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Politics Podcast: Can Economic Data Predict Elections?

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 22:20:20 GMT

Last week economic data revealed the largest-ever quarterly contraction of the U.S. economy. The second-quarter GDP shrunk by an annual rate of nearly 33 percent. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew asks how well economic data alone can predict the outcome of a presidential election. They also discuss the potential consequences of President Trump’s repeated attempts to cast doubt on election results.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Do You Buy That … We Could See A Delay In Election Results?

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 14:48:53 GMT

Can Donovan Mitchell Reach His Potential In The Bubble?

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 14:23:02 GMT

High-usage bucket-getters like Donovan Mitchell are essential for most title contenders, and before the 2019-20 season began, that’s exactly what his Utah Jazz were. Their preseason over/under was lower than that of only three other teams,¹ and after opening night, the FiveThirtyEight prediction model gave them a 5 percent chance of making the NBA Finals — which, to some, is the cutoff that justifies an immediate push to win it all.

In addition to Mitchell’s anticipated growth into the All-Star he became this season, Utah had an imposing defense, long-range shooters and ingenious coaching. But for a variety of reasons, the Jazz never quite coalesced like so many thought they would.

It’s not that Utah stunk. Before the season restarted, they were eighth in net rating and second in effective field-goal percentage. But they had a glut of success against weaker teams, and they went 5-5 after the All-Star break, sandwiched between the Phoenix Suns and Atlanta Hawks with the 20th-best net rating in the league. Trading for Mike Conley was a huge source of optimism in Salt Lake City before the season began, but the 32-year-old missed 23 games, and his player efficiency rating dropped to its lowest point in a dozen seasons. The other significant addition was Bojan Bogdanović — Utah’s second-leading scorer — and he’s now out for the playoffs thanks to wrist surgery.

But the NBA’s bubble season will be a whole new world. It’s fertile ground for surprises. The circumstances are unprecedented, and in them a rising star like Mitchell can shatter assumptions. Boundlessly athletic, assured and still only 23 years old, Mitchell wasn’t the reason Utah underperformed. But he didn’t make the strides as a scorer or playmaker that Utah ultimately needs if it ever wants to get over the hump.

Now, with Bogdanović out and the Jazz needing to alter how they play, Mitchell has an opportunity to progress in areas that can nudge this team back toward the doorstep of a higher tier. For the rest of the way this year — as the team is largely counted out and on track to go home before the conference finals once again — what’s best for Mitchell might be what’s best for the Jazz.

It’s fair to feel skeptical of Mitchell but also bullish about his chances. Utah was outscored by 5.3 points per 100 possessions when its All-Star guard played without Bogdanović, and in those moments it had a worse offensive rating than the 30th-ranked Golden State Warriors. But their probable new starting five — Conley, Mitchell, Royce O’Neale, Joe Ingles and Rudy Gobert — should remove any role-related confusion that previously existed for several players, while also generating more scoring opportunities, on and off the ball, for Mitchell.

Stylistically, the Jazz are unique, more egalitarian than most teams. They set a ton of screens (third most in the league per 100 possessions, according to Second Spectrum) — with Gobert’s limited skill set both preventing Utah from taking a broader approach and sharpening their execution of the game plan they do run. But with Bogdanović out of the frame and fresh lineups and sets needing to be deployed, it may make more sense to simplify that approach and feed Mitchell in ways they did not before.

The least complicated example of what this could look like is also the one that’s the most antithetical to how Utah plays basketball: Give Mitchell the ball and let him cook. Among all players who isolated at least 100 times this season, Mitchell’s 7.4 percent frequency was dead last. But even if he wasn’t the most efficient scorer in these situations, few guards in basketball are more explosive than Mitchell, with his combination of upper-body strength, long arms and a splash of offbeat creativity. Isolating Mitchell more often, particularly against weak defenders in lineups that can really space the floor, makes sense — as it did in the playoffs when he was a rookie. Let him improvise downhill and unleash the sort of swindling acrobatics that make him invincible.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Mitchell-on-Tatum.mp4

Jazz head coach Quin Snyder could take that idea even further by also using Conley-Mitchell-Jordan Clarkson groups — especially in crunchtime, a la Oklahoma City’s three-guard lineup — that would ramp up the team’s speed and offensive potency. (As an off-ball complement, Mitchell hit nearly 44 percent of his spot-up threes this season — 12th-highest out of the 125 players who had at least 150 catch-and-shoot attempts.)

Now might also be a good time for the Jazz to bend a bit more toward their young franchise player’s athleticism by hunting for more open floor opportunities after they get a stop instead of pushing into the frontcourt and then steadying themselves in an attempt to pick the defense apart. (Utah shuffled its feet in half-court sets more often than any other team this season.)

Even with all this, Mitchell’s main function will still be in the pick-and-roll. The Jazz will use wings and forwards to set ball screens and confuse defenders, but the lion’s share of Mitchell’s attack involves a partnership with Gobert that’s both a gift and a curse. Per Second Spectrum, only six pick-and-roll tandems collaborated more than Mitchell and Gobert this season,² and overall, Utah averaged 1.19 points per possession whenever they ran one, which ranks in the top 20 percent among all duos that logged at least 100 actions.

Gobert is a reliable lob threat, and despite having a lower usage rate than Georges Niang, he is in many ways the vertebra that holds up Utah’s entire offense: His picks, slips and measured dives to the rim demand attention from both his own man and defenders who slide in from the corner, which helped the Jazz generate threes from that zone at a higher frequency than every team except the Rockets.

But the fundamental cost of those forays into the paint is an intrasquad battle over real estate that Mitchell ultimately needs to own if he wants to scrape his ceiling; the Jazz probably can’t reach their apex if Mitchell and Gobert are simultaneously occupying the paint. According to Second Spectrum, when Mitchell shoots off a Gobert screen, he averages only 0.963 points per chance — ranking in the 29th percentile of pick-and-roll tandems.³

Instead of earning the layups and free throws that might be afforded to someone with more room to operate, Mitchell is often forced to dine on tricky floaters and pull-up twos.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/CLIP-VS.-RAPTORS.mp4

https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/CLIP-VS.-PISTONS.mp4

He’s been accurate enough on these taboo shots to justify the volume at which he launches them — as in, he’s more accurate than Kawhi Leonard and Kyrie Irving on pull-ups — but any primary scorer who also wants to be efficient can’t subsist on shots that make their job more difficult than it could otherwise be.

By increasing his isolation and transition chances, Mitchell can balance out the high-risk, low-reward looks he gets when in tandem with Gobert and seek to draw more shooting fouls — which is the next step on his ladder to greatness. Taking over an NBA game when you’re listed at 6-foot-1 — shorter than Damian Lillard! — is not easy, and it’s even harder when you aren’t getting to the line.

Of the 53 players who had a usage rate higher than 25 percent this season, Mitchell ranked 44th in free-throw rate. And the red flags travel to other venues: On Team USA last summer, Mitchell logged a team-high 219 minutes and hoisted a team-high 88 shots, but he only took eight free throws — about half as many as Marcus Smart, who missed three games. Up those attempts, and Mitchell starts to look like young Dwyane Wade with an outside shot.

Utah isn’t a lock to get out of the first round, and a Finals run feels like a pipe dream. But if aesthetic changes are made to accommodate Mitchell’s ability in Bogdanović’s absence, this team can easily exceed its dwindling expectations. Mitchell’s potential is nearly limitless; the Jazz should adapt as necessary to accelerate his journey there, and they should do it sooner rather than later.

The MLB Records* That Could Fall In A 60-Game Season

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 13:00:04 GMT

The 60-game 2020 MLB season — provided it can be completed — will be filled with all of the usual statistics baseball fans love. But if history is any guide, expect the sport to again be embroiled in a fierce debate over asterisks, a controversial record-book remedy since Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 162 games, instead of Ruth’s 154. While the current home run record is certainly safe, others of the game’s most sacrosanct records could be in serious jeopardy this season.

Leaders in MLB’s rate statistics qualify on a per-game basis,⁴ regardless of how many games are played. But randomness plays a primary role in many baseball statistics even in a normal season. In a much shorter one, this is more pronounced.

Consider, for example, the stabilization rates of batting average (910 at-bats or about 260 games), batting average allowed (630 batters faced or about 154 innings) and homers per fly balls allowed (400 fly balls or about 300 to 500 innings). And remember that when “stabilization” is reached, that doesn’t mean performance is fully indicative of skill; it only means that it’s at least half skill (and half random factors). So stats achieved before they can stabilize are mostly the result of luck.

This could have a pronounced effect on the holy grail of baseball stats: the .400 average. That’s a mark, as fans know, not reached since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. But in a sample of 60 games, the odds of someone doing it, even in an era when batting average is dead, dramatically increase. After all, Cody Bellinger was hitting .404 49 games into the Dodgers’ 2019 season.

In 2016, Joey Votto hit .401 between July 23 and Sept. 27 (the dates of this year’s regular season). If we limit ourselves to games played between those dates over the past five seasons, the list of top 10 batting averages is eye-popping.⁵

Will someone hit .400 this season?

MLB batters since 2015 with the highest single-season batting average from July 23 through Sept. 27

Year	Name	Team	Games	At-Bats	Hits	Average
2016	Joey Votto	CIN	60	217	87	0.401
2016	DJ LeMahieu	COL	57	223	85	0.381
2018	Justin Turner	LAD	49	184	68	0.370
2016	Yadier Molina	STL	54	199	73	0.367
2016	Freddie Freeman	ATL	57	210	77	0.367
2019	Nelson Cruz	MIN	47	180	66	0.367
2019	Tim Anderson	CWS	51	223	81	0.363
2017	Avisaíl García	CWS	48	180	65	0.361
2015	Francisco Lindor	CLE	61	237	85	0.359
2017	Lorenzo Cain	KC	58	222	79	0.356

To get a sense of the high variance possible in such a relatively small sample, last year Nelson Cruz, a career .277 hitter, hit 90 points higher from July 23 to Sept. 27. Even the 10th-best average in this five-year sample is 8 points higher than any qualifying hitter managed in a 162-game season since 2015.

What about pitching? Baseball’s most revered pitching record is Bob Gibson’s 1.12 ERA in 1968 — the lowest in the Live Ball Era that began in 1920. He was so dominant that the league decided it had no choice but to lower the mound to make things more fair for hitters.⁶

Gibson pulled that feat while hurling over 300 innings, including 28 complete games. But this year, a starter will need at most 60 innings pitched to qualify for an ERA title.⁷ So Gibson’s 52-year-old record seems like a strong contender to be overtaken.

Will we see a sub-1.00 ERA?

MLB pitchers since 2015 with the lowest single-season ERA from July 23 through Sept. 27

Year	player	team	Games	Innings Pitched	Earned Runs	ERA
2015	Jake Arrieta	CHC	13	94.1	9	0.86
2019	Jack Flaherty	STL	12	81.0	9	1.00
2016	Jon Lester	CHC	12	79.1	12	1.36
2018	Trevor Williams	PIT	12	71.2	11	1.38
2019	Gerrit Cole	HOU	10	70.2	12	1.53
2019	Jacob deGrom	NYM	12	82.0	14	1.54
2016	Kyle Hendricks	CHC	11	74.0	13	1.58
2015	Clayton Kershaw	LAD	12	89.0	16	1.62
2017	Corey Kluber	CLE	13	98.0	18	1.65
2018	Clay Buchholz	ARI	9	59.2	11	1.66

Jake Arrieta would have shattered the record in 2015, clocking in at a 0.86 ERA in 94.1 frames from July 23 through Sept. 27 en route to winning the National League Cy Young Award. Just last season, Jack Flaherty posted a 1.00 ERA in 81 innings over the same period. Flaherty would have nearly broken another record last year, too, with a WHIP of 0.667. But Gerrit Cole would have just edged him, posting a 0.665 WHIP in 70 2/3 innings — better than Pedro Martinez’s live-ball era record of 0.74 WHIP over 217 innings in 2000.

Counting stats, of course, are an entirely different matter. While we think of 20 wins in a normal season as a milestone, getting just 10 would be a significant achievement this year. That mark has been surpassed from July 23 to Sept. 27 just once in the past five seasons — by Corey Kluber, who tallied 11 wins in 2017.

Ditto for roundtrippers. Forget 60, 50 or even 40 homers. A tremendous season would be 25, given what we know about the home run leaders in this time frame since 2015:

We would be lucky to see 30 home runs

MLB batters since 2015 with the highest single-season home run totals from July 23 through Sept. 27

Year	Name	Team	Games	At-Bats	Home Runs
2017	J.D. Martinez	ARI	58	220	29
2017	Giancarlo Stanton	MIA	61	225	27
2016	Brian Dozier	MIN	61	262	25
2015	Carlos González	COL	62	224	25
2017	Josh Donaldson	TOR	56	209	24
2018	Khris Davis	OAK	58	225	24
2019	Eugenio Suárez	CIN	59	208	23
2015	Chris Davis	BAL	62	223	23
2018	Christian Yelich	MIL	58	233	21
2015	Yoenis Céspedes	DET/NYM	60	251	21

The last time a hitter led a league in homers with a total under 30 was in the shortened season of 1981, when Tony Armas (A’s), Dwight Evans (Red Sox), Bobby Grich (Angels) and Eddie Murray (Orioles) tied for the AL lead with 22. And before that, you have to go all the way back to the full season of 1946, when Ralph Kiner slammed just 23 for the Pirates (though he’d lead the NL six more seasons in a row, clubbing over 50 twice).

The most runs scored between July 23 and Sept. 27 in the past five seasons was 58 (Brian Dozier in 2017). That same year, J.D. Martinez had the most RBI (65) — one of two players to top 60 in our sample (the other was Giancarlo Stanton with 61, also in 2017). No one has, over a complete season, averaged an RBI per team game this century.

The most strikeouts any pitcher has managed in that time frame since 2015 was Corey Kluber, who fanned 127 batters in 98 innings over 13 starts in 2017. The last time a league leader in a full season had a total lower than that was during World War II, when Tex Hughson and Bobo Newsom topped the AL with 113 in 1942.⁸ As will be the case with many stats, the 2020 strikeout leaders will seem one day like misprints on the backs of the baseball cards.

There Have Been 38 Statewide Elections During The Pandemic. Here’s How They Went.

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 11:00:15 GMT

In mid-March, as businesses shuttered, hospitals filled up and Americans hunkered down at home, election officials faced a difficult question: Was it even possible to hold safe and accessible elections in the age of COVID-19? More than four months later, we’re not that much closer to answering that question.

Since the World Health Organization declared an official pandemic on March 11, 37 states plus Washington, D.C., have held statewide primaries⁹ for president or state-level office. And while those that have gone poorly have tended to grab the headlines, there have been success stories too. Ultimately, it’s been hard to assess how well our democracy has adapted to the pandemic. So here’s a snapshot of all 38 statewide elections since the pandemic started and what macro trends we’ve been able to observe so far.

First, most states — and almost all those that actually made an effort to do so — were wildly successful at getting people to vote by mail (or at least vote before election day). In 24 out of 35 states for which we have this data, a majority of ballots were cast absentee.¹⁰ In addition, every state but one¹¹ made more use of absentee ballots than it did in the equivalent election in 2016.¹² Considering what a massive logistical undertaking it is to switch to a predominantly mail election, this is an impressive achievement by election officials. (Of course, as we’ll cover below, it didn’t always go off without a hitch.)

Like it or not, most states are now holding mail elections

Share of ballots cast absentee in statewide elections held during the pandemic, and how much that share increased since 2016

Jurisdiction	Mail Ballot Access	Absentee	Change from 2016
Alaska	Mailed ballots	100%	+100
Wyoming	Mailed ballots	100	+100
Kansas	Mailed ballots	100	+100
Oregon	Mailed ballots	100	0
Hawaii	Mailed ballots	100	+100
Idaho	Mailed ballot applications	100	+86
Montana	Mailed ballots	100	+30
Nevada	Mailed ballots	100	+89
North Dakota	Mailed ballot applications	100	+73
Utah	Mailed ballots	100	—
Ohio	Mailed instructions for requesting ballot	99	+85
Colorado	Mailed ballots	99	—
Maryland	Mailed ballots	97	+93
Arizona	Anyone could vote absentee	89	+8
Nebraska	Mailed ballot applications	84	+63
Rhode Island	Mailed ballot applications	83	+79
Iowa	Mailed ballot applications	78	+59
Wisconsin	Anyone could vote absentee	75	+65
Kentucky*	Mailed instructions for requesting ballot	73	+70
Washington, D.C.	Mailed ballot applications	71	+64
New Mexico	Mailed ballot applications	63	+56
South Dakota	Mailed ballot applications	58	+44
Indiana*	Anyone could vote absentee	51	+35
Pennsylvania	Mailed instructions for requesting ballot	51	+48
West Virginia*	Mailed ballot applications	50	+49
Georgia	Mailed ballot applications	48	—
Florida	Anyone could vote absentee	46	+16
Delaware	Mailed ballot applications	45	+42
South Carolina	Anyone could vote absentee	22	+10
Virginia	Anyone could vote absentee	21	+20
Louisiana	Excuse required	19	+16
Texas*	Excuse required	17	+3
Oklahoma	Anyone could vote absentee	14	+10
Illinois	Anyone could vote absentee	9	+6
Alabama*	Anyone could vote absentee	5	—

Unsurprisingly, states that mailed every voter a ballot saw the highest share of their votes cast absentee, although it’s hard to definitively say that was the reason, as these states also offered few polling places — or, in Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming, no polling places at all.

However, other ways of encouraging mail voting had more mixed results. For instance, in the states that just mailed voters absentee-ballot applications or instructions for how to apply for an absentee ballot, there was anywhere from 45 percent absentee participation in Delaware to 84 percent in Nebraska. (But don’t read too much into the 100 percent absentee rates in Idaho and North Dakota — they, too, eliminated in-person voting.)

What we do know is the states that did not mail voters anything to nudge them toward voting absentee (such as Illinois, with 9 percent absentee participation, and Oklahoma, with 14 percent absentee participation) tended to have the lowest shares of absentee voters, and the smallest increases from 2016. The same was true of states like Louisiana and Texas, which still required voters to provide an excuse to vote absentee. A notable exception was Wisconsin, where 75 percent of votes were cast absentee despite nothing being mailed to them. Most likely, the intense news coverage predicting doom and gloom for Wisconsin’s primary caused Wisconsinites to heed the state government’s advice and request absentee ballots; both Joe Biden’s and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns also encouraged their supporters to vote by mail.

Of course, just because a state conducted its primary predominantly by mail does not mean it will be able to turn the same trick in November. For starters, as the next table makes clear, most of these elections were low-turnout affairs: Anywhere from 3 percent to 46 percent of the voting eligible population turned out to vote in them, while presidential general elections have VEP turnout rates around 60 percent. (And, needless to say, processing mail ballots for 60 percent of the population is a lot more challenging than processing mail ballots for 20 or 30 percent.) But the good news is that the coronavirus doesn’t seem to be putting a dent in turnout rates. Just as turnout in the presidential primaries before the pandemic hit was a bit above 2016 levels, 22 of the 34 elections for which we have the relevant data actually saw their VEP turnout race increase over the equivalent election in 2016.

Despite the pandemic, turnout is up in many states

Turnout as a share of the voting eligible population in statewide elections held during the pandemic versus turnout in the same election in 2016

Date	Jurisdiction	2016 Turnout	2020 Turnout	diff
June 30	Colorado	16%	38%	+21
July 14	Alabama*	2	17	+15
June 2	Iowa	9	23	+14
May 12	Nebraska	23	36	+13
June 30	Oklahoma	12	24	+12
June 2	Idaho	15	26	+11
June 30	Utah	16	27	+10
June 9	Nevada	12	22	+10
June 23	Kentucky*	21	31	+10
June 2	Montana	37	46	+9
June 9	South Carolina	11	20	+8
June 23	Virginia	2	9	+7
July 14	Texas*	3	10	+6
May 2	Kansas	2	7	+5
June 2	New Mexico	23	28	+5
June 2	South Dakota	20	24	+4
June 9	North Dakota	24	28	+4
April 10	Alaska	2	4	+2
April 17	Wyoming	2	4	+2
June 2	Washington, D.C.	20	22	+2
May 19	Oregon	41	42	+1
May 22	Hawaii	3	3	0
June 2	Maryland	34	32	-1
June 9	West Virginia*	34	32	-2
July 11	Louisiana	19	16	-3
June 2	Pennsylvania	34	30	-4
July 7	Delaware	24	17	-6
June 2	Rhode Island	24	16	-8
March 17	Florida	28	20	-9
March 17	Arizona	24	12	-12
March 17	Illinois	40	25	-14
April 7	Wisconsin	50	35	-14
June 2	Indiana*	36	22	-15
April 28	Ohio	38	21	-17
June 9	Georgia	—	30	—

Admittedly, turnout did plummet in many states this year — but for most of them, there is a compelling reason unrelated to the coronavirus. States like Delaware, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin went from hosting contested presidential primaries on both sides (Democratic and Republican) in 2016 to being virtually irrelevant to the delegate math this year (both President Trump and Joe Biden sewed up their respective nominations by the end of March). And Arizona did not even hold a Republican presidential primary this year, which explains its huge drop-off in turnout.

But if the pandemic significantly suppressed turnout, it was probably in Illinois, where VEP turnout went from 40 percent in the 2016 primary to 25 percent in the 2020 primary. The pandemic seems like a good explanation for at least part of the drop-off: Illinois experienced long lines and other problems on election day (see below), and because the primary was held just days after the country locked down, voters didn’t really have time to request absentee ballots — nor did the state have time to mail them anything. (The lack of a competitive GOP presidential primary this year also explains a lot of the drop-off but not all.)

Similarly, there were non-pandemic-related reasons for the turnout increases in many states. For instance, Colorado opened its primaries up to unaffiliated voters; Oklahoma and Utah simply had more interesting races on the ballot in 2020 than in 2016. There were also states like Kentucky and Nebraska that didn’t hold one party’s presidential primary in 2016, and states like Alabama, Texas and Virginia, where there were no statewide races in 2016 (so many residents just didn’t have an election to vote in).

But there were several elections — in states like Idaho, Montana (on the Democratic side), Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota — where turnout did increase even though those states held equally or less competitive primaries in 2020 than in 2016. You could arguably add Iowa to that list too; its 2020 down-ballot primaries were pretty competitive, but not enough to explain a 14-percentage-point turnout increase from 2016.

It’s plausible that these states’ embrace of mail voting helped expand the electorate; all of them either mailed ballots or sent absentee-ballot applications to voters. In addition, Kansas also saw turnout spike after the Kansas Democratic Party, spurred in part by the coronavirus, switched from a caucus in 2016 to an all-mail primary in 2020 (caucuses are notorious for their low turnout).

There’s an important caveat here, though: Just because the coronavirus did not lower turnout overall does not mean it didn’t disenfranchise individual voters. We know that at least some voters were unable to vote because of the pandemic. Indeed, the primaries conducted during the pandemic have been far from the smooth sailing suggested above. Instead, an unusual number of problems have occurred — some serious enough that they have made it harder for people to vote and even put them at a heightened risk for infection.

Two specific problems have come up again and again. At least 16 jurisdictions¹³ saw long lines at polling places, which had often been consolidated due to a shortage of poll workers. The unluckiest voters in Milwaukee waited two and a half hours to vote; in Washington, D.C., five; in Las Vegas, seven.

And some voters in at least 12 places¹⁴ reported never receiving the absentee ballots they had requested — sometimes weeks in advance. In some states not used to a heavy volume of mail voting, understaffed election offices were receiving ballot requests faster than they could respond to them. In six Ohio counties, about 4,500 people who requested an absentee ballot were not sent one because their request lacked essential information. In one Pennsylvania county, officials simply ran out of time to fulfill 400 ballot requests and sent out 6,000 ballots the day before the primary, when they had little chance of being received in time to be voted. In Maryland, 1 million ballots were delivered either late or not at all.

Other problems were less rampant — but no less concerning. In Illinois, multiple polling places lacked the proper voting equipment or cleaning supplies. In Georgia, new voting machines did not work correctly, either because they malfunctioned or poll workers were not adequately trained. In Florida, Illinois and New York, truant poll workers caused some polling places to open late. In Idaho, the state’s online absentee-ballot request portal got overloaded and crashed right before the deadline (which was extended as a result). In Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., police wrongly told voters waiting in line to disperse because of a curfew even though voters were exempt from it. In South Carolina, polling-place consolidation and new, untrained poll workers apparently led to some voters being given the wrong ballots. In Texas, some poll workers walked off the job after other poll workers refused to wear face masks.

The coronavirus has put American democracy to the test — and by our reckoning, election officials have made big strides in a short period of time. But a lot of work must still be done.

Some states, like Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota, have risen to the challenge, greatly expanding their use of absentee voting and reporting few problems at the polls. These states also saw increases in turnout relative to the equivalent election in 2016. However, it may be hard to replicate their success nationally, as they all are mostly rural and sparsely populated, so their task may be easier than a state like New York or Michigan. Similarly, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Oregon and Utah also scored highly because they already conduct their elections mostly via absentee ballot and thus were able to avoid major problems.

On the other hand, states like Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin bungled the execution of their primaries. They did little to expand mail voting (although many voters cast absentee ballots anyway), and their turnout fell (which may or may not be related to the first two points). Georgia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., are also guilty of ineptitude that surely disenfranchised some voters, although their turnout rates didn’t reflect it — perhaps because their efforts to expand mail voting also brought new people into the electorate.

So where does this leave us headed into November? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, it is worth keeping in mind how states handled their primaries. But on the other hand, don’t assume a state that performed competently in the primary will do so in the general, or the inverse. They may, but the general election is also a very different beast — and, with that higher turnout, one that is much more difficult to tame. States may also learn from a bad experience during the primary and resolve to do things differently in the fall; they may have more or less funding available for November than they did for the primary, and they may tweak rules surrounding absentee-ballot or in-person voting access. Unfortunately, nobody really knows what the 2020 general election will look like — and how each state will fare.

Many Americans Are Convinced Crime Is Rising In The U.S. They’re Wrong.

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 10:00:21 GMT

Will you get robbed this year? How would you rate your chances?

Over 10 years, from 1994 to 2004, the national Survey of Economic Expectations asked respondents to do just that. People estimated their risks for a whole host of bad-news life events — robbery, burglary, job loss and losing their health insurance. But the survey didn’t just ask respondents to rate their chances: It also asked whether those things had actually happened to them in the last year.

And that combination of questions revealed something important about American fear: We are terrible at estimating our risk of crime — much worse than we are at guessing the danger of other bad things. Across that decade, respondents put their chance of being robbed in the coming year at about 15 percent. Looking back, the actual rate of robbery was 1.2 percent. In contrast, when asked to rate their risk of upcoming job loss, people guessed it was about 14.5 percent — much closer to the actual job loss rate of 12.9 percent.

In other words, we feel the risk of crime more acutely. We are certain crime is rising when it isn’t; convinced our risk of victimization is higher than it actually is. And in a summer when the president is sending federal agents to crack down on crime in major cities and local politicians are arguing over the risks of defunding the police, that disconnect matters. In an age of anxiety, crime may be one of our most misleading fears.

Take the crime rate. In 2019, according to a survey conducted by Gallup, about 64 percent of Americans believed that there was more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago. It’s a belief we’ve consistently held for decades now, but as you can see in the chart below, we’ve been, just as consistently, very wrong.

Crime rates do fluctuate from year to year. In 2020, for example, murder has been up but other crimes are in decline so that the crime rate, overall, is down. And the trend line for violent crime over the last 30 years has been down, not up. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the rate of violent crimes per 1,000 Americans age 12 and older plummeted from 80 in 1993 to just 23 in 2018. The country has gotten much, much safer, but, somehow, Americans don’t seem to feel that on a knee-jerk, emotional level.

“The biggest challenge really, and we’re seeing this as a society across the board right now, is that even though our organizations, our businesses, our government entities are becoming more data driven, we as human beings are not,” said Meghan Hollis, a research scholar at the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship.

That’s not to say that Americans are completely clueless about crime. When we spoke to John Gramlich, a senior writer with the Pew Research Center and one of the people who has been tracking and writing about this disconnect for years, he was quick to clarify that Pew didn’t like to frame Americans’ apparent inability to register their own increased safety as a product of being uninformed or misinformed. The reality, he told us, is that the nature of data collection makes it hard for the public to really assess crime rates and for experts to assess what the public knows or feels about crime rates.

Even the concept of a “crime rate” is messy. When we talk about crime rates in the context of an article like this one, what we’re actually discussing is the number of crimes, in a set of particular categories, that get reported to the police and, from there, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — or results from a government survey about whether people have experienced crime. These stats document murder, rape, robbery and assault, among others, as well as several property crimes, including burglary, theft, car theft, and arson. That covers a lot of ground, and it gives us a pretty good idea what the crime rate truly looks like — enough that experts feel comfortable saying things like “Hey, look, the crime rate has been going down for 30 years.”

But those statistics don’t tell the whole story, and that matters in ways that become important when you’re trying to understand the difference between how people feel and what the data say. Not all crimes are reported to the police. Sexual assault, in particular, is notoriously underreported. And there are plenty of crimes we don’t really track well in data — like vandalism, drug use and sales, or public intoxication — which can affect how safe people feel in their neighborhoods, even if the crimes aren’t serious.

Wesley Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University, spent much of the 1990s attending neighborhood-level public meetings around Chicago and documenting the issues that residents told police were problems they wanted solved. Some of these issues weren’t even, strictly speaking, crimes, at all. In 17 percent of the meetings, residents asked police to do something about litter. Loud music or other noise-related problems were discussed in 19 percent of the meetings. Residents complained about abandoned cars more often than they complained about gang problems. Skogan thinks about these factors as measurements of social disorder, and has found evidence that these things affect how safe people feel. If violent crimes are down, but there’s still a good deal of social disorder in an area, people’s responses to a survey might reflect how they feel about litter more than how they feel about a reduced murder rate.

The way the polls are worded also don’t help. “The polling tends to be pretty generic,” said Lisa L. Miller, a political scientist at Rutgers University who studies crime and punishment, which makes it hard to capture the difference between how Americans think about murder and litter when it comes to how safe they feel. More importantly, she said, questions like “Do you think crime has gone up or down?” is not the same thing as measuring fear. “When people are genuinely worried about crime and really fearful, it tends to be in relation to violent crime. That’s the thing I’ve found really drives public pressure for the government to do something,” she said.

This whole thing is further complicated because crime is extremely localized — and estimates about the national crime rate are, well, not.

“All the homicides in Chicago occur in about 8 percent of the city’s census tracts,” Skogan said. For almost everybody, he said, that means “the crime you hear about is crime somewhere else.” And that matters because research suggests people are a lot better at estimating the crime rate in their own backyard than they are at estimating what it’s like across town, or across the country.

Finally, there’s the question of race, which permeates and complicates everything surrounding crime. It’s not just trash and loitering that make people perceive a neighborhood as more dangerous regardless of the crime rate. When Lincoln Quillian, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, analyzed data from three surveys of crime and safety in cities across America, he found that people perceive their neighborhood as more dangerous — regardless of the actual crime rate — if more young Black men live there. That was true for both Black and white respondents of the surveys, but in some cities the effect was significantly more pronounced in white people.

This is all a long-winded way of saying the situation is messy on many levels, but it remains true that people’s personal fear of being victims of crimes and their perceptions of national crime rates are far from accurate.

So why do Americans still think crime is high?

Turns out, the local news may be responsible for convincing Americans that violent crime is more common than it really is. Researchers have consistently found that “if it bleeds, it leads” is a pretty accurate descriptor of the coverage that local television broadcasters and newspapers focus on. For years, rarer crimes like murders received a lot more airtime than more common crimes like physical assault. And that hasn’t changed as the crime rate has fallen.

Understandably, seeing stories about violent atrocities on the news every night seems to make people afraid that the same thing could happen to them. According to one study conducted in California, consumption of local television news significantly increased people’s perceptions of risk and fear of crime. “The news is not going to report on things that are going really well very often,” Hollis said. “It’s not like ‘Hey Austin, Texas doesn’t have a whole lot of crime and that’s our news for the day!'” Stories about gun violence grab attention, so you get more stories about rare, but serious, crimes. “You can have people perceiving areas of cities as much more violent than they actually are because that’s what they see in the news,” she said. “It really amplifies that view of criminal activity beyond what it really is.”

There’s a significant amount of evidence, too, that reporting on crime can prop up harmful stereotypes: Studies have found that local news media disproportionately portray Black people as perpetrators of crime, and white people as victims.

There’s also plenty of fodder for this kind of coverage because even though crime has fallen a lot over the past few decades, the U.S. is still a pretty violent country, at least compared to other developed nations. “Violence remains an American problem,” Miller said. “Just think about mass shootings. So in that sense it’s not irrational for people to be somewhat fearful of violence.”

But often, those fears can be blown out of proportion — not just by wall-to-wall murder coverage on the news, but also by politicians who bring up the crime rate in press conferences and interviews. President Trump is far from the first president to paint a dark vision of crime in American cities, but he is singularly obsessed with the topic, especially now. According to a HuffPost analysis, the vast majority of the ads his campaign aired in the month of July dealt in some way with public safety. In one ad, an elderly woman is robbed as text flashes across the screen reading, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

And a recent study suggests that Trump’s words could have an effect. Researchers found that news coverage and political rhetoric — as measured by mentions of crime in presidential State of the Union speeches — were significant indicators of whether Americans thought crime was a pressing issue facing the country. The actual crime rate was not. A HuffPost poll conducted from July 22 to 24 found something similar: Only 10 percent of Americans correctly believe that crime has fallen over the past decade, while 57 percent think crime has increased.

Some Americans may be more receptive to tough-on-crime rhetoric than others, of course. Republicans are generally more apt to say that crime is a serious problem facing the country than Democrats. And although Pew analysis of polling data doesn’t uncover big racial differences in perceptions of crime, white and Black Americans likely think about crime very differently because criminal justice has become so inextricably tied to race.

Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies race and justice, told us that Black people’s views on criminal justice are complex, in part because they’re likelier than other demographic groups to actually live in high-crime neighborhoods and to be victims of crime. In other research, he’s found that some Black people have also internalized negative stereotypes about who commits crime, and may be more likely to embrace punitive solutions as a result. Those perceptions and experiences are hard to capture in public opinion data, but they can do a lot to shape what Black people mean when they tell a pollster that they think crime is a serious issue facing the country. And that’s important, because as the past few decades have shown, Black people are also much likelier to be mistreated by police, experience incarceration or grapple with the challenges of a criminal record.

Regardless of what’s driving fear of crime, though, the fact that it is so out of whack with reality can make it really hard to change people’s minds or reform the criminal justice system. It’s not that an out-of-proportion fear of crime automatically leads people to support more punitive policies — right now, for instance, Americans are mostly not in favor of more money for policing. But these misperceptions can make it harder for reforms to gain traction, particularly if politicians with a big national platform — like Trump — are talking about out-of-control crime at every turn.

It’s not hard, for instance, to imagine that kind of rhetoric being used as a wedge against efforts to restructure local funding for the police. Especially considering that in the past, a fear of crime has been used politically as a reason to oppose criminal justice reforms like reducing incarceration or changing the bail bond system — even though research suggests those reforms don’t increase crime in the long term.

The history of “law and order” campaigns is riddled with dog whistles, and Trump’s recent rhetoric about sending federal agents to combat crime in cities like Chicago arguably falls into this category, according to Justin Pickett, a criminologist at the University of Albany who studies attitudes toward crime and justice. Talking about the dangers of crime, he said, can turn into a cover for racist attitudes.

None of this has made us safer. And ironically, fear of crime can actually lead to other behaviors that put us at greater risk, like buying and carrying guns. If anxiety about crime keeps Americans from embracing different ways of thinking about criminal justice, that may be doing more harm than good, too. For instance, there’s no real evidence that putting more people behind bars contributed to the decrease in crime or that imprisoning fewer people will raise crime. Instead, a mountain of research points in the opposite direction to problems and inequalities linked to mass incarceration.

The trouble is that fear about crime isn’t rational, and it’s hard to convince people to think differently about a problem that they don’t experience on a day-to-day basis anyway. “You can tell Americans that the crime rate is lower today than it was in the 1990s, but it won’t feel real to them,” said Kevin Wozniak, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “That is, unless politicians stop drumming up the crime rate and people stop hearing about murder every night on the local news.”

And that seems unlikely to happen in 2020.

Lab-Grown Antibodies Might Protect Essential Workers

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 22:46:23 GMT

This week on Podcast-19, we talk about lab-grown antibodies, called monoclonal antibodies, that could temporarily protect people from COVID-19. How soon might they be available for the public?

We also explore the long history of a COVID drug touted as a lifesaver, and learn about an inhalable treatment that might keep coronavirus patients off ventilators.

Don’t want to miss an episode of PODCAST-19, FiveThirtyEight’s weekly look at what we know — and what we know we don’t know — about COVID-19? Subscribe on your favorite podcasting app! For example, here’s where to do it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We’re Hiring A Politics Reporter

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 16:52:34 GMT

FiveThirtyEight is seeking a reporter to write about politics and elections with a particular focus on race. This person will work both independently and in collaboration with colleagues across the newsroom to produce one to two stories each week about U.S. politics, elections and how race and identity intersect with each.

Experience reporting on and writing about race and identity in America is a must. As is some experience with data — how to find it, how to ask questions of it, how to know its limits. This can take many forms, though: using Census information, polls or other statistics in your reporting, for example. Statistical skills, such as using Excel or R to analyze data, would be a plus, but are by no means required.

We welcome applications from candidates with a history of producing high-quality journalism for digital or print audiences, as well as a desire to work closely with colleagues with different skill sets (visual journalists, for example) and a range of experience levels and journalistic backgrounds. We want someone who can help us tackle important and pressing stories, including features like: What would modern U.S. elections look like with fewer barriers to voting? How are different groups of voters reacting and processing the lead-up to November? Really, we’re open to a wide range of ideas and backgrounds and want the reporter to help define this role; candidates shouldn’t feel that they need to check every box in order to apply.

This position is full-time with benefits and can be based anywhere.

Responsibilities

Write a mix of short and longer features each month that explore how race, identity and politics intersect.
Work with the editing and interactive staff to develop and execute major projects.
Collaborate with graphics editors, as well as audio and video producers.
Work with the politics editor and other colleagues to help guide FiveThirtyEight’s political coverage in general.

Must-haves

Minimum of three years’ experience as a reporter, data journalist, visual journalist or similar position at an online or print news outlet.
Experience writing and reporting on issues of race and ethnicity.
Experience covering U.S. politics.
Experience working with data in some form.

Nice-to-haves

Experience writing and reporting on federal and state elections in an empirical or data-driven way for a wide audience.
Experience working with academic and scientific research on politics, race and ethnicity.
Statistical analysis skills.

Required Education

And if you don’t check every box, that’s OK. Please apply! Send a cover letter and resume to sarah.frostenson@fivethirtyeight.com.

What A Year Off Might Do To Baseball Players’ Skills

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 15:09:33 GMT

Hundreds of professional baseball players may go months without participating in any games or practices organized by Major League Baseball clubs. The minor league season was canceled in June. Some major league players have decided to sit out the season because of COVID-19 concerns. And if there are more outbreaks, like the one involving the Miami Marlins, the major league season is at risk of being canceled all together.

For players not among the 60-man MLB rosters eligible to play and be coached on the field this season — and the vast majority of players in affiliated professional baseball are not on those rosters — it may be a “lost season of development.”¹

Mitch Horacek, a minor league pitcher for the Minnesota Twins who is not in the club’s 60-man pool, is concerned about what the cancellation of so many professional games means for baseball.

“Unfortunately, any way you cut it, baseball will be less talented next year in aggregate,” Horacek told FiveThirtyEight.

Could there be detrimental effects not only for players’ careers but for the overall quality of future play? The pandemic is unprecedented in many respects, but there was another time when a number of professional baseball players did not play games for non-injury reasons: World War II. With help from our friends at Baseball-Reference.com, we compared how major league players who missed at least one full season to WWII service performed before departing to European and Pacific theaters and after returning.²

We don’t have a huge sample to look at. There were 98 players who lost at least one full season to military service between 1939 and 1946. Of that group, there were 30 hitters to reach 150 plate appearances in their first year before service and also in their first season back. There were 15 pitchers to total at least 70 innings in their last year before WWII participation and in their first year playing after the war. All of those players returned in either the 1945, 1946 or 1947 MLB seasons. (There were 343 total MLB players who played in 1944 and 1945, so many returnees were facing players who did not miss time in previous seasons).

The hitters suffered some performance decline, relative to the league average. As a group, their OPS+ — which adjusts for the run-scoring environment and ballpark factors — declined by 5.2 percent, from an average of 118.1 pre-service to 111.9 in their first season back. But there were also cases like that of Ted Williams, who missed his age-24, 25 and 26 seasons and returned in 1946 to win the AL MVP award. Perhaps there was some aging effect in the group, but the average age of players in their return was 30.1 years, which likely placed near their prime performance years.

We get mostly the same results if we change our criteria slightly to get a bigger sample. Looking at the 37 players with at least 100 plate appearances, rather than 150, hitters’ performance slightly declined from a 111.4 OPS+ before WWII to a 107.2 mark in their return.

And if we look at all instances of one-plus seasons lost in service — adding one WWI case and eight Korean War veterans to our sample — there was only a slight performance dip (-0.9 percent).

Pitchers saw an even smaller effect.

Using ERA+, which also adjusts for stadium effects, the WWII veterans were 4.5 percent better upon their return. Take Bob Feller, who led the AL in wins in his last year before entering the war, but was better on a per-inning basis when he returned late in 1945. Looking at all pitchers in the group, they improved from a 108.2 ERA+ to a 114.3 mark.

When including all conflict-related cases — adding in one player who served in World War I and 10 Korean War veterans — the performance levels upon return were nearly flat. New York Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford returned after two years serving in the Korean War to go 18-6 with a 3.00 ERA.

So for those players that hope to return to affiliated games next year, perhaps they can take solace in the lack of dramatic decline in performance after military service. While World War II occurred more than 70 years ago, changes to technology and training practices have perhaps allowed game play to be less important to development today. After all, many modern career breakthroughs have occurred far from organized baseball fields. Yankees pitcher Adam Ottavino turned around his career thanks to a new pitch and better command honed in the confines of a Manhattan storefront. Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner and Boston Red Sox slugger J.D. Martinez rebuilt their swings and careers in various Los Angeles-area batting cages, morphing from bench players into stars. Indeed, some players are getting creative in the face of the pandemic.

Teams are, too. The Baltimore Orioles’ new leadership team is attempting to take advantage of the pause as best they can. Player development director Matt Blood has spent scores of hours with players on Zoom video calls this year. The video chats have focused on areas like mindfulness and nutrition. “Zoom dinners,” as Blood calls them, have pushed players to avoid relying on fast food. “We all cook the same meal, at the same time, so that we learn, and part of it is also so we can be together and see each other’s faces,” he said. The Orioles’ strength and conditioning staff helped players construct improvised weight-training equipment for those with limited means or without access to gyms, he added.

Of course, a major issue with players trying to develop away from their organizations is the lack of uniform access to facilities, tools and coaches.

Horacek said the Twins are in regular contact with their players but that there is no “set protocol” to follow. “I think they realize that they can’t ask too much of us because of the obstacles we face in training,” Horacek told FiveThirtyEight. “Many guys I know are just doing whatever they can, which certainly isn’t enough to develop.”

Even if clubs keep paying minor leaguers their paltry salaries, Horacek says players are looking for backup plans with so little future assurance of work — baseball has proposed reducing the affiliated minor leagues by 42 clubs next season. Horacek has started a web-development business that designs tools for teams and companies in the baseball business.

“I have a buddy who replied to his [organization’s] texts asking what he’s planning to do to ‘stay ready’ [by] saying ‘I’m not doing a goddamn thing for you guys anymore,’” Horacek wrote. “I think most players will shut it down until next year. Many will retire …. Some players might take this time to develop in the gym, but only those with the means to do that will be able.”

So perhaps the key question is not how players will develop without games, but how many will return at all.

Happy Birthday To Roy Williams, The Coach Who Never Changes

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 13:00:17 GMT

When the NCAA men’s basketball tournament was officially canceled on March 12 because of the coronavirus pandemic, it marked the end of one of the most unpredictable — and wide-open — seasons in recent memory. We saw a record number of teams grab the top spot in the Associated Press rankings in the first few weeks of the season, and by season’s end, three of the top 10 teams in Ken Pomeroy’s final efficiency rankings — Baylor, San Diego State and Dayton — were relative newcomers; two of them had only had one previous top-10 season since 2002, and Dayton hadn’t had any.

The season was aberrant in another sense, too. It was the first losing season in the Hall of Fame career of North Carolina coach Roy Williams, and it would have been only the third time a Williams-coached team had missed the Big Dance.³ Williams, who turns 70 on Saturday, is fourth all-time in NCAA Division I wins (885), trailing only Bob Knight (899) and fellow ACC septuagenarians Jim Boeheim (1,065)⁴ and Mike Krzyzewski (1,157). He’s already passed his mentor and idol, the legendary Dean Smith, in wins and NCAA championships (three to two), and he’s the only coach to have won 400 games at two different schools.

In 2019-20, however, those records seemed a distant memory. Though they were ranked No. 9 in the preseason, the Tar Heels quickly fell from national relevance after dropping four straight in December, including a home loss to lowly Wofford, and continued their slide into January with five straight defeats to start the new year. It was a far cry from “the best daggum bath [he’d] ever had with his clothes on,” as “Ol’ Roy” quipped after he was doused with ice water after the Tar Heels reached the 2017 Final Four. The typically folksy Williams didn’t mince words.

This crew is “the least gifted team I’ve ever coached in the time that I’ve been back here,” Williams said after Georgia Tech thumped Carolina 96-83 at the Dean E. Smith Center.

“He should probably fire me, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Williams said of UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham after the Tar Heels blew a late 10-point lead to Clemson, again at home.

Needless to say, last year’s Carolina team was hardly the vintage edition that observers have come to expect in Chapel Hill, where Williams built one of Division I’s most consistent programs, not only in terms of year-in, year-out performance, but also in its steady approach amid countless changes to the sport.

Under Williams, the Tar Heels have always looked to score early in the shot clock — his UNC teams have played one of the fastest tempos in the country, with all but two of his 17 squads ranking in the top 50 of KenPom’s adjusted tempo. If they don’t get a quick score in transition, they still typically look to score inside first, relying on skilled big men and crisp passing to execute the vaunted secondary break that Williams inherited from Smith. And they’ve crashed the offensive glass — all but one of his Carolina teams have ranked in the top 25 in offensive rebounding percentage.

Perhaps as a consequence of their inside-first approach, the Tar Heels have relied less on long-distance shooting than most teams. Under Williams, UNC teams have only once ranked in the top 200 in 3-point shooting frequency (No. 199 in 2006), and they’ve ranked 349th (2014) and 350th (2015) out of 351 in that metric. Even Williams’s two best outside shooting teams by 3-point percentage, the 2005 and 2009 teams, didn’t take many shots from downtown; they ranked 230th and 300th, respectively, in 3-point attempt rate, even though they drilled threes at clips of 40.3 and 38.5 percent. If that sounds like coaching malpractice by today’s standards, consider that both of those teams were kings of the Big Dance.

But perhaps more remarkable than Williams’s consistent strategy — and the fruits it has borne — is its relative novelty, especially as it relates to pace. Since the 2003-04 season, just six teams have finished in the top 10 of both overall efficiency margin and tempo; every single one of those teams was a Williams-led Carolina squad. During Williams’s tenure, Carolina has finished in the top 10 in overall adjusted efficiency margin 11 times, and it has played at the fastest tempo among the top 10 nine of those times. You don’t have to run at every opportunity to win in college basketball⁵ — 12 of the last 13 non-UNC men’s national champions have sported adjusted tempos that ranked 100 or below — but Williams insists on doing it anyway.

Carolina’s consistent predilection for offensive rebounding and 2-pointers also belie a sport-wide trend away from both those strategies. From 2004 to 2020, the median offensive-rebounding rate across men’s college basketball crept down from 32.1 to 27.9 percent, and the share of field goal attempts shot from 2-point range fell from 67.3 to 62.5 percent. Though those shifts explain each other to some extent — as teams are more spread out on offense, they’re less likely to be in a position to crash the glass — they haven’t led to a revolution in the Tar Heel offense. Sure, in 2018-19, Carolina’s last season of national relevance, the Heels grabbed 35.3 percent of available misses and 64.2 percent of their field goal attempts were 2-pointers, lower figures than they’ve typically produced under Williams. But they still ranked near the top in offensive rebounding percentage (16th) and near the bottom (253rd) in 3-point field goal rate.

And of course, in a sport where recruiting is arguably the most important aspect of building a team, Williams has consistently done more with less talent than his competitors. His recruiting classes at UNC have an average ranking of 17.6th in Division I, according to 247sports.com’s team rankings. Compare that with three other traditional “blue bloods,” Duke, Kentucky and Kansas, whose average rankings in that time have been 12.1, 4.8 and 14.1. Since Williams returned to Chapel Hill in 2003, UNC has amassed more NCAA titles, Final Fours and tournament wins than any of those programs, all while not radically changing its ethos of building its most successful teams around players who had stayed multiple years.

After the “one-and-done” era kicked off in 2006, some coaches, like Kentucky’s John Calipari, became known for building their teams around highly touted recruits that otherwise would have gone straight from college to the pros, while others, like Duke’s Krzyzewski, gradually changed course to make those players the focal point of their teams. Williams didn’t. Williams had just four one-and-done players from 2006 through 2019, compared to the 17 of his rival just up Highway 15-501. And those players on Williams’s teams haven’t played the same kind of starring roles as recent top freshmen on Coach K’s teams; none led the team in scoring, and only two (Brandan Wright and Coby White) started for UNC.

Though North Carolina’s recruiting malaise from 2014 to 2017, when the average UNC recruiting class ranking was 28.3, could be attributed to the academic scandal that cast a pall over the men’s basketball team, Williams arguably benefited from largely landing the players who would stay multiple years and anchor championship-caliber teams. Only one of Carolina’s five Final Four appearances under Williams has involved a top-10 freshman recruiting class (2005, with the No. 10 class in the country). For every Zion Williamson or Andrew Wiggins who chose another school, he got a Marcus Paige or Joel Berry who learned the North Carolina system over four years and helped guide their teams deep into the NCAA tournament. And in March, there’s no better coach than Ol’ Roy: According to Bart Torvik’s coach ratings, his performance against KenPom expectations is the best in college basketball since he arrived in Chapel Hill.

Williams has bucked the trends over the years, whether it’s in stubbornly sticking to his offensive game plan, refusing to call timeouts or succeeding with lower-ranked recruiting classes and more experienced players than his blue-blood counterparts. Sticking to his guns doesn’t always turn out in his favor: He might not have won the adulation of his contemporaries, nor will he (in his mind) ever eclipse the greatness of his mentor Smith. And it’s possible that his intransigence caught up with him in a disastrous 2019-20 season that the baby-blue fan base hopes to soon forget.

But, daggum it, why would Roy change now?

Can You Cheat At Rock, Paper, Scissors?

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 12:00:13 GMT

Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. Two puzzles are presented each week: the Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and the Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement. Submit a correct answer for either,⁶ and you may get a shoutout in next week’s column. Please wait until Monday to publicly share your answers! If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting dust in your attic, find me on Twitter.

Riddler Express

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the final round of the Riddler Rock, Paper, Scissors.

The rules are simple: Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper, and paper beats rock. Moreover, the game is “sudden death,” so the first person to win a single round is immediately declared the grand champion. If there’s a tie, meaning both players choose the same object, then you simply play another round.

Fortunately, your opponent is someone you’ve studied well. Based on the motion of their arm, you can tell whether they will (1) play rock or paper with equal probability, (2) play paper or scissors with equal probability or (3) play rock or scissors with equal probability. (Every round falls into one of these three categories.)

If you strategize correctly, what are your chances of winning the tournament?

Submit your answer

Riddler Classic

From Dave Moran comes a perplexing puzzle of pomp and circumstance:

The inaugural graduating class of Riddler High School, more than 100 students strong, is lined up along the circumference of the giant circular mosaic on the plaza in front of the school. The principal, Dr. Olivia Rhodes, stands atop a tall stepladder in the center of the circle, preparing to take the panoramic class photo.

Suddenly, she shouts, “Hey, class, every single one of you N graduates — except Val, our valedictorian — is standing in the wrong place! Remember, you’re supposed to stand in order of your class rank, starting with Val directly in front of me, and going counterclockwise all the way to Zach, who should then be next to Val.” (Poor Zach was ranked last in the graduating class at Riddler High.)

Dr. Rhodes continues, “Not only are almost all of you in the wrong positions, but no two of you are even in the correct position relative to each other.” Two graduates would be in the correct position relative to each other if, for example, graduate A was supposed to be 17 positions counterclockwise of graduate B and was indeed 17 positions counterclockwise of graduate B — even though both graduates were in the wrong positions.

But Val speaks up: “Dr. Rhodes, that can’t be right. There must be at least two of us who are in the correct position relative to each other.”

Dr. Rhodes looks carefully around the circle of graduates below her and admits, “Of course, our brilliant Val is quite right. I do now see that there are two of you who are correctly positioned relative to each other.”

Given that there are more than 100 graduates, what is the minimum number of graduates who are posing for the class photo?

Submit your answer

Solution to last week’s Riddler Express

Congratulations to Joe Maloney of Atlanta, Georgia, winner of last week’s Riddler Express.

Last week, Riddler Township was having its quadrennial presidential election. Each of the town’s 10 “shires” was allotted a certain number of electoral votes: two, plus one additional vote for every 10 citizens (rounded to the nearest 10).

The names and populations of the 10 shires are summarized in the table below.

Which way will Riddler Township swing?

Shire	Population	Electoral votes
Oneshire	11	3
Twoshire	21	4
Threeshire	31	5
Fourshire	41	6
Fiveshire	51	7
Sixshire	61	8
Sevenshire	71	9
Eightshire	81	10
Nineshire	91	11
Tenshire	101	12

Under this sort of electoral system, it was quite possible for a presidential candidate to lose the popular vote and still win the election.

With two candidates running for president of Riddler Township, and every citizen voting for one or the other, what is the lowest percentage of the popular vote that a candidate could get while still winning the election?

To win with as few votes as possible, a candidate needed a majority of the 75 electoral votes, meaning they needed at least 38 votes. They also needed just over half the popular vote in any shire they won, while losing the entire popular vote in the shires they lost.

Meanwhile, the less populous shires also offered greater leverage. For example, Oneshire, with its three electoral votes and a population of 11 people (i.e., a majority consisting of six people), offered 0.5 — three divided by six — electoral votes per supporter. Twoshire, with four electoral votes and a voting majority of 11 people, offered about 0.36 electoral votes per supporter. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, Tenshire offered less than 0.24 electoral votes per supporter.

That meant our unpopular winner wanted to win the less populous shires, accruing electoral votes without winning too many popular votes.

The fewest votes a candidate needed to win turned out to be 136 out of Riddler Township’s 560 total citizens, and so the smallest possible winning percentage of the popular vote was approximately 24.3 percent.

There were several different ways to generate this electoral nightmare. For example, the winner might get six votes in Oneshire, 16 votes in Threeshire, 21 votes in Fourshire, 26 votes in Fiveshire, 31 votes in Sixshire and 36 votes in Sevenshire. In all, that is indeed 38 electoral votes against just 136 popular votes. This particular scenario was illustrated by Andrew Heairet:

That map of Riddler Township looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t quite place it.

But that wasn’t the only solution. Many solvers, like Nora Corrigan from Columbus, Mississippi and Caspian from Stockholm, Sweden found multiple ways to generate exactly 38 electoral votes and 136 popular votes. Here is the complete list of such scenarios:

Slim victories in Oneshire, Threeshire, Fourshire, Fiveshire, Sixshire and Sevenshire
Slim victories in Oneshire, Twoshire, Fourshire, Fiveshire, Sixshire and Eightshire
Slim victories in Oneshire, Twoshire, Threeshire, Fiveshire, Sixshire and Nineshire
Slim victories in Oneshire, Twoshire, Threeshire, Fiveshire, Sevenshire and Eightshire
Slim victories in Oneshire, Twoshire, Threeshire, Fourshire, Sixshire and Tenshire
Slim victories in Oneshire, Twoshire, Threeshire, Fourshire, Sevenshire and Nineshire

As it turned out, there were many ways for the electoral and popular votes to wildly disagree. I guess that’s the electoral college for you. Oh, and if you’d like your vote to really count in Riddler Township, it’s a good idea to live in Oneshire.

Solution to last week’s Riddler Classic

Congratulations to Steven Trautmann of Aurora, Colorado, winner of last week’s Riddler Classic.

Last week, you played a game of Riddler Pinball, which had an infinitely long wall and a circle whose radius was 1 inch and whose center was 2 inches from the wall. The wall and the circle were both fixed and never moved. A single pinball started 2 inches from the wall and 2 inches from the center of the circle.

To play, you flicked the pinball toward a spot of your choosing along the wall, specified by its distance x from the point on the wall that’s closest to the circle, as shown in the diagram below.

The goal of the game was simple: Get the ball to bounce as many times as possible.

If you aimed too far to the right (i.e., your value of x was too small), the pinball quickly bounced its way through the gap between the circle and the wall. But if you aimed too far to the left (i.e., your value of x is too big), the pinball quickly came back out the same side it went in.

Riddler Pinball was an unforgiving game — the slightest error tanked your chances of victory. But if you strategized just right, it was possible to do quite well.

What was the greatest number of bounces you could achieve? And, more importantly, what value of x got you the most bounces?

There was certainly a sweet spot that resulted in many, many bounces. For example, when x was 0.82248632494339, there were 43 bounces:

But before we go any further, let’s return to the first question that was posed: What was the greatest possible number of bounces?

As solver Phillip Bradbury observed, all the angles and points of impact changed monotonically with x. As noted above, smaller values of x made the pinball pass through, but larger values of x made the pinball bounce back out.

So then what happened between these two cases? Zooming in revealed a single point on the number line where the pinball neither passed through nor bounced back. But if it did neither of these things, what else could the ball possibly do? It would be stuck bouncing back and forth infinitely many times. And as x approached this point — whatever it was — the number of bounces went up, up, up. This was nicely illustrated by solvers Mark Girard and Dinesh Vatvani.

My solution to this week's #538Riddler

The optimal solution to the Pinball Wizard riddle is very elusive. It requires an +1 order of magnitude precision for every ~ +3 bounces.
I managed to get to 43 bounces before running into floating point precision problems. :/@xaqwg pic.twitter.com/y5MpqtB6g8

— Dinesh Vatvani (@d_vatvani) July 27, 2020

There were a few other ways to see how this was true. Jason Bellenger reasoned backwards, thinking about a ball that was bouncing straight up and down between the tip of the circle and the wall. If you perturbed it infinitesimally, but just right, it would ultimately bounce its way to the correct starting point. Playing these bounces in reverse would then give you an infinitely high-scoring pinball shot.

Laurent Lessard, meanwhile, was able to better visualize the multitude of bounces by plotting the logarithm of the x-coordinate, as shown below. Graphically, this had the effect of spreading out the bounces, leading him to correctly suspect the answer was infinity.

As it turned out, this reasoning was the easier part of the problem. Finding this precise value of x that got you infinitely many bounces was another matter entirely.

At this point, most solvers took a computational approach. Simulating the pinball as it bounced off the wall wasn’t too tricky — the ball simply reflected off the wall so that the angle it made with respect to the wall didn’t change. But simulating bounces off the circle was a little tougher. Again, the angles of incidence and reflection were equal, but now they were measured from the radius of the circle. A slight mess of trigonometry ensued.

Once you had a functioning pinball simulator up and running, then it was just a matter of trying different values of x, adding one digit at a time, and seeing which values gave you more bounces. Indeed, the answer was very close to 0.82248632494339 — the true value actually goes on for infinitely many decimal places.

Some solvers, like Dean Ballard and Joseph Wetherell, went to great lengths to crank out more of the solution’s decimal places. In fact, the answer is very, very close to:

0.82248632494339006569162637706984990078
134582582348831326968696909788932771367

According to Joseph, this precise value of x resulted in more than 200 bounces!

Meanwhile, solver Emma Knight boldly attempted a more analytic approach. However, ballooning floating point errors ultimately got in the way.

Finally, a few very clever readers noticed something glaring about this problem: There was a second solution! While the original statement of the riddle asked where along the wall the pinball should be aimed, it was also possible to hit the circle first and still achieve infinitely many bounces. Josh Silverman went as far as animating this alternate strategy:

then shoot at the ball pic.twitter.com/0loO36YtJs

— joshsilverman (@_joshsilverman) July 27, 2020

When I previously teased Riddler Pinball, I asked what interesting mathematical questions could be posed about it. There were multiple calls to alter the geometry, such as with a noncircular bumper, or to scale it up to three dimensions. With all these great suggestions, I don’t think it will be long before we all play another round of Riddler Pinball.

Want more riddles?

Well, aren’t you lucky? There’s a whole book full of the best puzzles from this column and some never-before-seen head-scratchers. It’s called “The Riddler,” and it’s in stores now!

Want to submit a riddle?

Email Zach Wissner-Gross at riddlercolumn@gmail.com.

Some Republicans Have Gotten More Concerned About COVID-19

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 10:00:59 GMT

This month, for the first time since April, our tracker of public opinion around the coronavirus shows that the share of Americans who say they are “very” concerned that they or someone they know will become infected with COVID-19 is higher than the share who say they are “somewhat” concerned.

That rise in concern is understandable, too, when you consider the spike in new coronavirus cases that began in mid-June, especially in the South and West. Just this past week, California, Florida and Texas, along with a handful of other states, saw record spikes in fatalities.

And the fact that the geography of the virus is changing — it’s no longer just a blue-state virus — may mean behaviors and political attitudes are shifting once again. To be clear, there are still deep political divides in how concerned people are about the virus, but there are also some signs that Republicans may be growing more concerned.

For example, as many states started lifting restrictions in April, the share of Republicans who said they were staying at home declined, while the share of Democrats saying they were staying put remained roughly the same. As you can see in the chart below, the share of Republicans who reported staying home as much as possible has ticked up by at least 10 points since the start of July. The latest poll from YouGov/Huffpost to ask this question did, however, also show a decline of 4 percentage points from the previous week, so it’s possible that the changes in Republican behavior could be plateauing — or declining again.

The YouGov/Huffpost polls show increased support for coronavirus-related restrictions, too. In early June, only 23 percent of Americans said there were not enough restrictions where they lived, but in the latest poll, that number had grown by 14 percentage points to 37 percent. That includes an increase of more than 10 points in every region except the Northeast, where the coronavirus’s spread has slowed down. And the share of Republicans who believe there are not enough restrictions, while still relatively small, has doubled from 10 percent in early June to over 20 percent in late July.

These shifts are small, as Republicans still lag behind Democrats on both of these metrics. But it’s significant because it comes at a time when public approval of the government’s handling of the pandemic has fallen to new lows.

According to our tracker, Trump’s approval rating on his response to the crisis has steadily declined since April. That even includes Republicans, whose approval of how he is handling the crisis, while still high at 78 percent, has declined roughly 5 percentage points since mid-June, when cases began spiking.

Recent polls have also shown that Republican governors are getting lower marks on how they’ve handled the pandemic, especially in hard-hit states like Texas, Florida and Arizona.

To be sure, Democrats are still more concerned about the coronavirus than Republicans, but that uptick in our tracker isn’t being driven by just Democrats. Republicans are also showing signs of increased concern around the virus. Some of that may be because as the virus spreads to different parts of the country, more Republicans are coming into contact with it, which may change their perceptions of it. Take what an Ipsos/Axios poll recently found. While only 35 percent of Republicans who had no personal experience with the virus said they are either “very” or “somewhat” concerned about COVID-19, concern over the coronavirus rose to 51 percent among Republicans who knew someone who died from it. Additionally, more than half of Republicans who knew someone who died from the virus said they always wore a mask, while only 38 percent of those who had no personal experience with the virus said they always wore a mask.

And perhaps that nuance underscores something Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote about for FiveThirtyEight earlier this month. Republicans and Democrats are divided on how they see the virus. But they’re less divided on the actual steps they can take to stay safe — whether that’s social distancing, trying to stay home more or wearing masks in public places. It’s possible that partisan opinion on the coronavirus isn’t entirely baked in — yet.

Other Polling Bites

65 percent of American adults said that they supported the protests that have taken place around the country following the police killing of George Floyd, according to a Gallup poll conducted between June and July. Fifty-four percent said that the protests have changed their views on racial justice either “a little” or “a lot,” and 11 percent reported personally participating in a protest about racial justice and equality in the previous month.
On Wednesday, the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook testified in an antitrust hearing in the House of Representatives. And according to a recent IBD/TIPP poll, many Americans seem supportive of breaking up these big tech companies. When asked about each company on its own, 60 percent of Americans said they either “somewhat” or “strongly” supported breaking up Google, 58 percent said the same of Amazon, 57 percent said the same of Facebook, and 55 percent said the same of Apple. This is an increase from a year ago, when a previous IBD/TIPP poll found 48 percent of Americans supported breaking up Facebook, 45 percent supported breaking up Amazon, 43 percent supported breaking up Google, and only 36 percent said they supported breaking up Apple.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of American parents who have a child 11 or younger said their child watches videos on YouTube.
Another poll from Pew found that lesser-educated Americans were much more likely to believe the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus outbreak was intentionally planned by powerful people. Forty-eight percent of those with a high school education or less and 38 percent of those with some college education said this theory was either “probably” or “definitely” true, while about a quarter of college graduates and only 15 percent of those with postgraduate education said the same.
According to a new Ipsos/Newsy poll, Americans have a variety of concerns about the upcoming elections. Seventy-nine percent were concerned about the impact of COVID-19, 71 percent were concerned about the impact of fake news, 63 percent were concerned about foreign interference, 63 percent were worried about vote suppression, 58 percent were troubled by voter fraud, and 54 percent expressed concern about mail-in-ballot fraud.

A new Gallup survey found that 34 percent of Americans identified as politically “conservative” in May and June, down from 40 percent in January and February. And among those with incomes of over $100,000 or between 35 and 54 years old, the share who identified as conservative fell by 11 and 10 percentage points, respectively. Meanwhile, the share of people who said they were “liberal” rose four points, from 22 percent at the start of the year to 26 percent in May and June. Gallup has tracked these numbers since at least 1992.

Trump Approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 40.6 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 55.1 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -14.5 points). At this time last week, 40.3 percent approved and 55.6 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -15.3 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 40.3 percent and a disapproval rating of 56.4 percent, for a net approval rating of -16.1 points.

Generic Ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot, Democrats currently lead by 8.3 percentage points (49.1 percent to 40.8 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 8.2 points (49.4 percent to 41.2 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 9 points (49 percent to 40 percent).

Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections.

A Republican Congressman Who Might Not Vote For Trump

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 21:52:51 GMT

For this week’s episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, we interviewed Rep. Will Hurd of Texas’s 23rd Congressional District. And as you’ll hear in the podcast and read in selected excerpts below, we covered a lot of ground, including whether Hurd will vote for President Trump in November.

The transcript below has been lightly edited.

On whether Hurd will vote for Trump:

Galen Druke: I want to talk about all that strategy and what the future of the party looks like. But are you going to vote for Trump this fall?

Will Hurd: Like a lot of Americans, I wish I had different options on the ballot. And my plan is always to support a Republican and we’re going to be making those decisions over the next 98 days.

GD: So you’re going to decide whether or not to vote for him over the next 98 days?

WH: That is how I always approach my election. I’m just like everybody else.

GD: Well, you previously said that you will vote for Trump this fall. So I’m just wondering if you’re hesitant a little bit now?

WH: I think that’s accurate.

Your polling is showing that. I’m like everybody else. I don’t want to vote for a Joe Biden because in the end, some of the policies, I think that a unified Democratic Party is going to pass … would be tough for the country, and things that I don’t support, and haven’t supported during my time in Congress. And as somebody who’s represented a large, competitive district, I know something about competitive districts and what needs to be done in order to win.

GD: I understand that desire not to vote for Joe Biden, but I guess more specifically on whether or not you’ll vote for Trump, what could change your mind in the next 98 days that would make you view him and his presidency differently than what he’s shown us so far?

WH: It’s a good question and who knows. I don’t think a year ago we would have been thinking about a global pandemic that would have impacted the entire world and brought the world economy to a standstill. And so who knows what can happen over these next few weeks.

But in the end, what I think that I’ve been trying to preach to my colleagues is that we have to change as a Republican Party. We have to start appealing to broader groups of people. And if we don’t, and also if the Republican Party doesn’t start looking like America, we’re not going to have a Republican Party in America.

GD: Everything you’re saying here makes it sound like you aren’t voting for Trump. Is that the case?

WH: As I said, I don’t like either one of my choices. And in the end, we’re going to evaluate this over the next 90 days, or 96 days.

On delaying the election:

GD: President Trump suggested delaying the presidential election, which Congress has the power to do, your branch of government. Do you support delaying the election?

WH: We are not an authoritarian government where the head of state gets to decide on a whim when an election happens. So no, this is Congress’s role, as you said. It should go forward as has been established. And ultimately, look, I’m of the opinion that we should be increasing the ways for people to vote, right, the more people that vote, the better off it is. And this is something that I’ve been able to prove, during my time in Congress, that if you take a message to more people, you can get it to resonate with more people and we shouldn’t be afraid.

On the U.S. response to COVID-19:

GD: Overall, do you think the country is doing a good job combating the pandemic?

WH: No. We have increasing death rates, right? We have the most number of people that are dealing with this right? I think the impact it’s had on the United States of America versus other countries is still … we’re dealing with one of the worst cases. We’re having debates on whether you should be wearing a mask or not. Wear a mask! Right? A mask is to protect yourself but also to protect the people around you. So why are we debating that? This debate and fights around whether school should open or not — we should be talking about, ‘how do we work together in order to exceed CDC guidelines on opening schools?’, not whether or not it should happen.

And so yeah, there are all kinds of problems. But I’m always trying to work with these folks to deal with the problem as it is right now. I know in Texas, a third of the deaths of coronavirus have been in nursing homes. That’s outrageous. And then also in prisons. And so if we couldn’t handle this in nursing homes or in prisons, how are we going to be handling it in an educational environment where it is even more chaotic than those other places? So yeah, we have a long way to go.”

On the future of the Republican party:

GD: Let’s talk about where the Republican Party is headed. You said that the Republican Party needs to look more like America. And you know, right now, it doesn’t. You’re the only Black lawmaker on the Republican side in the House. Why do you think there are so few Black lawmakers in the Republican caucus in the house?

WH: Everybody asked me when I first got elected, how does a Black Republican represent a 71 percent Latino district? And I say it’s because you know, I work hard and I show up to communities that had never seen a Republican show up, and you do that multiple times. If you’re showing up 90 days before an election, that’s called pandering.

You have to be in those communities. Showing up is half the battle. And unfortunately, I think over time, professional political consultants talk about focusing on your likely “x voter” — whether that’s a Republican primary voter or Democratic primary voter — rather than trying to grow and appeal to a broader group of people. It’s hard.

GD: Do you think that part of the reason has to do with Republicans actively appealing to a white identity?

WH: Look, I think when you look at a person like a Steve King — and you know Steve King losing his primary is ultimately a good thing — but when you know folks that that have been elected as a Republican that say racist or misogynistic or homophobic things, that hurts all of us that identify with with being a Republican.

… But what I found is that’s not everybody. But yeah, over time, have those things been said? Yes. And Does that hurt? Yes. And that’s why we have to speak out when those things do happen.

The Baltimore Ravens Used Their Tight Ends Differently

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 17:22:57 GMT

The Baltimore Ravens have now ended two seasons in a row with hasty playoff exits. The team, which opened its 2020 training camp on Tuesday, lost the 2018 AFC wild card game at home to the Los Angeles Chargers before suffering a stunning upset in the divisional round last season at the hands of the upstart Tennessee Titans.

But the way the team finished doesn’t diminish what it did between those two losses. Head coach John Harbaugh said during a preseason interview last year that his team would have a revolutionary offense in its first full season with Lamar Jackson under center, and he was right.

Jackson was unanimously voted the league’s MVP, and the team finished the regular season with the best record in the NFL, the league’s top-scoring offense and the best rushing attack in NFL history. While the second-year quarterback’s elevated play was key to the unit’s success, the usage of its trio of tight ends and the stable of backfield mates for Jackson allowed the offense to truly flourish – especially out of heavy formations.

Although the Ravens used a variety of personnel sets, their heavy formations garnered national attention because they contradicted the rest of the NFL. While the rest of the league was building offenses out of spread formations, Baltimore designed a system that ran nearly half of its plays from heavy formations,¹ according to ESPN’s Stats & Information Group. Out of 1,060 total offensive snaps in the regular season, Baltimore lined up 453 times (or 42.7 percent of its snaps) in heavy formations that featured different pairs of the tight ends plus Ricard. Meanwhile, the rest of the league lined up for only 27 percent of plays from heavy sets.

In 2019, Baltimore relied extensively on fullback Patrick Ricard² and tight ends Mark Andrews, Nick Boyle and Hayden Hurst. The team traded Hurst to Atlanta in the offseason, but undrafted rookie Eli Wolf will compete for that third tight end spot with Charles Scarff, who spent last year on the practice squad.³ So it seems likely that the Ravens will continue this scheme this year.

The members of Baltimore’s tight end/fullback crew were reliable blockers for Jackson and the running backs (Mark Ingram, Gus Edwards and Justice Hill) as well as viable receivers, which allowed the offense to use multiple variations of the group within the heavy sets to keep defenses guessing. In some cases, the team even had all four on the field at once.

Despite having fewer total rushing yards and yards per carry with heavy personnel than with spread personnel (the Ravens rushed for 1,089 yards in heavy sets while rushing 1,560 yards in spread sets), the team’s production within the heavy sets was vital to its success because it used them to extend drives and control the clock. But perhaps even more important was Baltimore’s third-down conversion rate on plays from heavy packages: The unit converted 69 percent of third downs during the regular season. Converting on these downs at such a high rate led to the team averaging nearly 35 minutes of possession time.

Their production on the ground also regularly opened up the passing game by forcing defenses to use personnel packages designed for crowding the line of scrimmage. This created opportunities for the offense to capitalize on mismatches by forcing bigger and slower defenders to cover the tight ends. Jackson was able to make the most of these moments, as each of the three tight ends recorded at least 20 receptions for over 200 yards. Andrews, Boyle and Hurst averaged 12.3 yards per reception while accounting for over half of the team’s 1,569 total passing yards from heavy formations. Although Ricard was mostly used as a blocker throughout the season, he also recorded a touchdown catch out of a heavy set and finished the regular season with eight total catches for 47 yards.

The depth and versatility of the group enabled them to account for nearly half of the team’s total receiving yards and 15 of Jackson’s 36 passing touchdowns. Andrews finished the regular season as the team’s leading receiver, with 852 receiving yards and 10 touchdowns, and he led all tight ends in touchdowns.

Baltimore’s postseason loss to the Titans showed what can happen if teams are able to limit the team’s dynamic rushing attack. After allowing the Titans to take a 14-point lead early in the second quarter, the Ravens started favoring the pass in an attempt to cut the lead. Jackson recorded a career-high 22 pass attempts in the first half, while the team had only 16 first-half rushing attempts. Jackson finished the game with 59 passing attempts, another career high.

Jackson and the offense went into halftime with season lows in total rushing yards and yards per carry. The unit averaged 3.81 yards per rush and gained only 61 yards on the ground. After averaging more than 37 rush attempts per game during the regular season, Baltimore finished the game with 29 carries – tying the second-lowest total of carries the team recorded in a game all season.

The Ravens’ struggles were most apparent on a pair of fourth downs. Coming into the postseason, Baltimore had converted on eight of eight fourth-and-1 attempts, but it failed to convert on fourth-and-1 in the second quarter and again in the third against the Titans. The offense posted its third-lowest total of snaps and yards gained from heavy formations in the loss (17 plays for 77 yards) and also completed a season-low 37.5 percent of passes from heavy sets.

While Baltimore’s last outing was another postseason disappointment, the team’s future is still bright as it heads into another season. What remains to be seen is whether the rest of the league will have caught on to the Ravens’ unconventional offensive approach and devised a way to stop it, or if Jackson and his plethora of diverse weapons will carry them to another postseason.

Trump Can’t Postpone The Election, But He Can Delegitimize The Results.

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 17:11:33 GMT

Welcome to a special edition of FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Earlier today, President Trump tweeted that the 2020 election should be delayed “until people can properly, securely and safely vote.”

Postponing the election, of course, is not something the president can legally do. But it’s also kind of besides the point. Trump has already been fighting to delegitimize the results come November, claiming that voting by mail can lead to mass voter fraud.

So let’s dive into that. How would you describe Trump’s efforts to throw November’s results into question? He did something similar in 2016 when facing Hillary Clinton. How is this different?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Well, in many ways it’s exactly what Trump was doing in 2016. It’s just that he’s president now. And thus, his words are even more damaging (and they were already very damaging in 2016).

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): There’s also a very important distinction here. Before, Trump was just a candidate casting doubt on the election, but now he’s a sitting president doing that.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I’d characterize this as an exercise in control and influence over his party and the news cycle. Everyone is forced to respond to what he says, even if they’re not responding positively. Trump isn’t effective at that many aspects of the job, but he’s pretty effective at agenda control.

clare.malone: I would also say that calling for the delay of the actual vote feels VERY dictatorial in nature. Like, we’ve perversely gotten used to the “fake votes,” “fake news” stuff. But encouraging a change in the election date feels sort of explicitly over a line.

sarah: And to ask a somewhat obvious question — but one that has to be asked — this is another unprecedented, norm-defying and democratic-value jeopardizing moment, right? To put it another way, has another sitting president ever done this?

julia_azari: I’m always nervous about the “never” question with past presidents, but yeah, most presidents have not been willing to take on all the formal rules, the legal system and other branches of government while in office. Congress — which has the power to change the date of an election — used to be stronger, too, and there was no Twitter. My go-to example for this is we still had a presidential election in 1864, during the Civil War.

geoffrey.skelley: And in modern times, incumbents who have lost reelection have exited office without too much of a fuss. Take George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, or if we go further back, Herbert Hoover. Granted, incumbents don’t often lose. So it’s important to note that each of those incumbents lost decisively, meaning there wasn’t much to stand on even if they had wanted to fight the result. But it’s not like Gerald Ford created a stir in 1976 when he lost narrowly.

julia_azari: Candidates have also conceded even when the election was a mess. See Al Gore in 2000, Samuel Tilden in 1876.⁴

sarah: But on this question of actually changing the election date. How much power does Trump have to do that?

clare.malone: He does not have the power to change the date of the election.

julia_azari: None. It’s up to Congress, and elections are administered by the states.

clare.malone: Here’s my question, though: What happens if Trump refuses to leave the White House on Jan. 20, and there are no official election results at that point?

Like, in that dire scenario (Trump not leaving, no clear winner) does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi become president and someone has to haul him out of the building?

geoffrey.skelley: If for some reason the Electoral College hasn’t acted or the electoral votes haven’t been certified by Congress, Trump’s term ends on Jan. 20, according to the 20th Amendment. So there’d be an acting president, who would be the Speaker of the House per the order set out by the Presidential Succession Act — assuming congressional elections occurred.

But of course, that’s how it’s written, not how it might go.

sarah: Did someone mention the 20th amendment?

julia_azari: I keep imagining this scenario, and I have to say, I have a hard time imagining that Trump refuses to leave office. I don’t want to be complacent, but like a lot of people on Twitter, Trump seems to be comfortable tweeting out bold ideas and not as great at standing firm under political pressure.

So as I see it, there would be a couple of components needed for this to actually happen. There would be the political pressure — what are advisors, including Jared and Ivanka, telling him to do? This would help us understand if there are people who have influence over Trump who have some interest in seeing the system remain intact and legitimate.

The second thing would be the actual formal power — does the Secret Service force him out? Does the military gets involved? These are wild scenarios.

I would be surprised if these institutions don’t have plans for this somewhere, even if they are not publicly known.

geoffrey.skelley: Not to take things down an even darker road, but in this scenario, I think it’s important to consider how other institutions like the military act and how the president’s supporters behave in the face of attempts to delegitimize the election results.

clare.malone: Totally. I think that’s where many people’s minds go, too. And as a country, I think we are deeply uncomfortable (and rightly so) with the military being involved with a power transition. I mean, I personally find it incredibly chilling to consider.

geoffrey.skelley: I’ve seen Seven Days In May. Great movie but, uh yeah, disturbing.

But it’s a sign of the times when you have Biden actually saying he thinks the military would escort Trump out of the White House if he refused to leave.

sarah: Because that’s the thing, as you’re all saying, there are mechanisms via the 20th amendment to ensure Trump leaves office. But there’s still a very real question of how some of this would actually be enforced if it came to this, right?

julia_azari: Exactly. The 20th amendment was ratified to shorten the period between the presidential election in November and the inauguration, which had been in March. There was growing instability around the time it was ratified, after the 1932 election, and that’s some of what it intended to deal with, but it wasn’t really designed with this problem in mind.

I’m trying to stake out the ground that acknowledges a lot of people won’t have much incentive to let Trump violate the rules in this way.

clare.malone: Julia, when you say that a lot of people won’t have incentive to let Trump act contrary to the rules, whom are you thinking of?

julia_azari: I guess I’m thinking of people who might want to run for president later.

clare.malone: Republicans?

julia_azari: Or make money off the Trump brand. This includes his kids, and yeah, other Republicans.

clare.malone: That is, people with sway over him. Got it.

julia_azari: Military leaders, too, as we saw many of them push back after the D.C. protesters incident in June.

sarah: So let’s talk about the other big doomsday scenario here: The results aren’t considered legitimate. What are the signs that that idea is already taking root?

julia_azari: That’s a good way to frame that, but I’m not sure there are signs that it’s taking root any more than it’s sorta been lurking in the conversation since 2016 — and even before.

geoffrey.skelley: In the face of COVID-19, states are expanding absentee voting and, in some cases, vote-by-mail. But the president is making the case that mailed ballots are illegitimate and highly vulnerable to fraud — this is not true, of course, but by casting aspersions, he’s setting up the potential for delegitimizing the results as they come in, on and after Election Day. And the after part is probably what really matters, especially if the election is close.

clare.malone: Yeah, I was going to say, we’ve spent the past 4 to 5 years conditioning a certain segment of the population to distrust most everything in American life, unless it comes from the president’s mouth.

Someone shared this 2017 survey that found that around half of Republicans would be ok with delaying the 2020 election. Granted, the question was framed around whether people would support delaying the election to make sure people weren’t voting illegally (a big claim of Trump’s in 2016). But I still thought that was surprising.

It’s especially striking when you get to 2020, and the questions revolve around the pandemic. I was shocked to see, for instance, the share of Republicans and Democrats who were willing to delay the election because of the pandemic (roughly 39 percent of Americans supported delaying the election, according to that survey from April).

sarah: Yeah … it is mind boggling. That finding is also at least somewhat corroborated in this paper FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman published with the Voter Study Group earlier this year. In an examination of democracy in the U.S., Drutman and his coauthors found that both Republicans and Democrats were open to their preferred presidential candidate “rejecting the legitimacy of the election if they claim credible evidence of illegal voting or foreign interference.” And in that vein, 29 percent of Republicans said it would be appropriate for Trump “to refuse to leave office because he claims that he has credible evidence of illegal voting.”

julia_azari: One quibble with that study, though, knowing I have the utmost respect for Lee and his coauthors, is that each scenario lays out a justification for delaying the election, which I think makes it harder to say no. And I think people’s willingness to tolerate this in practice is conditional on their evaluation of that evidence, the credibility of the claims and the person making the claims. (E.g., Trump, who isn’t very popular.)

clare.malone: Totally fair.

I was pretty shocked in general to see how amenable people were to changing this very foundational thing! Even with the reasonings the survey questions provided them.

julia_azari: I was, too, but I think it’s not unreasonable for people to have limits on how much they trust elections if they think those elections were not administered fairly.

geoffrey.skelley: And if the election is close and a state or two is in doubt, any questions about administration could become explosive. See: the 2000 election.

julia_azari: Right. It’s actually amazing how explosive that wasn’t. But things are different now — I wonder how this plays out if we flip it around.

Let’s say Trump wins.

(I mean, this sorta already happened in 2016. Trump won, yet he went right ahead and tried to delegitimize parts of an election he had won.)

But let’s say it happens again, and he wins narrowly once again? Who questions the results? And would that be the right thing to do?

geoffrey.skelley: Yes, I wanted to bring this up! Trump said there were at least 3 million illegal votes in an election he won — conveniently undoing Clinton’s popular vote margin. And then he set up a task force to investigate fraud after he took office. It found nothing.

julia_azari: But there will likely be this question of “credible evidence,” as they cite in that Voter Study group paper. What if Trump wins, and people were standing in hours-long lines in Black neighborhoods in Ohio?

In other words, I think there will be a question of how much skepticism about elections is reasonable, and how much is chaos?

clare.malone: I think there is just going to be skepticism about this election, full stop.

geoffrey.skelley: I would not discount opponents of Trump taking to the streets in that scenario. A recent simulation by a group of experts about what could happen in these sorts of scenarios did not bring me much comfort. They found that every scenario — Trump winning or losing but someone defying the result — ended in street-level violence and political gridlock.

sarah: Oof. It’s interesting to me, though, that the desire to delegitimize results isn’t purely a Republican thing, as that Voter Study paper found. Democrats also showed signs of also being willing to reject the legitimacy of the election if it helps their preferred candidate.

clare.malone: Stacey Abrams’s non-concession concession speech in 2018 provided an interesting template for a potential Biden response (in case of a loss to Trump).

Though I do think Biden is such a conventional politician and institutionalist that he wouldn’t respond in the same way Abrams did, justified or not.

sarah: Yeah and Biden obviously isn’t waging a campaign of disinformation in the way that Trump is either. But perhaps one unintended effect of all this is, to Clare’s point, that skepticism of the election (depending on its margin) is going to be rampant.

julia_azari: Although Biden seems like … truly angry at times about the Trump presidency. It’s not obvious what the institutionalist move is in that scenario, IMO.

clare.malone: A good point!

julia_azari: I think there’s a strong possibility that skepticism is persistent and embedded in Trumpist ideology and among his followers, but not that widespread if the election is not close.

clare.malone: I mean, let’s go back to 2016.

If Trump had lost, we were all preparing for the launch of Trump TV, a perch from which he would rail for the impeachment of President Clinton.

I can sort of see something similar happening if Trump loses (unless, of course, he’s too tired to start the Trump TV experiment!)

geoffrey.skelley: OANN would love to have him.

julia_azari: Again, I don’t want to be complacent. I spend way too much time on politics Twitter. I spend all my time on politics Twitter.

But if Biden wins by a lot and Trump tweets a bunch, most Americans will just go on about their lives. That’s sorta how 2000 played out, and that was obviously really close and subject to questions, too.

geoffrey.skelley: Thing is, I can’t imagine Trump conceding in a 2000-esque situation in the way Gore eventually did.

clare.malone: Of course, 2000 is the election that a lot of people point to as the start of mistrust in elections as institutions. And like, the era of “voter fraud” alarmism really ramped up under George W. Bush.

julia_azari: But the angry minority has demonstrated that it can drive politics and policy to a great degree. So I don’t want to be complacent, but I do want to be specific in my fears.

clare.malone: So you could say people went on with their lives, but there were corrosive effects.

julia_azari: If he loses, I sometimes imagine that people around Trump will say, “People will say nice things about you if you do a good concession speech,” and so he does. But it’s not encouraging that that’s what it might come to.

clare.malone: Right, the integrity of democratic institutions might come down to a pep talk from “Javanka?”

sarah: So at the outset of this chat, I asked how Trump’s tweet to postpone the election was different from what he’s already done to try and delegitimize November’s result. And we’ve also pointed out that there have been prior points in American history where voters have mistrusted election results.

But I think given the abnormal aspects of Trump’s presidency, it’s easy to point to historical comparisons without really probing whether the moment we’re in doesn’t have a historical comparison, as historian Rick Perlstein did in his tweet, telling the media he didn’t want to do more interviews on how this moment might compare to 1968.

julia_azari: I think Perlstein is right, but I also think that we should be precise about how abnormal politics interacts with normal politics, because that has been the story of the Trump presidency IMO.

clare.malone: So, I mean, I take Rick’s point in this tweet; there’s this instinct that we have to comfort ourselves with history (i.e., American democracy has weathered much worse) but I do think that we sometimes dwell a bit in history without facing the new challenges that Trump presents us.

We sort of have to respect the new paradigm that’s been created and understand that there are limits to what history can teach us in this particular case; i.e., Twitter, plus Trump, plus 20 years of diminishing electoral trust.

geoffrey.skelley: It’s interesting that people would comfort themselves with history — I take little comfort from it. We’ve been on the brink before with the 1876 election, for instance.

julia_azari: I think that’s absolutely true. I don’t see history as a comfort but rather as a guide to how much luck and skill it takes to maneuver through this stuff.

I also think history is helpful because it shows what’s not normal. (And what shouldn’t be, but is.)

Gun Sales Are Surging, But Background Checks Aren’t Keeping Up

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 15:07:06 GMT

Gun sales were so slow earlier this year that in February, The New York Times ran a piece on how some gun manufacturers were looking to rebrand to make up for the “Trump slump.”

But then the pandemic hit. And on Friday, March 13, when President Trump declared a national emergency, the number of background checks went through the roof, according to the FBI system that vets gun buyers.

In March, the FBI received almost 1.5 million requests for background checks, according to data the bureau released to FiveThirtyEight in response to a public records request. On Friday, March 20 alone, 104,084 background check requests were sent to the bureau; according to a slightly different measure that includes checks run by state systems, that day saw the highest daily number of background checks on record.⁵ In fact, by that broader measure, five of the gun background check system’s 10 busiest days were in March 2020. While March is usually a busy month for background checks, it was off the charts this year.

But the number of background checks didn’t just go up. As you can see in the chart below, as the number of background checks sent to the FBI rose, so did the percentage that were delayed more than three business days — a critical deadline after which federal law allows dealers to legally sell a gun without a completed background check.

This is significant because it means that it may have been easier for guns to get into the hands of people who cannot legally own them.

The danger here isn’t theoretical. Dylann Roof was able to buy the gun he used to kill nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 because of this loophole. Roof had a record for drug possession that meant he couldn’t legally own a gun, but after the three-day period passed, the gun dealer sold him a gun anyway.

To be sure, these numbers aren’t a perfect portrait of gun sales: They don’t include data from 20 states that process some or all of their background checks themselves rather than through the FBI. And not every background check represents a gun sale — many checks are run when people apply for gun permits, when states check on the status of gun permit holders, or for other purposes. A single background check can also represent multiple gun sales.

We also don’t know how many background checks from March the FBI never completed. When a background check drags on for 88 days, the bureau stops researching the potential buyer and purges the background check request from its systems to comply with federal regulations. The bureau hasn’t yet released data on purged requests made in March.

We do know that the bureau never completes the overwhelming majority of background checks that take longer than three business days. For instance, 79 percent of such checks were never completed in 2019. This year, it purged over 80 percent of such checks from January and 78 percent from February.

Still, Jurgen Brauer, chief economist at Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting, and other experts agree that the spike in background checks in March represented a real surge in retail gun sales. For instance, Brauer’s consulting firm analysed FBI data and found that retail gun sales drove the surge in March, along with a second surge in June that was likely tied to Black Lives Matter protests. In total, the firm estimated that gun sales rose year-over-year by 85 percent in March and 145 percent in June.

And a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program compared FBI data on gun background checks to gun violence data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, finding a nearly 8 percent increase in gun violence over expected levels from March through May 2020. This study hasn’t yet been peer reviewed, but if it’s accurate, that’s 776 additional fatal and nonfatal injuries, not including suicides and accidents.

This surge in gun sales during the pandemic has meant that an already brittle background check system is getting overloaded, causing massive delays, according to Brauer. He compared background checks to a drainage system that backs up during a big storm. “There’s a massive flow of rainwater, and the systems can’t handle it,” he said.

The FBI, however, disputed that characterization in a statement to FiveThirtyEight.

Holly Morris, a spokesperson for the bureau, said the agency hasn’t found a relationship between the rise in the share of delayed background checks and the increased volume of requests. “The influx in the percentage of delayed transactions and any extended processing times can be attributed to a number of variables,” Morris wrote via email, adding that staffing levels for the background check system have remained the same throughout the pandemic.

There are signs that the influx in gun sales might not be slowing anytime soon. The initial spikes in gun sales in March lined up closely with events related to the pandemic, including Feb. 26, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first confirmed that the virus was spreading within the U.S. and not just being brought back by travelers, and Trump’s national emergency declaration on March 13. But as the pandemic has worn on, the reasoning driving the spike in gun sales has changed, too. By the time gun sales soared even higher in June, research suggests it was no longer the coronavirus on buyers’ minds but the protests over the police killing of George Floyd.

Phillip Levine and Robin McKnight of Wellesley College compared the FBI’s state-by-state background check data with data on Google searches for the N-word to see if states with more searches for the racist slur saw a larger increase in gun sales. They found what Levine described as a “modest correlation” in June, suggesting that at least some of those sales were driven by concerns over Black Lives Matter protests.

“As the pandemic settled down, gun sales settled down too, until it got to June,” Levine said in an interview. “In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, there was another very dramatic spike.”

It’s hard to know how gun sales in the U.S. will continue to progress, as we don’t yet have data for July. The data released to FiveThirtyEight did not include June, but less-detailed data the FBI published online shows that last month the agency ran more background checks than any other month on record. And, of course, sales rose in 2016 in part over fears that Hillary Clinton would take the White House and impose new gun regulations, so with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden ahead in the polls, another surge in gun sales may not be far behind. Not to mention that another surge in coronavirus cases could again drive a spike in sales like the one we saw in March.

Whatever happens, more gun sales will likely mean more delays — potentially putting guns into the hands of people who can’t legally own one.

Confidence Interval: Will Biden Choose Kamala Harris As His VP?

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 14:57:48 GMT

Welcome to another episode of Confidence Interval, where we make a persuasive case for a hot take … and then reveal how confident we really feel about the idea. This time, elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich argues that Joe Biden will pick Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate.

The Players To Watch On The NBA Teams Just Trying To Hang Around

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 13:00:48 GMT

Twelve NBA teams have already clinched their place in this year’s playoff field, but 10 others made the trip to the league’s Orlando bubble with the hopes of playing their way into the four remaining unfilled spots. Some of those bids have a better chance than others; for instance, our prediction model thinks the Dallas Mavericks and Orlando Magic have effectively zero chance of missing the playoffs, no matter how the restart goes. For the other eight teams, though, there are at least some stakes in the prelude to the postseason, even if they’re mostly along for the ride.

[Related: Our NBA Predictions]

With that in mind, let’s highlight the players on those eight clubs — the Brooklyn Nets, Memphis Grizzlies, New Orleans Pelicans, Phoenix Suns, Portland Trail Blazers, Sacramento Kings, San Antonio Spurs and Washington Wizards — who rate highest this season according to our RAPTOR player ratings ⁶ and who might have the biggest impact on the pre-playoff bubble action.

Damian Lillard

PG, Portland Trail Blazers

RAPTOR plus/minus: +5.9 points/100 possessions
Team playoff odds: 12 percent

Will the restart be Dame Time? RAPTOR thinks Lillard is the best player among all the playoff hopefuls,⁷ after yet another outstanding season that saw him rank sixth among all NBA players in RAPTOR wins above replacement (WAR). Despite maintaining a usage rate north of 30 percent, Lillard also set a new career high in true shooting percentage — 61.9 percent — thanks in large part to his glossy conversion rates from 2-point (51.8 percent) and 3-point (39.4 percent) range. Add in a career-best assist rate of 34.1 percent, and Dame is an incredible offensive machine, even if RAPTOR considers his defense (-2.0 points/100) subpar. Lillard has been hobbled in practice with a foot injury, but reports are that he should be ready when the real games tip off — essential news for an offensive-minded Portland team trying to gun its way into the postseason.

Other Blazers to watch: C Hassan Whiteside (+3.2 RAPTOR); SG CJ McCollum (+1.4)

Jrue Holiday

SG, New Orleans Pelicans

RAPTOR plus/minus: +4.8 points/100 possessions
Team playoff odds: 45 percent

What, were you expecting Zion Williamson here? It’s true that Zion has been a revelation for the Pelicans since his debut on Jan. 22, posting a RAPTOR of +2.4 points/100 in 19 games. But the rookie might not hit the ground running in the restart; he hasn’t been practicing with his team over the past few weeks because of a family emergency (though he has now cleared quarantine in the bubble). And besides, Holiday has been better according to RAPTOR anyway, with a +4.8 rating per 100. That might be surprising, but Holiday has rated better than +4.0 per 100 in each of the past three seasons, making him one of the more underappreciated two-way players in the league. Only four players this season⁸ — Giannis Antetokounmpo, Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard and Holiday — have a RAPTOR offensive and defensive rating of at least +2.0 points/100. And that might actually understate the breadth of Holiday’s contributions, between his mix of efficient shooting from the field,⁹ low-turnover playmaking and disruptive perimeter defense. Without question, the Pels need Williamson at his best to crash the playoff party, but they also need Holiday to keep up his quiet brand of all-around excellence in order to have a chance.

Other Pelicans to watch: C Derrick Favors (+3.4 RAPTOR); PF Zion Williamson (+2.4); F Brandon Ingram (+1.1)

Patty Mills

PG, San Antonio Spurs

RAPTOR plus/minus: +3.5 points/100 possessions
Team playoff odds: <1 percent

Mills doesn’t even start for San Antonio — in 63 games, his lone appearance in the opening lineup came in late November. But he has still managed to make his presence felt this season, leading San Antonio in RAPTOR WAR (4.6) despite coming off the bench. Mills has long been an unsung player for the Spurs, dating back to their dynasty days. But at age 31, the creaky veteran still scores plenty (18.5 points/36 minutes), knocking down nearly 150 3-pointers this year (at a 38 percent clip) while almost never giving the ball away (7.6 percent turnover rate). The Spurs have little chance to make the playoffs, sitting four games out of the West’s No. 8 seed with four teams ahead of them and highly paid big man LaMarcus Aldridge out for the year. But they are a markedly better team with Mills on the court, evidence of his value even in a down year for coach Gregg Popovich’s crew.

Other Spurs to watch: C Jakob Poeltl (+3.3 RAPTOR); SG Derrick White (+2.6); SF DeMar DeRozan (+0.1)

Jonas Valančiūnas

C, Memphis Grizzlies

RAPTOR plus/minus: +2.7 points/100 possessions
Team playoff odds: 34 percent

Guard Ja Morant has had a fine debut season (1.8 WAR) and is overwhelmingly likely to win Rookie of the Year honors, but the No. 2 pick in last year’s draft was not RAPTOR’s pick as the best Grizzly of 2019-20. That distinction goes to Valančiūnas, who’s enjoying an outstanding year in his second season with Memphis, posting a career-high +2.7 RAPTOR (including a +2.2 mark on defense). Valančiūnas has been at his hyper-efficient best all season, ranking 12th in the league in effective field-goal percentage while averaging 14.9 points and 11.2 rebounds per game and playing tough D. According to Basketball-Reference.com, Memphis’s defense allowed 109.2 points/100 with Valančiūnas on the court, 3.0 points/100 fewer than when he sat — a big part of why Memphis is even here. (Its defense is exactly average, while its offense has been 1 point/100 worse than the league norm.) Valančiūnas has looked good in warmup games, so watch for more efficient play from him if the Grizz are going to hang onto the eighth seed in the West.

Other Grizzlies to watch: PG De’Anthony Melton (+2.5 RAPTOR); C Gorgui Dieng (+2.3); PF Brandon Clarke (+1.2); PG Ja Morant (-0.8)

Jarrett Allen

C, Brooklyn Nets

RAPTOR plus/minus: +1.9 points/100 possessions
Team playoff odds: 95 percent

The Nets have been absolutely devastated by injuries, opt-outs and COVID-19 diagnoses, costing them Kyrie Irving, Spencer Dinwiddie, DeAndre Jordan, Taurean Prince and Wilson Chandler, among others. However, Brooklyn does have a couple of solid RAPTOR-rated starters left over in Allen (+1.9) and guard Caris LeVert (+1.3), plus a six-game buffer to work with over the No. 9 Washington Wizards to avoid being in danger of missing the playoffs. The 22-year-old Allen has been one of the most improved players in the NBA this season, following up a dreadful -4.3 RAPTOR in the 2018-19 regular season to post a rating 6.2 points/100 better this year. The improvement came mostly on defense, where Allen went from -2.8 to +2.5 points/100, with much better numbers in our player-tracking measures like shot defense and opposing matchup performance. Allen’s offense is still negative (-0.6 points/100), but he did improve his true shooting percentage, turnover rate, offensive rebound rate and fouls drawn per 100 shots this season. In tandem with LeVert’s scoring and passing skills and forward Joe Harris’s shooting, Allen leaves the Nets with at least some productive options in the bubble going forward.

Other Nets to watch: SG Caris LeVert (+1.3 RAPTOR); SF Joe Harris (-0.5)

Ricky Rubio

PG, Phoenix Suns

RAPTOR plus/minus: +1.8 points/100 possessions
Team playoff odds: <1 percent

The Suns have a good ensemble cast of starters, so a few of them could make a case as Phoenix’s player to watch. But the team’s best RAPTOR rating (+1.8) belongs to Rubio, whose arrival via free agency last summer helped the Suns improve enough to even be in this position. With Rubio on the court, the Suns score 6.7 more points/100 than when he sits, and they allow 3.3 fewer points/100 — meaning Phoenix’s overall performance is about 10 points/100 better when Rubio is in the game. Why? Rubio has great chemistry with running mates Devin Booker and Kelly Oubre Jr. — two strong scorers — because he is such a good facilitator, leading the team in assist rate (39.9 percent), and his ability to draw fouls makes him an efficient fallback option on offense. Defensively, Rubio’s RAPTOR has slipped some this year (from +1.2 last regular season to +0.1 points/100), but he still ranks among the league leaders in steal rate (2.3 percent), long one of the “hidden” ways Rubio’s value exceeds his reputation.

Other Suns to watch: SF Mikal Bridges (+1.7 RAPTOR); SG Devin Booker (+1.0); C Deandre Ayton (+0.8); SF Kelly Oubre Jr. — if healthy (+0.6)

Richaun Holmes

C, Sacramento Kings

RAPTOR plus/minus: +1.5 points/100 possessions
Team playoff odds: 9 percent

Holmes isn’t exactly a household name,¹⁰ but in the restart, he’ll lead a crop of six Kings who have played at least 1,000 minutes with a positive RAPTOR this season. Holmes had spent the previous four years of his NBA career carving out a niche as a shot-blocking big man with good finishing ability around the rim, but this year he’s upgraded his rating from -1.3 to +1.5 points/100 — a huge improvement. Fueling the change has been a career-best true shooting percentage (fifth-best in the league) and slightly expanded shooting range, plus improved defensive numbers in terms of both RAPTOR’s on-versus-off court and player-tracking categories. Before the season was put on hold, Holmes had just returned from an injury that sidelined him from early January into March; now he should be one of the best-kept secrets of the playoff chase, even if his Kings are up against long odds to snag the No. 8 seed and extend their season.

Other Kings to watch: PF Nemanja Bjelica (+0.8 RAPTOR); PG De’Aaron Fox (+0.6); SG Bogdan Bogdanovic (+0.3); SG Buddy Hield (+0.2)

Isaac Bonga

SF, Washington Wizards

RAPTOR plus/minus: +1.2 points/100 possessions
Team playoff odds: 5 percent

With high-scoring guard Bradley Beal (+1.5 RAPTOR) sitting with a shoulder injury and efficient forward Dāvis Bertāns (+2.4) opting out of the bubble,¹¹ the Wizards are running low on decently rated players for the restart. According to RAPTOR, their only above-average guys left are center Moritz Wagner (+0.6), who has logged just 707 minutes this season, and Bonga (+1.2), who may prove to be Washington’s under-the-radar MVP if it manages to overcome the Nets or Magic to make the playoffs. Bonga doesn’t produce big numbers; he’s averaging just 4.6 points per game this season. But he is efficient with what chances he gets — producing 121.4 points per 100 possessions he personally ends — and he’s been stellar when he gets corner threes, on which he’s gone 11-for-23 this season. On defense, Bonga creates havoc with both steals and blocks, and the Wizards play more like a competent NBA defense with him on the court, a huge bonus for the league’s worst defensive team.

Other Wizards to watch: C Moritz Wagner (+0.6 RAPTOR); PG Shabazz Napier (-0.1); C Ian Mahinmi (-0.1)

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What Trump Could Learn From NASCAR

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 10:00:24 GMT

NASCAR is niche. A recent Morning Consult survey of the sport’s fans found that they’re much more male, white and Southern than other sports fans are. It’s a subculture status that some fans have relished but which NASCAR itself seems eager to shake — in the last two years, its TV ratings bottomed out after peaking in the mid-2000s, according to SportsBusiness Journal. They’ve declined for six years running, in fact. Since the mid-aughts, the sport has actively sought to expand its fan base — seeking race venues outside the South, for example — and in doing so, sometimes drawing the ire of its core fans. “We believe strongly that the old Southeastern redneck heritage that we had is no longer in existence. But we also realize that there’s going to have to be an effort on our part to convince others to understand that,” then-NASCAR President Mike Helton said in 2006.

Like so many institutions in American life, the sport was grappling with what its place would be in a more diverse county and culture.

So when the NASCAR Cup Series’ only Black driver, Bubba Wallace, called for a ban of the Confederate flag earlier this summer, saying “No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race,” NASCAR readily complied. It had already formally asked fans to stop bringing the flags to events in 2015 following the murders of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., by a white supremacist. President Trump weighed in on NASCAR’s decision, tweeting that its flag ban was to blame for its “lowest ratings EVER!” (ratings are actually up following the flag ban).

But according to the Morning Consult survey from June, 44 percent of NASCAR fans agree with the president and said that fans should be allowed to bring the flag to races. Only 30 percent were fine with the ban. And at NASCAR races in June and July, Confederate flags reappeared. Not in the stands, but high above them; a group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans rented planes to fly the flag over the racetracks. The group’s leader, Paul Gramling Jr., told the Columbia Daily Herald that “The Sons of Confederate Veterans is proud of the diversity of the Confederate military and our modern Southland. We believe NASCAR’s slandering of our Southern heritage only further divides our nation.”

Gramling’s statement about the “diversity” of the Confederate army and his use of the term “modern Southland” speak volumes. Enslaved men were conscripted as soldiers and servants in the Confederate Army — they were hardly volunteers for the Southern cause — and Gramling’s “Southland” conjures the image of a cohesive nation, as if the Confederacy, which existed for less than five years, had not been decimated long ago.

The SCV and NASCAR’s oblique tussling might seem like a fringe issue in an election year when a pandemic and an economic crisis imperil millions of lives, but their divergent visions of what the culture of the American South is — who it’s for and of — embodies much about the political and cultural climate in which we find ourselves. Trump and NASCAR are in similar positions: overly reliant on a slowly shrinking, mostly white base. NASCAR is trying to expand its audience in order to stay relevant; Trump is not. The sport has realized something that the president can’t seem to grasp, which is that overt shows of racism turn most Americans off.

Electoral politics has played a role in normalizing on a national level the kind of neo-Confederate views that the SCV — and Trump — have condoned and promoted in recent weeks. You don’t have to have grown up in the American South to have thought that the Confederate flag was inextricably tied to what the SCV calls “Southern heritage,” but which really means a particular slice of Southern white culture. Going back decades, blocks of white votes in the South have been courted aggressively by non-Southerners who have played to the culture that has grown around these symbols and a particular nostalgic language about the Confederate past. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan, a California governor of Illinois birth, appeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi — where Freedom Rider activists were famously murdered in 1964 — and gave a speech about “states’ rights,” which was read by many as euphemistic in the most loaded way possible, given the context of the place. The country had gotten comfortable with delicate work-arounds like that — the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights. For decades, parts of the country have tolerated a semantic category that blandly normalized a strain of white resentment at the Confederate defeat. Sometimes the language is more blunt, of course: the War of Northern Aggression, “the South will rise again” or “It’s only halftime.”

According to the 2010 census, 55 percent of the country’s Black population live in the South. While the region is still nearly 60 percent white, its Black and Hispanic populations are significant, and while traditionally rural, diverse, growing cities like Atlanta and Charlotte have become important business hubs. North Carolina’s Research Triangle region boasts the sort of academic power and national draw often associated with the Northeast Corridor’s Ivy League. NASCAR’s bid to diversify, geographically and otherwise, is in keeping with the modern South’s changes.

But strong vestiges of the racist Confederacy have held on in the region. Mississippi removed the Confederate stars and bars from its state flag only last month, becoming the last state in the Union to do so. While the majority of Americans — 52 percent — favored the removal of Confederate statues from public spaces, according to a Quinnipiac University survey from June, 52 percent of those from the South opposed removal, the only region of the country where a majority supported keeping the statues.

In the midst of a floundering campaign, Trump grasped onto Southern white culture — that particular strain of it — as a way to pull his head above water. A large base of his support does indeed lie in the South, as has been the case for all recent Republican presidential candidates; Bill Clinton won Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia in 1996, but no Democrat has since. Trump ran a race-baiting campaign in 2016, and his 2020 campaign has continued to play on long-standing tropes of racial fear, like violent “liberal Democrat” cities. Ironically, his use of federal law enforcement officers in Portland, Ore., is about as far from states’ rights as you can get.

But Trump seems to be speaking to the SCV types and not the more “mainstream” white voters he actually needs to win. The SCV, for what it’s worth, is more than the “historical, patriotic, and non-political organization” that its website says it is. Its branches have donated to Republican politicians and it controversially purchased the Silent Sam Confederate statue that was torn down at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In other words, the group is representative of the types of (white) voters who are Trump’s ride-or-dies.

But Trump has misjudged — or refuses to see — that much of white America is changing how it thinks about racial issues. A Monmouth University survey from June found that 49 percent of white Americans thought police were more likely to use excessive force against a Black person, up from only 25 percent in 2016. A Morning Consult poll from May and June of this year found that 49 percent of white Americans supported the protests unfolding across the country, and 54 percent of suburbanites supported them (white people are the majority in 90 percent of America’s suburban counties, according to Pew Research Center).

Someone seems to have leaned into Trump’s ear and told him he needs these white suburbanites in order to have a fighting chance of winning in November. Last week, he called on “The Suburban Housewives of America” — as if harkening to a membership organization from 1955 — and said that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden would “destroy” their American dream by promoting affordable housing for all in the suburbs. In Trump’s framing, by hoping to diversify the suburbs, Biden would destroy the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” A majority of Americans in a Pew survey conducted in 2019 said Trump had made race relations in the country worse, and while white, Black and Hispanic people still differ in their views on racial issues, it’s clear that recent events have brought greater racial awareness to the forefront of white Americans’ minds.

Republicans are increasingly worried about Trump losing a state like Ohio — once thought solidly in Trump’s camp — in large part because of the president’s diminishing support in suburban areas. (I wrote at length about this Ohio suburban phenomenon back in 2019.) His embrace of the racist totems of the white South — which large swaths of the white South itself eschews — could now potentially cost Trump with the Midwestern or Northeastern (whatever you want to call Pennsylvania) voters he needs to hold onto in order to win.

Trump, a New York City-born pol who doesn’t quite seem to “get” the ‘burbs — and has never been a particularly subtle political thinker or communicator — crucially misunderstood that the muscular Southern racism the Confederate flag has long represented doesn’t work in the white suburban realms of respectability anymore. That cohort — Republican and Democratic — absorbs and displays its biases more mutedly in 2020. Trump, who came to political power riding a wave of racist conspiracy theory — it was only fair to ask questions about whether the first Black president was actually American, wasn’t it? — now suddenly seems ill-equipped for the political times.

He forgot that most of the country requires a modicum of plausible deniability in its dog whistles.

How The NHL’s New Format Changed The Stanley Cup Race

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 15:02:32 GMT

On Saturday, the NHL joins the ranks of sports returning to action, with 24 teams plotting out one of the strangest paths to the Stanley Cup in hockey history.

Like the NBA, the NHL season will restart in a “bubble,” with early games split between two “hub” sites: Toronto (for the Eastern Conference) and Edmonton (for the West). Also like its basketball-playing cousins, hockey will have a bit of a convoluted format upon its return. Each conference’s top four teams¹ will play a round-robin tournament (under regular-season rules) for playoff seeding, while the other eight teams from each conference have a best-of-five series (under playoff rules) to determine who reaches the Round of 16.

From there, though, the playoffs will look roughly the same as usual, aside from reseeding after every round and a lack of crowds or home-ice advantage — which isn’t worth much in hockey anyway — for anyone except the Maple Leafs and Oilers.² So with the playoffs set to begin, I wanted to see how much the Stanley Cup picture has changed since the last time players took the ice, on March 11. Using Hockey-Reference.com’s Simple Rating System (SRS) for each team — and a set of logistic regressions relating SRS to win probabilities for games under rules for both the regular season and the postseason³ — I programmed 10,000 simulations for the rest of the season and playoffs under two scenarios: if the season had played out as planned back in March and under the current expanded format.⁴

Before the break, the Stanley Cup favorites (according to SRS) were the Boston Bruins (13 percent), Colorado Avalanche (12 percent), Tampa Bay Lightning (11 percent), St. Louis Blues (9 percent), Philadelphia Flyers (8 percent), Washington Capitals (7 percent) and Vegas Golden Knights (6 percent). Under the new system, those seven are still the front-runners, with essentially the same odds — except Boston dropped to 12 percent and Tampa Bay moved up to 12 percent. So in that sense, the big picture of the playoffs hasn’t changed much.

Cup favorites, then and now

Most likely 2019-20 NHL champions under original* and new playoff systems

Original System			New System
Rk	Team	Prob.	Rk	Team	Prob.
1	Boston Bruins	12.6%	1	Boston Bruins	12.2%
2	Colorado Avalanche	12.0	2	Tampa Bay Lightning	12.1
3	Tampa Bay Lightning	11.2	3	Colorado Avalanche	12.0
4	St. Louis Blues	8.8	4	St. Louis Blues	8.7
5	Philadelphia Flyers	7.8	5	Philadelphia Flyers	8.2
6	Washington Capitals	6.8	6	Washington Capitals	6.9
7	Vegas Golden Knights	5.8	7	Vegas Golden Knights	5.5
8	Pittsburgh Penguins	5.7	8	Dallas Stars	4.3
9	Carolina Hurricanes	5.0	9	Pittsburgh Penguins	3.4
10	Vancouver Canucks	3.6	10	Carolina Hurricanes	3.3
11	Edmonton Oilers	3.6	11	Edmonton Oilers	3.2
12	Dallas Stars	3.4	12	Winnipeg Jets	2.4

However, some teams have seen their title probabilities nudged up or down by a percentage point or two. The Arizona Coyotes (whose Cup chances rose by 1.3 percentage points) and New York Rangers (up 0.8 points) saw their odds increase because both are reasonably good teams by SRS — each ranks in the league’s top half — that had relatively long playoff odds beforehand, but now can potentially do damage in the expanded bracket. Others, such as the Montreal Canadiens and Chicago Blackhawks, watched their Cup odds go up mainly because they had next to no shot at making the playoffs under the standard system; now, the qualifying series gives each a fighting chance. And the Dallas Stars’ probability went up because they are the fourth seed in the West — meaning they can avoid the qualifying round entirely and skip straight to the Round of 16, despite ranking among the league’s bottom half in SRS.

How did Cup odds shift under the new playoff format?

For playoff-bound NHL teams, biggest change in 2019-20 championship odds since play ceased on March 11

	Stanley Cup Odds
Team	Normal System	Current System	Change
Arizona Coyotes	0.7%	2.0%	+1.3
Chicago Blackhawks	<0.1	1.3	1.3
Tampa Bay Lightning	11.2	12.1	0.9
Dallas Stars	3.4	4.3	0.9
New York Rangers	0.5	1.4	0.8
Montreal Canadiens	<0.1	0.7	0.7
Columbus Blue Jackets	0.3	0.9	0.6
Philadelphia Flyers	7.8	8.2	0.4
Minnesota Wild	1.2	1.6	0.4
Nashville Predators	1.3	1.6	0.4
Florida Panthers	1.2	1.3	0.1
Washington Capitals	6.8	6.9	0.1
New York Islanders	1.3	1.4	0.1
Toronto Maple Leafs	2.3	2.3	0.0
Colorado Avalanche	12.0	12.0	0.0
St. Louis Blues	8.8	8.7	0.0
Vegas Golden Knights	5.8	5.5	-0.3
Edmonton Oilers	3.6	3.2	-0.4
Boston Bruins	12.6	12.2	-0.4
Winnipeg Jets	2.8	2.4	-0.5
Calgary Flames	1.8	1.2	-0.6
Vancouver Canucks	3.6	2.0	-1.6
Carolina Hurricanes	5.0	3.3	-1.7
Pittsburgh Penguins	5.7	3.4	-2.3

That somewhat arbitrary cutoff between the top four seeds and the rest of the conference could prove consequential for several teams. As an example, the Pittsburgh Penguins rank eighth in SRS and possess plenty of star power — when healthy — but also finished 3 points behind the rival Flyers for the fourth-best record in the East. That means Pittsburgh must play an extra series — with just a 59 percent chance of winning it — to even make it into the Round of 16, despite having a 98 percent chance to get that far before the pause. Even though the Pens will play the Canadiens, who are tied with the Columbus Blue Jackets for the lowest SRS of any team in the restart field, Pittsburgh is a clear victim of the NHL’s modified playoff system.

Whose playoff odds improved under the new format?

For restart-bound NHL teams, biggest change in odds of making the Round of 16 since play ceased on March 11

	Odds to Make Round of 16
Team	Normal System	Current System	Change
Chicago Blackhawks	2.4%	44.8%	+42.5
Montreal Canadiens	<0.1	41.0	+40.9
Arizona Coyotes	19.4	52.1	+32.7
New York Rangers	17.9	44.4	+26.5
Columbus Blue Jackets	17.6	42.7	+25.1
Florida Panthers	41.5	50.8	+9.3
Minnesota Wild	42.8	48.0	+5.2
Dallas Stars	96.7	✓	+3.3
Vegas Golden Knights	99.4	✓	+0.6
Philadelphia Flyers	>99.9	✓	+0.0
Washington Capitals	>99.9	✓	+0.0
Boston Bruins	>99.9	✓	+0.0
Colorado Avalanche	>99.9	✓	+0.0
Tampa Bay Lightning	>99.9	✓	+0.0
St. Louis Blues	>99.9	✓	+0.0
Nashville Predators	48.1	47.9	-0.2
Winnipeg Jets	63.3	54.7	-8.6
New York Islanders	58.2	49.2	-9.1
Calgary Flames	58.9	45.3	-13.6
Toronto Maple Leafs	76.7	57.3	-19.4
Vancouver Canucks	75.1	52.0	-23.1
Carolina Hurricanes	90.0	55.6	-34.4
Edmonton Oilers	93.9	55.2	-38.7
Pittsburgh Penguins	98.1	59.0	-39.0

The same goes for the Oilers, Hurricanes and a number of other teams that had high postseason odds under the old system, but now — by virtue of missing out on the top four seeds in the conference — will need to win a best-of-five series just to get into the usual playoff bracket. (The good news? All three of those teams — Edmonton, Carolina and Pittsburgh — would see their Cup odds double if they do survive the qualifying round.)

This effect could also hurt Canadian teams’ chances of winning the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1993. Although Montreal was among the biggest beneficiaries of the amended format, Canada’s other postseason entries all saw their odds of mounting a deep playoff run drop, some significantly. (This despite Canada hosting the entire restart, with two of its teams — Toronto and Edmonton — having at least some extra familiarity by playing in their home facilities.) Overall, the six Canadian teams in the restart — sorry, Ottawa — are, on average, 10 percentage points less likely to make the Round of 16, 5 percentage points less likely to make the conference semifinals, 3 percentage points less likely to make the conference finals and 1 percentage point less likely to make the Cup Final now than if the season had been allowed to play out normally.⁵

If you’re not a fan of one of the teams hurt by the change in format, though, these playoffs should be as exciting and compelling as ever. Can the defending-champion Blues keep beating the odds? Can the Bruins avenge last year’s Game 7 defeat? Can the Lightning find redemption after their historic 2019 collapse? Or will one of the nonfavorites crash the party, because it’s hockey? All of those storylines are why, despite months of waiting and a byzantine new playoff format (as per the NHL’s typical style), the battle for the 2020 Cup still promises to be a good one.