered to Reinhart early this season.

• 🏁 Honoring 12 standout Cup performances you might have missed in 2024 - For NASCAR.com, I awarded 12 more totally-not-fake trophies from this past season for the performances you might not have noticed.

• 🏀 12 NBA Takes: Reasons for Optimism - Pitching in on

  Royce Webb
  ’s round-up this week, I offered one of my causes for hope in the early NBA (among many other choices by my fellow Substackers).

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 Myth of the NBA Championship Hangover: How Champions Are Defying Convention by

  Peter Merrill

• 🏀 Bonus Boys by

  Owen Phillips

• 🏀 Become a delight to your enemies by

  Katie Heindl

• 🏀 Do I Believe These Early NBA Trends? by

  Quinn Everts

• 🏈 Where is the space in today's NFL? by

  Ben Wylie

• 🏈 Georgia-Georgia Tech 1999 - One of the most memorable rivalry games of all time by David Hale and Mark Schlabach (Note: Yes, we had our own version of this UGA choke on Friday night. I don’t care!)

• ⚾ Billy Wagner and the Myth of the Failed Starter by

  Lewie Pollis

• ⚾ Jason Heyward for Shelby Miller + Andrew Friedman's First Move by

  Trades Ten Years Later

• ⚾ We Played Baseball in Our Apartment by We Got Ice

• 🧊 STEVE YZERMAN / I'd written about the captain a few times during Detroit's glory run, but the tribute for a best-of list had the worst possible outcome, a killer story I couldn't print by

  Gare Joyce

• 🧊 The Devil's Hockey Dictionary PART 2 // Your translation guide to "Hockey speak" - what do "Hockey people" really mean? by

  Ralph Strangis

• 🧊 2024-25 Season Spotlight: Sam Reinhart by

  Vinh Cao
  (Note: Check this out for a very good and totally different analysis on Reinhart!)

• 🧊 Does Firing NHL Head Coaches During the Season Actually Work? by

  Justin Giampietro

• 🏁 How Losing Won Max Verstappen the Public Opinion Polls by

  Olivia Hicks

• 🏁 The Most Disrespectful Moment in Sports History by

  Robbie Marriage

• 🦃 Does Thanksgiving Music Exist? by

  Chris Dalla Riva

• 🦃 On John Madden, Thanksgiving, Sincere Gratitude by

  Matt Lombardo

• 🦃 A few things I'm thankful for by

  Andrew Steele
  (Thanks for the kind words, Andrew…)

• 🃏 A poker double feature: "WHY DO I CHOOSE THIS FOR A LIVING" by Jon Bois and Poker's Greatest Tournament Run by EmpLemon

• 👀 There Are No Safe Havens and BlueSky, Twitter, Celebrity, and the Is/Ought Distinction by Freddie deBoer

• 🎮 The Golden Era of EA Sports by

  Kofie Yeboah

Old YouTube game of the week

Notre Dame at DePaul from the Rosemont Horizon (3/8/81)

Music to play us out

DUMPSTER DISCO by Louie Zong

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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