How Consistent Was Every Premier League Lineup This Season?What our newest metric STABLE can tell us about Arsenal’s surprising title challenge — and Chelsea’s face-plant.

By Ryan Best

Before the 2022-23 Premier League campaign kicked off, there was a buzz around St. James’ Park that hadn’t been felt in quite some time: optimism. After years of bottom-half finishes, relegation scraps and mediocrity, it finally felt like Newcastle United was building a team its fans could believe in.1 Driven by a cohesive and formidable defensive unit — a four-man back line and goalkeeper2 who have played more than 77 percent of the season’s minutes together[a]3 — the Magpies more than delivered, blowing away their most bullish expectations to be fighting for a top-four finish and a place in next year’s Champions League[b].

To evaluate the consistency of Newcastle’s squad, along with every other Premier League team this season, we created a new metric called STABLE (Similarity of Teams And Balance of Lineups across Every match) that tells us how similar each team looked every time it took the pitch. A team whose starting lineups and substitutions stayed exactly the same for every match would have a STABLE score of 100 percent, while a team that switches its entire lineup from one match to the next would earn a 0 percent. Looking at a team’s season through this lens, especially in comparison to its performance on the pitch, can tell us something about its cohesiveness (see, for instance, Newcastle’s stalwart defensive back line), strategy (like Pep Guardiola’s constant rotation of Manchester City’s starting 11) and luck (yet another injury-riddled Liverpool season).

Consistency has put Arsenal and Newcastle ahead of schedule, with Chelsea lagging way behind

Points earned per match relative to FiveThirtyEight’s preseason forecast and STABLE score for Premier League teams in the 2022-23 season

70%75%80%85%+0.5EVEN-0.5Points per matchvs. preseason forecastSTABLE score▲ OVERPERFORMERSMORE CONSISTENT SQUADS▲▲ OVERPERFORMERSMORE CONSISTENT SQUADS▲

The two most consistent teams this season by STABLE, Arsenal and Newcastle, just so happened to be the two biggest overperformers, based on actual points earned per match versus predicted points per match from our preseason forecast. But there isn’t actually a tidy relationship between consistency and success.4 Teams can have relatively steady squads that drop points match after match (sorry, Everton supporters). And there are many reasons clubs find themselves on the inconsistent end of the STABLE spectrum. For the richest clubs with deep rosters, inconsistency can be more of a feature than a bug. Ever-changing lineups can also point to a team devoid of any cohesiveness, struggling to establish who its best squad really is — or a team that simply suffered lots of injuries and bad luck. And in the worst-case scenario, it can signal all these at once (here’s looking at you, Chelsea).

But while we can’t just look at a team’s STABLE metric and see evidence of a good or bad year, it can still tell a story. By visualizing each team’s lineup throughout the year, we created a unique fingerprint for each club that offers nuanced detail about a team’s identity and its season.

Which Premier League teams were the most consistent?

STABLE score and match-by-match squads for Premier League teams in the 2022-23 season

HOW TO READ THISEach column is a match …… each row is a player …… combined to make a fingerprint of every minute in a club’s seasonEvery player minute on the pitch is colored in, and every minute on the bench is grayed outThe most consistent teams stay the same from match to matchArsenal86.6%STABLENewcastle85.5%STABLEEverton84.3%STABLEBrighton83.2%STABLEAston Villa82.9%STABLEC Palace82.6%STABLEFulham82.2%STABLEBrentford81.2%STABLELeeds80.7%STABLETottenham80.2%STABLEBournemouth79.9%STABLELeicester79.5%STABLEWolves79.5%STABLENottm Forest79.0%STABLEMan United78.4%STABLEWest Ham78.2%STABLELiverpool76.7%STABLESouthampton76.2%STABLEMan City74.1%STABLEChelsea67.6%STABLEJump to explore your club

Let’s zoom into a few of these charts to take a closer look at what these fingerprints can tell us about specific squads and players this year. First up is Arsenal, whose consistency helped the Gunners outperform expectations and mount a surprising (but failed) title challenge.

Arsenal86.6%STABLEAaron RamsdaleGKGabrielDEFBukayo SakaMIDMartin ØdegaardMIDBen WhiteDEFGranit XhakaMIDGabriel MartinelliFWDWilliam SalibaDEFThomas ParteyMIDOleksandr ZinchenkoMIDGabriel JesusFWDEddie NketiahFWDLeandro TrossardFWDKieran TierneyDEFJorginhoMIDTakehiro TomiyasuDEFRob HoldingDEFFabio VieiraMIDJakub KiwiorDEFA. LokongaMIDReiss NelsonFWDEmile Smith RoweMIDMohamed ElnenyMIDCédric SoaresDEFMarquinhosFWDEthan NwaneriMID

Arsenal Football Club entered the season aiming to earn a top-four spot and return to the Champions League after six years away. So while ending such a promising season without a trophy after spending almost the whole campaign at the top of the table will be brutally disappointing for the Gunners, any reasonable supporter5 would’ve given you a resounding “yes” if you asked them at the beginning of the season if they would take a second-place finish.

Much of their reemergence can be attributed to a sense of stability and identity Mikel Arteta has developed within a tight, cohesive nucleus of young and talented players. Goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale and center back Gabriel have only missed a combined 11 minutes[c] across all Premier League competitions.6 Starboy winger Bukayo Saka has been an almost permanent fixture in Arsenal’s front line and has developed into one of the league’s best playmakers — he is the only player to register double-digit goals and assists[d][e] in the Premier League this season. And captain Martin Ødegaard has shown remarkable leadership, calm and dynamism in the ever-important midfield. In the 37 matches Arsenal has played so far, Arteta has used only 20 unique starting 11s, tied with Newcastle for the lowest figure in the league[f].

The biggest shake-ups to Arsenal lineups have come through injury — most notably to striker Gabriel Jesus, who missed 12 matches after sustaining a knee injury during the World Cup, and center back William Saliba, who has been out since suffering a back injury on March 16. Arteta employed a next-man-up approach to steady the ship, slotting Eddie Nketiah and Rob Holding in the starting 11 for long stretches,7 minimizing the impact on Arsenal’s STABLE score. Arsenal will probably need to upgrade their roster and build depth over the summer if they want to challenge for trophies next season, but their small and close-knit squad has outpaced expectations this year.

Manchester City74.1%STABLEEdersonGKRodriMIDErling HaalandFWDKevin De BruyneMIDManuel AkanjiDEFIlkay GündoganMIDBernardo SilvaMIDJack GrealishMIDRúben DiasDEFNathan AkéDEFKyle WalkerDEFJohn StonesDEFRiyad MahrezFWDPhil FodenMIDJulián ÁlvarezFWDJoão CanceloDEFAymeric LaporteDEFRico LewisDEFSergio GómezMIDCole PalmerMIDKalvin PhillipsMIDStefan OrtegaGKMáximo PerroneMID

Manchester City are top of the Premier League once again, having already clinched their fifth title in six years after spending the vast majority of the season behind Arsenal.8 City goes into the [g]last match of the season with the league’s second-lowest STABLE score, at the opposite end of the spectrum as the Gunners. Their lack of consistency is a concerted strategy by manager Pep Guardiola, who constantly rotates lineups from one match to the next — so much so that fans refer to the challenge of predicting his starting lineup as “Pep roulette.” In 37 Premier League matches this season, Pep has used 36 unique starting 11s[h][i][j].

Manchester City have the luxury to use fluid, ever-changing lineups because of their incredibly deep roster of all-world talent. Seemingly endless wealth from Emirati owner Sheikh Mansour and years of sustained success have made City an attractive destination for star players looking to win at the highest level, most recently Jack Grealish and Erling Haaland. Pep moves players who would be regular starters at pretty much any other Premier League club to and from his bench as he sees fit, keeping them fresh for future matches while keeping opposing tacticians guessing. We’ll see if this strategy finally pays off in Europe as City go for their first Champions League win against Inter Milan, but it’s been a well-oiled machine domestically as the Cityzens have established themselves as a Premier League juggernaut.

Newcastle United85.5%STABLENick PopeGKKieran TrippierDEFFabian SchärDEFDan BurnDEFSven BotmanDEFJoelintonFWDJoe WillockMIDBruno GuimarãesMIDSean LongstaffMIDMiguel AlmirónMIDCallum WilsonFWDAlexander IsakFWDJacob MurphyMIDAllan Saint-MaximinFWDMatt TargettDEFChris WoodFWDAnthony GordonFWDRyan FraserMIDElliot AndersonMIDJamaal LascellesDEFMartin DúbravkaGKMatt RitchieMIDJonjo ShelveyMIDJavier ManquilloDEFJamal LewisDEFEmil KrafthDEF

If you’re a Newcastle United supporter, 2022-23 was about as close to a dream season as you could’ve hoped for. Finishing top-four and qualifying for the Champions League[k] is a massive achievement for the Magpies, who hadn’t finished higher than 10th in the Premier League table since the 2011-12 competition[l] (and had even suffered relegation in the 2015-16 season). Newcastle’s overperformance boils down to three main factors: money, player development and defense. Saudi Arabian ownership has flushed Newcastle with cash and they’ve used it adeptly, bringing in talented players in key positions of need like midfielder Bruno Guimarães and forward Alexander Isak. Manager Eddie Howe and his staff also have found a way to make their existing players so much better, elevating the likes of Joelinton, Miguel Almirón and Sean Longstaff into top-level Premier League players.

Newcastle’s tactical success is founded on their defensive unit, which is one of the best in the league — they’ve conceded the fewest goals of any club[m], allowed the second-fewest expected goals against[n] and are tied for the second-most clean sheets[o]. Their core defensive unit of goalkeeper Nick Pope and defenders Kieran Trippier, Fabian Schär, Dan Burn and Sven Botman have formed a cohesive and formidable back line. It’s become rare to see a Newcastle team without them on the pitch — 29 of the Magpies’ 35 starting lineups this season[p] have included all five of those players.

Chelsea67.6%STABLEKai HavertzMIDKepa ArrizabalagaGKThiago SilvaDEFRaheem SterlingFWDKalidou KoulibalyDEFMateo KovacicMIDMarc CucurellaDEFMason MountMIDRuben Loftus-CheekMIDTrevoh ChalobahDEFConor GallagherMIDBen ChilwellDEFEnzo FernándezMIDCésar AzpilicuetaDEFJorginhoMIDReece JamesDEFWesley FofanaDEFBenoit BadiashileDEFJoão FélixFWDÉdouard MendyGKChristian PulisicMIDHakim ZiyechMIDMykhailo MudrykMIDP. AubameyangFWDN’Golo KantéMIDLewis HallMIDNoni MaduekeFWDDenis ZakariaMIDArmando BrojaFWDCarney ChukwuemekaMIDDavid Datro FofanaFWDOmari HutchinsonMID

Conversely, if you’re a Chelsea supporter, 2022-23 was about as much of a disaster as you could’ve imagined. It’s been arguably the most disappointing season in the club’s history, given its lofty aspirations and record-setting spending. Chelsea had finished outside the top six only once since the 1995-96 season — a blip followed by appointing manager Antonio Conte in 2016 and winning the league the next season. But the Blues come into the last weekend in 12th place, sitting 6 points closer to relegation than they are to the top six, and could fall as low as TKth.

It’s been an unthinkably disjointed first full campaign for the new Chelsea ownership consortium that includes Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly, who have employed four different managers9 and spent an astounding €611 million on 17 new players across the summer and winter transfer windows while failing to address the team’s key needs in the short term, especially in front of goal.

Such a massive influx of players in a short period of time bloated the Chelsea squad to the extent that players reportedly had to change in the hallway, sit on the floor in team meetings and split into separate training sessions. What resulted was a team lacking any semblance of identity or cohesion. Compounded by a number of long-term or lingering injuries affecting key players such as N’Golo Kanté, Reece James, Ben Chilwell, Thiago Silva, Wesley Fofana and Armando Broja (just to name a few), Chelsea never figured out a lineup that worked — in 36 matches, Chelsea have used 36 different[q][r] starting 11s. At this point, Chelsea supporters can do nothing more than be relieved that the team avoided being sent down to the Championship and hope that the team shows any sense of identity or improvement next season under new manager Mauricio Pochettino[s].

Each club’s fingerprint and STABLE score tells its unique story of the 2022-23 season. Explore each team yourself below and see what their match-to-match lineups looked like this season:

PICK A PREMIER LEAGUE TEAMAFC BournemouthArsenalAston VillaBrentfordBrighton & Hove AlbionChelseaCrystal PalaceEvertonFulhamLeeds UnitedLeicester CityLiverpoolManchester CityManchester UnitedNewcastle UnitedNottingham ForestSouthamptonTottenham HotspurWest Ham UnitedWolverhampton Wanderers79.9%STABLEJefferson LermaMIDAdam SmithDEFDominic SolankeFWDPhilip BillingMIDMarcos SenesiDEFNetoGKChris MephamDEFLloyd KellyDEFRyan ChristieMIDMarcus TavernierMIDLewis CookMIDJordan ZemuraDEFKieffer MooreFWDJaidon AnthonyFWDJack StephensDEFDango OuattaraFWDJoe RothwellMIDMark TraversGKRyan FredericksDEFHamed TraorèMIDMatías ViñaDEFJack StaceyDEFBen PearsonMIDAntoine SemenyoFWDIllia ZabarnyiDEFDavid BrooksMIDSiriki DembeleMIDJunior StanislasMIDJamal LoweFWDEmiliano MarcondesFWDOwen BevanDEFMETHODOLOGYTo calculate a team’s STABLE score, we first count how many total minutes each player played in every match and compare that to how many minutes that player played in the club’s previous match.10 We then calculate the sum of the absolute value of the differences between those two minute counts across all players and matches. Then, we divide that sum by the total number of minutes played by all players in a team’s season (90 minutes per match × 11 players × the number of matches a team plays) to yield the percent of a team’s total player-minutes that were inconsistent from match to match.The results of the above calculations give us a number between 0 and 200. To make it easier to interpret, we then scale that figure to fall between 0 and 100 percent. Because STABLE counts when players play either more or fewer minutes than their previous match, and also counts differences for players who might not even be on the pitch in a given match (if they played in the previous match), it can actually double-count inconsistent player minutes. Take, for example, a team who played one set of 11 players a full 90 minutes in one match (“Match 1”) and played a totally different set of 11 players 90 minutes in its next match (“Match 2”). To evaluate the STABLE score of this team in Match 2, we first need to count all the minutes that differed between Match 2 and Match 1 for each player, whether or not they actually played in Match 2. This total would be 1,980 — 90 minutes for all 11 players who played in Match 2 (but not in Match 1), and 90 minutes for all 11 players who played in Match 1 (but not Match 2). Then, we calculate the percent of this team’s player-minutes that were inconsistent from Match 1 to Match 2 by dividing that sum of 1,980 by the 990 minutes played by all players in Match 211 to yield 200 percent. Since we want STABLE to range from 0 percent (completely inconsistent team) to 100 percent (completely consistent team), we need to then divide this percentage by two before finally subtracting it from 100 percent to yield our final STABLE score for a team’s season. In this most extreme example, our team’s STABLE score through two matches of the season would be 0 percent.Starting lineups and bench selections for each Premier League match, along with when any player is put on or taken off the pitch, come from ESPN. Players can be taken off the pitch either because they are subbed off for another player or ejected after receiving a red card or second yellow card. Stoppage time at the end of the first half is included in the 45th minute and stoppage time at the end of the match is included in the 90th minute, so each match contains a total of 90 minutes. Any player subbed on is attributed a minimum of one minute played — players subbed on in stoppage time after the 90th minute log one minute played, and players subbed off after the 90th minute log 89 minutes played.

MLB

Andrew McCutchen Is Hitting It Big Again With The Pirates

By Alex Kirshner

Apr. 26, 2023, at 10:26 AM

A year after Albert Pujols found the fountain of youth and spent his final season setting major league pitching on fire, the old-guy star of the 2023 season hasn’t been a positional contemporary like Joey Votto or Miguel Cabrera. Instead, April’s ultimate veteran revival has belonged to Andrew McCutchen of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Much like Pujols, McCutchen returned to the club that drafted him after experiencing some ups and downs elsewhere. Now that he’s back in Pittsburgh, both McCutchen and his team are turning back the clock and playing their best baseball in years. 

McCutchen was a big star for the Pirates in the early-to-mid-2010s — winning the National League MVP in 2013 — but he spent five years traveling across MLB after Pittsburgh traded him following the 2017 season. McCutchen was a fine player in those years: Bouncing between the San Francisco Giants, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Milwaukee Brewers, he posted a 110 OPS+ from 2018 through 2022, 10 percent better than league average. He also was worth 6.7 wins above replacement, according to Baseball Reference, making him a solid contributor if no longer any kind of star. (The previous seven years, in Pittsburgh, McCutchen had been worth 34.2 WAR, the eighth-most among all hitters.) 

McCutchen, 36, signed a one-year, $5 million free agent deal to return home in January. And when he slipped on a Pirates jersey again, he regained superpowers. McCutchen is hitting for a .270/.371/.527 triple-slash line in his first 89 plate appearances. He has homered five times, while mostly serving as designated hitter and occasionally playing right field — a short jog from the center field he used to patrol with Gold Glove skill at PNC Park. The only 35-or-older hitter with more early-season WAR than McCutchen’s 0.6 is reigning MVP Paul Goldschmidt by a matter of decimal points. The Pirates have played only 24 games, but McCutchen has more or less already paid off in pure WAR-per-dollar terms, producing $5.1 million of value, per FanGraphs.

Of course, McCutchen’s value to the Pirates is more aptly measured in decibel levels when he comes up to bat at PNC Park. He has rapidly reclaimed his old status as the beating heart of baseball in Pittsburgh, a city where he once led the Pirates to their first playoff berth (and winning season) in 21 years: 

The Pirates are 16-8 and have gone from an 8 percent preseason chance to make the playoffs to 24 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Times are good for a franchise that’s lost 100 games (or at a 100-loss pace) three years running, and McCutchen’s throwback start has been a huge part of the fun. No, traditional aging curves say he will not keep this up all year. But whether small sample sizes prove misleading or not, McCutchen’s start has not been fluky. He is doing some things as well as at any point in his illustrious career, and he’s already banked a good foundation toward his best season since at least 2017, his last year in Pittsburgh.

Besides, getting McCutchen back at all was an emotional lift for a team and fan base that needed one. Getting him back with good baseball left in the tank? That has been something else entirely. 

Three standout qualities of McCutchen’s brilliance in his prime were his plate discipline, hands and speed. From 2011 through 2017, 129 hitters had at least 3,000 plate appearances, and McCutchen was tied for 24th among them in walk-to-strikeout ratio (0.65). He brought the bat through the zone with extraordinary quickness, something that Statcast (whose data started in 2015 and just recently started tracking swing speed) couldn’t quite capture. But to go through a highlight reel of McCutchen’s MVP season in 2013 is to see him flick his wrists with shocking ease and send baseballs flying all over the park. And he was, of course, really fast. In every year except one since data began in 2015, McCutchen was in the majors’ 87th percentile or higher in sprint speed.

In some ways, time took its toll. McCutchen gradually stopped cracking the ball the way he once did, dropping from MLB’s 84th percentile in average exit velocity in 2015 to somewhere between the 38th and 65th in each of the past three seasons. He put the barrel on the ball less often, and his strikeout numbers in some years were worse than the league average. But McCutchen retained some important assets. Perhaps surprisingly for a player in his 30s, his speed held up well. He never lost control of the strike zone and stayed in the bottom 20 percent of the league in chase rate, or swinging at balls out of the zone, in each of the past four seasons. With the exception of 2020, when he drew bases on balls at almost exactly the league median rate, McCutchen has remained one of the league’s most prolific walkers. He has also held up as one of the sport’s tougher outs against left-handed pitching. He posted an .870 OPS against southpaws in his non-Pirate years, a top-50 mark. 

So McCutchen’s great start to 2023 is partly a continuation of the things he never stopped doing well. He has been one of the league’s 50 fastest players by average sprint speed, according to Statcast. On the basepaths, he’s taken an extra base on 57 percent of his opportunities, which would be the third-highest rate of his career. He has posted a .950 OPS against lefties, compared to .863 against righties. He has walked 14.3 percent and struck out 15.5 percent of the time — and that’s not even a continuation of anything. By walk-to-strikeout ratio, that’s better than McCutchen has ever done, despite a long career of posting strong contact and walk numbers. 

Indeed, McCutchen is seeing the ball very well. He’s made contact on 79.3 percent of his swings, his best rate since 2020 and better than in many of his prime seasons. In particular, McCutchen has been a difficult man to throw a fastball past. He has seen them about 60 percent of the time, in line with his career average. But he’s only whiffed on 12.4 percent of them, compared with his usual rate of somewhere between 16 and 20 percent. And he’s making good use of that contact, with a somewhat comical .857 slugging percentage on at-bats ending in four-seam heaters. He’s in the league’s 70th percentile of hard-hit rate, which isn’t prime McCutchen-like (he was in the 90th percentile in 2015) but far exceeds his showing the past three years. 

There’s lots of season left to go, and McCutchen is old. He could be sitting on fastballs to an extreme degree and find himself struggling once pitchers notice that they can’t blow him away and start mixing in more off-speed and breaking balls. But he has aged gracefully in the traits that once made him such a star, and he appears to be the same discerning curator of pitches that he’s always been. A litany of projection systems agree that he should be a slightly better than average hitter from here in, even at 36. While McCutchen’s Pirates story was mostly written long ago, it turns out the last chapter is a compelling read.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

MLB

Can Fernando Tatis Jr. Still Mash After A Year Away From MLB?

By Howard Megdal

Apr. 25, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Bob Melvin played 10 years in the big leagues, and has managed for another 20. Yet the San Diego Padres’ skipper freely admitted that he has no idea exactly what to expect from Fernando Tatis Jr., now that the 24-year-old superstar has returned to the field after missing the entire 2022 season.

“Based on what we saw in spring training and who he is, there’s obviously a high expectation level,” Melvin said a few weeks ago, sitting in the visiting dugout at Citi Field ahead of a Mets-Padres game. “But you do have to temper it knowing that he has not played in basically a year and a half.”

Tatis did show some rust during his first weekend back, going 3-for-18 — though he also hit a home run. As always, essentially everything about Tatis is an outlier. There’s both his previous career performance, which was off-the-charts excellent — particularly relative to the age at which he did it — and the multifaceted nature of his time away.

Tatis accumulated a 160 OPS+ through the first three seasons and 1,175 plate appearances of his career, covering his age 20 through 22 seasons. To get a sense of historical perspective, among hitters with at least 1,000 PAs through age 23, that OPS+ mark ranks eighth all time. The seven ahead of him? Ted Williams, Pete Browning, Ty Cobb, Mike Trout, Stan Musial, Willie Wells and Albert Pujols. Pretty good list! Tatis is ahead of everyone else — including his current teammate Juan Soto, plus Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, Reggie Jackson and Dick Allen. Simply put: There aren’t a lot of players, historically, like Tatis just from performance alone.

Tatis missed the entire 2022 season, but for two different reasons. A broken left wrist sustained during a motorcycle accident was expected to cost him the first three months or so. On Aug. 12, however, Tatis also was suspended for 80 games after testing positive for the steroid Clostebol. That carried his suspension over into the first 20 games of 2023.

But there’s time and there’s time away. Tatis wasn’t inactive for that entire period. He played this spring, as Melvin alluded to above, and he suited up for minor league games with Triple-A El Paso of the Pacific Coast League. Let’s just say he more than held his own there, slashing .515/.590/1.212 in 39 plate appearances, with seven home runs. The bat appeared ready.

“I think it’s [hard] to ask if he’s got a 1.000 OPS at the end of this season,” Melvin said. “I don’t know. But man, he looked good in spring training, he was active on the bases, and he was excited about playing. And he’s a special talent.”

Plus, there are plenty of parallels for precocious performers who pushed past a protracted pause. 

That list has got to start with Musial, whose .344/.423/.539 line from 1941 to 1944 was interrupted by his military service, costing him the entire 1945 season. But the U.S. Navy discharged him in March 1946, and after hitchhiking home to Donora, Pennsylvania, to see his family, he headed to St. Louis Cardinals camp to see if he could still hit.

Spoiler alert: He could. Musial’s slash line by the end of April was .370/.404/.574, including a four-hit effort against the Cubs, and he discussed how little the layoff was affecting him with the AP’s Duke Morgan in an article from April 28, 1946.

“I’m not having any trouble so far with any of the pitchers and I’m hitting the ball well — much better than I expected after my layoff,” Musial told Morgan. Musial finished the 1946 season at .365/.434/.587, good for an OPS+ of 183, and he ended up winning the National League batting title. And the MVP. And the World Series, in seven games, over the Red Sox.

If Musial is any kind of comparison for Tatis — who missed his age-23 (rather than age-24) season and played at a similar level to Musial prior to his time off — then there’s good reason for optimism around San Diego’s prodigal shortstop. 

Of course, Tatis wasn’t just taking time off from the game — he suffered a significant injury. Though not exactly the same, Andres Galarraga can relate some: In The Big Cat’s case, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma following a 1998 season in which he slashed .305/.397/.595 with 44 home runs and a 157 OPS+ for the Atlanta Braves. After a year away from the game spent undergoing chemotherapy, Galarraga was back and ready to play again by the spring of 2000. Though he, too, didn’t know what that might look like. 

“After one year, I thought it would be hard,” Galarraga told Steve Rock of the Kansas City Star in March of 2000. “I didn’t know what kind of reactions I would have. But as soon as I started swinging, I was feeling comfortable. I surprised myself.”

Galarraga went on to hit .302/.369/.526, good for a 123 OPS+. That earned him an All-Star appearance and NL Comeback Player of the Year honors. While it was a drop-off from 1998, Galarraga’s comeback might represent a floor of sorts for Tatis in his own return. The nature of the reason for his absence, along with his advanced baseball age — he turned 39 during the 2000 season — make Galarraga an imperfect comparison for the 24-year-old Padre.

A similar disclaimer applies to another recent return from missing a full year — that of Alex Rodriguez, whose own steroids suspension cost him the entire 2014 season before he returned to the field for the 2015 New York Yankees.

Rodriguez, immersed in a deeply complicated scandal we don’t need to rehash here, hadn’t played particularly well in 2013 either, so it made sense that when he stood in for his first spring at-bat in March 2015, he told the umpire: “Take it easy on me, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve been in the batter’s box.”

But Rodriguez did quite well in 2015, slashing .250/.356/.486 for a 129 OPS+ and 33 home runs in what was the final excellent season of his career. He even played in 151 games, a further example of players returning from layoff and putting in a full campaign on the diamond. Musial played 156 games in 1946; Galarraga played 141 in 2000.

And how much will Tatis Jr. play? Melvin said he’s going to follow the doctors on how often to incorporate his young star, but the plan is full speed ahead.

“It’s more in communication with the training staff on how many in a row maybe for him,” Melvin said. “But soon as we get him, he’s gonna be in the lineup, 100 percent.”

Which means we’ll start to get some answers soon about where this long-awaited return fits into the compendium of comebacks from throughout baseball history.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

NFL

Why Is Anthony Richardson Suddenly The NFL Draft's Hottest Prospect?

By Josh Hermsmeyer

Apr. 24, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Each spring, NFL prospects rocket up mock draft boards for both obvious and inscrutable reasons. Sometimes it’s due to a player’s performance at the NFL combine or pro day where they flash unexpected athleticism (think receiver Denzel Mims’s 4.38 second 40-yard dash at the combine in 2020 or linebacker Jamin Davis and his 4.37 pro-day 40 time in 2021). In other cases, rumors of a particular team’s enthusiasm drives the ascent (think Mac Jones and the talk of San Francisco’s interest in 2021). 

This year’s most notable pre-draft riser is Florida quarterback Anthony Richardson — and like Mims and Davis before him, it’s his athleticism and physical traits that have driven his climb. Richardson’s ascent is best illustrated by comparing him with the rock-steady draft stock of 2021 Heisman Trophy winner and consensus No. 1 overall pick Bryce Young of Alabama. Using data collected by Ben Robinson on Grinding the Mocks, we can see that Young’s projected pick number remained remarkably flat throughout the college season and through the draft process.¹ Meanwhile, Richardson’s draft stock has jumped from the final third of the first round in December all the way to a possible top-five selection.

It’s also interesting that Richardson’s rise began in earnest after the 2022 college football season ended, but prior to any athletic measurements at the combine. That’s notable because Richardson’s combine performance revealed him to be one of, if not the most athletic quarterbacks ever tested.

Richardson’s athletic ability was obvious on the field all season, so maybe teams just needed time to come to grips with his underwhelming production. Starting for just one year at Florida, Richardson finished the season with a Total QBR of 71.2, good for 24th out of 64 qualified Power Five quarterbacks,² while throwing 17 touchdowns against nine interceptions with 7.7 yards per dropback. Richardson also added nine TDs and over 600 yards on the ground. And if his overall production was middling at best, Richardson’s pure accuracy was very poor, ranking eighth-worst among qualified Power Five QBs in catchable pass attempt rate (69.9 percent). 

To be fair, Richardson threw deep balls at a healthy clip, averaging 9.9 air yards per pass attempt — fifth-highest among Power Five QBS — which can sometimes depress measures of accuracy. But while lots of deep-ball pass attempts might be a mitigating factor for most QB prospects, it turns out the Florida signal-caller actually struggled mightily with his accuracy on shorter passes. Richardson posted the third-worst QBR (33.1) when targeting receivers running shallow routes, and his struggles are probably why he mostly just avoided throwing short altogether: Richardson attempted shallow passes on only 8 percent of his dropbacks, the third-lowest share in the Power Five in 2022.

A lack of accuracy used to be a massive red flag for a quarterback prospect. But with the success in recent years of players like Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts, it’s clear that some teams are placing an emphasis on athleticism and physical traits even when there are questions about passing. Those teams appear willing to take the gamble that Richardson, who is still just 20 years old, can grow into an elite NFL talent. And as a result, his draft stock has soared.

Or at least, the public perception of it has. It’s worth noting that pre-draft risers are mostly a media-driven phenomenon — we’re the ones generating the rankings, after all — and not necessarily a reflection of a change in opinion among NFL teams. Perhaps changes in mock drafts simply reveal what front offices have known all along.

Some scouts even claim that there’s no such thing as a draft riser. Others take pains to remind us that mock drafts are entirely ignored by teams because teams have more information than public rankers. Both of these claims should be viewed with skepticism, however. 

Public rankings have been shown to be fairly good proxies for non-QB value, so whatever extra information a particular team has access to that the public doesn’t typically isn’t enough to overcome the aggregated opinions of the masses. Moreover, in speaking and working with NFL front offices, there are absolutely teams that pay attention to public mocks, if only so they can better estimate what other teams drafting ahead and behind them might end up doing. So whether or not a pre-draft riser reflects the real-time evolution of NFL teams’ evaluation of a player, or if it’s just the public catching up to what teams already knew, by the time the draft rolls around the two sets of player opinions are roughly equivalent. 

And if NFL teams and the public are on similar footing when it comes to players that aren’t QBs, it’s likely true for quarterbacks as well. After all, nobody knows anything about projecting quarterbacks. Extrapolating from the recent successes of “toolsy” prospects who’ve turned teams into Super Bowl contenders ignores a long history of failed prospects that fit the same billing. Likewise, the Brock Purdys of the world help to underline that there’s no skeleton key to winning the QB lottery. 

No hard-and-fast rules for finding talent exist — except that you’ll almost certainly lose if you refuse to gamble your premium picks on the position. For upside-heavy QBs like Richardson in particular, it’s like a bizarro world version of “WarGames“: The only winning move is to play.

NBA Playoffs

The Bucks Would Be In Big Trouble Without Brook Lopez

By Josh Planos

Apr. 21, 2023, at 6:00 AM

When two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo tumbled to the court in the first quarter of the Milwaukee Bucks’ series-opening loss against the Miami Heat, the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference knew it would need to rally around the rest of its core. 

“Everyone’s ready,” said center Brook Lopez of the challenge. And as it turned out, Lopez was the one leading the charge — as has often secretly been the case for Antetokounmpo’s slightly taller (and mostly overlooked) teammate. 

Thanks to Lopez’s efforts, the Bucks responded decisively in Game 2, demolishing Miami in a 138-122 victory. The 7-footer scored a game-high 25 points on 12-for-17 shooting, delivering a jolt of offense Milwaukee might have worried would be missing without its superstar. And on the other end of the floor, Lopez easily led all defenders by contesting 19 shots, while as the primary defender he held Bam Adebayo to 8 points on 4-for-10 shooting. The win may have helped stabilize the series for the Bucks, who now have a 64 percent chance of advancing to the second round even after accounting for Antetokounmpo’s unclear status going forward. 

Anchoring a team at both ends, and especially on defense, is nothing new for Lopez. But sometimes a player like him is best appreciated in absentia, which happened when Lopez missed nearly the entire 2021-22 regular season after he underwent back surgery in December 2021. To that point — and with a healthy Lopez available for coach Mike Budenholzer — Milwaukee had led the NBA in defensive rating twice in three years.¹ But with Lopez limited to 13 regular-season games, the Bucks fell back to No. 14 in defensive rating and were eliminated by the Boston Celtics in the second round of the 2022 NBA playoffs.² 

Milwaukee fashioned a top-five defense this season in part due to the return of Lopez, who appeared in 78 games, led the league in blocked shots (193) and finished second in Defensive Player of the Year voting. “Whatever happens, if someone comes at the rim, I’m going to try to be there to stop them from putting the ball in the basket,” Lopez said. “That’s a pretty simple answer, I guess.”

To turn away a shot, a defender must first make the choice to contest it. Nobody made that split-second decision this season more than Lopez (17.5 per game, 45 percent more challenges than any other player), who led the league in contested shots by an appreciable margin.³

All told, Lopez contested 526 more shots inside the arc than any other NBA player — and 400 more than the combined output of the most recent Heat starting lineup Lopez and the Bucks squared off against in the first round of the playoffs. And not all of his contested shots were at the rim. Lopez also contested 135 3-pointers, more than perimeter-centric defenders like Russell Westbrook (133), Tyrese Haliburton (125) and Devin Booker (115). Overall, opposing shooters saw their percentage drop by nearly 5 percentage points when Lopez served as the primary defender.

This effort matters to Milwaukee’s bottom line, of course. Without Lopez on the court, the Bucks allow 113.0 points per 100 possessions, or the equivalent of the 10th-best defense in the league. When Lopez plays, Milwaukee opponents score just 106.6, which would be the league’s best defense by a huge margin of 3.3 points per 100 possessions. 

The Bucks have asked more of Lopez than just his defense. They also needed help on offense. Most championship teams over the past decade were near the top 10 in both offensive and defensive rating. Milwaukee’s offense finished the regular season ranked No. 15, and in absolute terms that left their efficiency closer to No. 22 than to No. 10. While the Bucks’ offense has performed at the sixth-best rate in the league since the All-Star Break, much still depends on the health of Khris Middleton, who has played in just 33 games this season and is currently nursing a knee injury (which didn’t prevent him from playing in Games 1 and 2, but threatened to).

Middleton was the second-leading scorer and fourth-quarter closer on the Bucks’ 2021 championship team, and even though his scoring has dipped this season, he still contributes 15 points per game for an at-times stagnant offense. With him in and out of the lineup, Lopez’s scoring (15.9 per game) ended up the highest it had been since the 2016-17 season, and he shot a career-best 37.4 percent from beyond the arc on a diet of 3-point attempts nearly double his career average. In total, Lopez’s true shooting percentage of 63.0 percent represented the most efficient shooting season of his career.

A career-best output is hardly the expectation for a 15-year pro with more than 30,000 career minutes played. Lopez turned 35 earlier this month and finished fourth in block rate (6.7 percent). The three players ranked ahead of him⁴ have played a combined 10 NBA seasons and are each at least 11 years younger. That a breakout season from a veteran on the oldest roster in the league might swing this year’s NBA title race is an odd reality. But it was one that was on clear display when the Bucks needed someone to pick up the slack in Antetokounmpo’s absence and help turn a series around.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

NBA Playoffs

Busting 4 Major Myths About Referees In The NBA Playoffs

By Ben Dowsett

Apr. 20, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The NBA playoffs come with an intensified microscope on everyone, referees maybe most of all.

Typically an afterthought (with some exceptions) during the regular season, NBA officials tend to be thrust into the limelight in the spring. Seemingly every postseason comes with a new incident or think piece on the sad state of NBA officiating. Fans learn the names of refs they’d barely registered the existence of until recently.

Most of this is innocent enough. NBA officials don’t mind the “heel” role they’re destined to play on social media or the inevitable boos when a home crowd feels wronged. Hell, some might even say acting irrationally about officials is part of being a sports fan(atic). But sometimes these conversations become more serious — such as when prominent players publicly raise issues about player-ref relationships and the quality of league officiating.

When that happens, several major misconceptions tend to seep in, and they’re worth unpacking as the most intense part of the season kicks into gear.

Myth No. 1: “Refs should be perfect!”

High-level basketball is impossible to officiate perfectly. It’s a far more dynamic game than, say, baseball, where nearly every decision is black-and-white in nature — there’s more subjectivity and gray area than any other major sport.

Even casual fans are likely aware of this, but may not grasp the basic arithmetic at play.

A typical NBA game features 500 to 550 material calls (or non-calls) made by the officiating crew, per sources within the NBA’s referee grading program.¹ And while the league has shied away from touting raw accuracy percentages — i.e., the share of possible calls that refs got right in the moment, according to the letter of the rulebook — in recent years, those numbers hovered between 92 and 95 percent in the past, when that approach was more common. If a crew hits that 95 percent mark in a game with 500 decisions required, that still leaves 25 expected “misses.”

And some of those 25 will invariably occur at more important moments than others. “You can’t miss a call in that spot” is a common refrain from frustrated parties, but think about it for a moment: If officials could simply will themselves into never missing in high-leverage spots, wouldn’t they just do that for all situations instead?

None of this makes missed calls — especially the more obvious-looking ones — any less frustrating when they happen during a key sequence of a tense playoff contest. No one likes their team being disadvantaged by factors outside players’ control.

Broadly, though, accepting that misses are part of the game makes handling their inevitable occurrence a bit easier.

Myth No. 2: “Refs aren’t held accountable for errors!”

This one is a straight-up falsehood, sadly perpetuated by some media members in addition to casual fans.²

The reality: NBA refs are graded on every single decision by third-party evaluators. Those grades, as I also reported on last season, are a major factor in who gets promotions to crew chief roles, salary increases and playoff assignments (which carry further financial bonuses). Refs are sometimes fined for misapplication of rules; those who consistently fall below league standards are dismissed.

Some feel this accountability should be more public in nature, which is a fair position — though one with some nuance involved.³ Internally, though, tying financial outcomes directly to performance is about as good an example of accountability as one can find.

Myth No. 3: “The NBA assigned (insert ref name — usually Scott Foster) to a game on purpose to lengthen the series!”

Likely the most common implication among the NBA’s tinfoil-hat-wearers is this one: That in response to a couple of early blowouts in a series, the league will assign one of its “fixers” to guarantee the underdog a victory and, therefore, secure extra games and increased revenue.

A bit of logistics, per multiple league sources: Officiating crews are pre-assigned for Games 1 through 4 of every NBA playoff series ahead of time, in part to avoid criticisms just like this. Refs also are paid by the playoff round they reach,⁴ rather than by the game — so even if an official calls only one game in a given round, they receive the full bonus for that round. Again, this is so there’s zero incentive, conscious or subconscious, for a ref to do anything but call a game straight.

True conspiracy theorists are perhaps undeterred by this news; because the league is forced to assign refs on a game-by-game basis later in a series, they could still dictate outcomes!

But at the risk of giving this nonsense more attention than it deserves, the idea that a profitable and public sports entity would risk its entire legitimacy and a league-altering scandal for a few extra million here or there through any means⁵ is, frankly, laughable from a risk-reward standpoint. It’s especially so with Tim Donaghy’s rogue game-fixing incident, which current and former ref ops staff have worked very hard to recover from, not even two decades in the past. If the people running the league were this dumb, they’d have been caught years ago.

Let’s move on.

Myth No. 4: “(Team X) shot way more free throws than (Team Y) in that game — surely there’s something afoot!”

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Well over a decade ago, NBA officiating leadership moved away from the “game management” approach — that is, the idea that the rules are flexible depending on game situation or any other factor beyond whether or not an infraction took place. But there are many examples of misconceptions influenced by this thinking that still hang over the sport: That star players should be officiated differently purely based on status, not on merit; that certain calls should be whistled early in a game, but not if it’s close down the stretch; that a ref “owes” a team a call if the last several went against them; etc. Each is its own slippery slope toward bias and unfairness, and this myth is among their ilk.

In truth, call discrepancies mean refs are doing the job the right way. Some players and teams foul more than others! That should often be reflected in foul and free-throw totals.

The NBA’s officiating program, and its individual referees, are far from perfect. Legitimate critiques are an important part of improvement — but they’re tougher to discuss earnestly when faulty presumptions cloud the conversation.

But hey, if booing officials is your thing, boo away! They’ll live.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

NBA Playoffs

How Mikal Bridges Went From Supporting Player To Star

By Jared Dubin

Apr. 19, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The Brooklyn Nets dropped both Games 1 and 2 of their series with the Philadelphia 76ers on the road, and they face a tough climb to come back and make this a competitive series — let alone advance to the second round. The Nets were heavy underdogs coming into the matchup, so their 2-0 deficit is not all that surprising. But one bright spot for Brooklyn is that, despite his team losing both games, Nets wing Mikal Bridges has showcased the holistic development of his game, carrying over to the postseason much of what he did upon arriving in Brooklyn in the Kevin Durant trade.

If you’ve been paying attention to the NBA over the past few months, you have almost surely heard all about Bridges’s explosion in volume, but the numbers are wild enough that they need to be repeated.

After setting a career high with a 15 percent usage rate last season with Phoenix, Bridges saw that figure rise to 19.2 percent during his 56 games with the Suns prior to the trade (and to 24.6 percent across his final 12 games as a Sun), but it exploded to 30.3 percent with the Nets. Prior to this season, Bridges had actually never attempted more than 18 shots in a single game.¹ Across his 27 regular-season games with Brooklyn, Bridges averaged 18.6 field-goal attempts per game.

Even more impressive than the added volume, though, was Bridges’s apparent ability to handle it while maintaining his strong efficiency. Among the 57 non-rookies during the 3-point era² who have attempted at least 18 shots a night in their first 27 games with a new team, Bridges’s 60.7 true shooting percentage was tied for the third-best mark. And among the top-10 such players, only Adrian Dantley in his first season with the Utah Jazz had made a larger jump in field-goal attempts per game from his previous team to his new one. The others had mostly already proved they could handle the higher volume.

Incredibly, just about all of Bridges’s added volume came in the form of self-created shot attempts.

During his time in Phoenix, Bridges was rarely tasked with creating for himself. Being that he played on the same team as Chris Paul and Devin Booker, plus a former No. 1 overall pick in Deandre Ayton, and that he was never a high-volume player even in college at Villanova, it made sense that Bridges was largely asked to be a play-finisher during his time with the Suns. That began to change during the span where Booker and Paul missed time with injuries this season, but even that doesn’t compare to the work he was tasked with upon arriving in Brooklyn — the first stretch of his career in which fewer than half of his shots came off of a potential assist (according to Second Spectrum).

As you can see, Bridges averaged almost exactly the same number of assisted (or potentially assisted) field-goal attempts per game in Brooklyn as he did in Phoenix earlier this season, and in each of the previous two. What changed was the volume of unassisted field-goal attempts, which accounted for 4.9 of the additional 5 shots per game he attempted as a Net. And it wasn’t just the shots — Bridges’s creation responsibility extended to the ability to get himself to the free-throw line. During the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons combined, Bridges drew 62 self-created shooting fouls,³ according to Second Spectrum. In just 27 regular-season games with Brooklyn, he drew 63 such shooting fouls. As a result, Bridges’s free-throw rate exploded, and the rates at which he used possessions and drew fouls were in line with those achieved exclusively by star scorers in recent seasons. 

With the ball in his hands more often, Bridges has thrived as a creator. His pick-and-roll volume had already spiked early this season in Phoenix, then it more than doubled upon his arrival in Brooklyn. Still, when either he or a teammate one pass away finished the play (with a shot, turnover or foul drawn), Bridges maintained sterling efficiency. His isolation volume had already more than doubled in Phoenix, and it more than tripled again when he got to the Nets. Yet he achieved a level of efficiency on par with players such as Jalen Brunson and Trae Young.

Bridges is still developing his repertoire as a passer. His assists per game actually dipped a bit in Brooklyn from where it was in Phoenix earlier this season, although that figure on its own is at least somewhat misleading. The shots he created for his Brooklyn teammates, according to Second Spectrum, were the highest-value looks he’s created in his career to date. They carried an expected effective field-goal percentage of 53.0; his fellow Nets just missed a lot of the same shots his Suns teammates had made.⁴ Playmaking development can often be the last thing to come along when a player scales up his usage (and some big scorers just never actually become high-level creators for others), so it’s promising that Bridges has shown the ability to create quality shots for his teammates, even if not necessarily at all that high a volume just yet.

Beyond all of this, though, perhaps the best sign regarding Bridges’s evolution is that he leveled up like this while (a) being guarded by better defenders; and (b) maintaining his defensive role against opposing teams’ best (or second-best) offensive players.

“He’s probably going to be guarded by the No. 1 or No. 2 defender,” Nets coach Jacque Vaughn noted earlier this season, while explaining the new burden Bridges had to shoulder. “So, we played Chicago, [Alex] Caruso’s guarding him, Pat Williams is guarding him. Where, when he was with Phoenix, Coby White might have been guarding him — not as distinguished a defender compared to those other two.”

That was borne out by the numbers. Using Second Spectrum matchup data and BBall-Index’s D-LEBRON, we can see that Bridges spent the significant majority of his career being guarded by relatively weaker defenders. Upon arriving in Brooklyn, though, that changed:

And it wasn’t just the quality of defenders that increased, but also the type of defender. In previous seasons, opposing teams would have their best perimeter defenders guard Paul and/or Booker, while defending Bridges with whomever was left over or who needed to be hidden on a less-threatening offensive player. Looking at BBall-Index’s metrics, you can see that Bridges faced players classified in defensive-minded roles⁵ significantly more often when he got to the Nets. In other words, teams were more likely to defend Bridges with their version of Bridges, whereas before he might have been defended by, as Vaughn said, the Coby White types.

We’ve seen this so far during the series against Philadelphia, where the significant majority of his possessions have come against De’Anthony Melton and Tobias Harris. If he were still playing alongside Paul and Booker, Bridges would be much more likely to be guarded by James Harden or Tyrese Maxey. That type of thing likely won’t happen all that often anymore. Even with the more difficult matchups, though, Bridges still dropped 30 points on just 18 shots in Game 1. (He did get off just two shots after halftime, because when you score 23 points in the first half, the opposing team does tend to focus even more on denying your opportunities.) Bridges again saw Harris and Melton check him (along with Jalen McDaniels) for the majority of Game 2, and the Sixers also sent a second defender his way quite often. He was limited to 21 points as a result, but he managed to pick up seven assists — and could have had more had the Nets not shot so poorly. (Bridges had 14 potential assists.)

At the same time, Bridges is not, say, camping out on P.J. Tucker in the corner so he can conserve his energy for the offensive end of the floor. Bridges was not on Harden (the toughest perimeter matchup) all that often in Game 1, but he was in Game 2; and when he hasn’t been on the Sixers’ lead creator, he has spent most of his time guarding Maxey or Harris. That’s roughly in line with how Brooklyn used him after the trade, when he actually was tasked with the toughest half-court defensive matchups (according to BBall-Index’s O-LEBRON) of his career.

Bridges’s breakout is still in its nascent stages, and it remains to be seen how he handles the burdens of two-way stardom over the longer term. The difference between a good player and a great one is the consistency with which they produce at a star level, and the difference between a great player and a superstar is their ability to succeed even under disadvantageous circumstances. Bridges has shown he can reach star heights, in a way that came as a surprise even to the team that made him the centerpiece of the Durant trade. The question now is whether he can maintain this level of play, and do so while remaining one of the league’s best defenders and arguably its most durable player. Whether the Nets ultimately come back or fall flat in this series, Bridges has proved that the requisite skill set is there. The key moving forward is accessing the right parts of it on a consistent basis.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

MLB

These 3 Former MLB Prospects Have Gone From Busts To Busting Out

Jarred Kelenic, MacKenzie Gore and Geraldo Perdomo were running out of time to reach their potential — but no longer.

By Alex Kirshner

Apr. 18, 2023, at 10:29 AM

In 2021, Jarred Kelenic was the No. 4 prospect in baseball, according to MLB Pipeline. That placed him one spot ahead of a fellow Seattle Mariners outfield prospect, Julio Rodriguez, at No. 5. But while Rodriguez would soon become one of the most awe-inspiring young mashers in years — and sign a huge, complicated contract worth several hundred million dollars — Kelenic sputtered. He played in 147 games over the next two years and posted an adjusted OPS of 66. (The league average is 100.) His triple-slash line was .168/.251/.338 in his 588 plate appearances across two seasons. The Mariners demoted him to Triple-A in 2021 and then, upon trying again in the majors, demoted him again in 2022. He came back to the bigs just before the trade deadline and posted a putrid .561 OPS down the stretch. 

That same year, the sport’s No. 6 prospect was MacKenzie Gore, a left-handed pitcher then working in the San Diego Padres’ organization. Gore had been the No. 5 prospect the year prior and remained highly regarded despite some less-than-sparkling minor league stats. Gore was in the Padres’ starting rotation by April of 2022, and though he struck out more than nine batters per nine innings, he also walked nearly five per nine and gave up 0.9 home runs per nine, too. When he went to the injured list with elbow inflammation in late July, his ERA+ was 84. He didn’t pitch another game that season. Nor did he end the year as a Padre: The Washington Nationals acquired the injured Gore in the trade that sent Juan Soto to Southern California. Gore still had value, clearly, but would soon be 24 and had yet to put much together as a major leaguer.

Further down the prospect ranking in 2021, at No. 79, was Geraldo Perdomo. The Arizona Diamondbacks’ up-and-coming shortstop was in his second year as a top-100 prospect and represented hope for a D-backs team that was about to finish last in the National League West for the second straight season. Perdomo appeared in 11 games at the end of 2021 and looked promising, posting a 117 OPS+, but his first full year in the bigs was horrible: a .195/.285/.262 slash line, a 57 OPS+, and 0.63 wins above replacement, according to an average of FanGraphs’ and Baseball Reference’s systems. Perdomo’s defense at shortstop was the only thing that prevented him from providing zero value for Arizona.

Kelenic, Gore and Perdomo had each followed similar paths: Become a top prospect, get to the major leagues and sputter. This year, they all have something else in common: They’re starting to fulfill their onetime promise. Each looks to be staging a 2023 breakout and vindicating the industry’s view of them — just a year or two later than expected. If at first a top prospect doesn’t succeed, then maybe he will a bit later. 

In these early weeks of the season, Kelenic has been arguably baseball’s most fun player to watch. For one thing, he hit a 482-foot home run into the upper reaches of the center field Wrigley Field bleachers: 

It was the second-longest homer of the MLB season to date, just behind a 485-footer off the bat of (who else?) Giancarlo Stanton. And it was representative of Kelenic tearing the cover off the ball with alarming frequency. He homered in four straight games from April 10 through 14. On every conceivable player-tracking metric that points to “hitting the ball really damn hard,” Kelenic is currently a Statcast star. He’s in the top 12 percent of MLB in average and maximum exit velocity, barrel percentage, hard-hit percentage and expected batting average and slugging percentage. Naturally, it has all translated to top-end production: Kelenic is hitting .362/.423/.723 through Sunday, good for a 219 OPS+. 

Kelenic has even been quite a bit more productive than Rodriguez, making it feel less weird that the two were once considered more or less equal prospects. Fortunately for the Mariners, Kelenic-Rodriguez is not a competition. They get to have both of them. And just as Rodriguez played a pretty good center field for the Mariners last year, saving a handful of runs over the course of the season, Kelenic has shown some good things in right field. Consider this web gem from the weekend: 

Across the country, an apparently healthy Gore has gotten it rolling, despite not yet figuring out the biggest thing that plagued him last year. In three starts totaling 15 innings, Gore has walked 6.0 hitters per nine innings but struck out 10.8. He’s sporting a round-numbered ERA of 3.00 and has won both of his decisions. In some subtle ways, he’s been a much different pitcher than he was in 2022. 

Gore’s fastball velocity is basically steady (94.5 mph, down from 94.7), and he’s thrown it with the exact same frequency (on 60.9 percent of his pitches) as last year. But he’s generated velocity upticks of between 1 and 3 miles per hour on his other three pitches: a curveball, slider and changeup. Hitters have swung and missed at 30 percent of his pitches, up from 24 percent, even as he throws pitches in the zone at a rate (49.5 percent) that’s just one-tenth of 1 percent different from last year. When hitters do get bat on ball, they’re beating it into the ground at rates that are unusual for Gore. He typically posted ground ball rates in the mid-40-percent range as a minor leaguer, and 37.6 percent of balls put into play against him last year were grounders. This year, the figure is 51.4 percent. Gore has become both harder to touch and harder to really get a hold of, and it’s all helped him overcome those persistent walk problems. 

As for Perdomo, he wasn’t quite as hyped a prospect as Kelenic or Gore, but he’s been just as exciting to watch out in the desert. One of Perdomo’s great traits as a minor leaguer, after the D-backs signed him as an international free agent from the Dominican Republic in 2016, was his plate discipline. Perdomo has always generated double-digit walk rates, and at several minor league stops he walked more often than he struck out. For him, a 10 percent walk rate in 2022 against a 20.6 percent strikeout rate qualified as quite bad. So far in 2023, though, Perdomo has walked on 15.2 percent of his plate appearances, the 41st-highest rate in MLB. 

He’s also struck out more, going down that way 24.2 percent of the time. But he’ll take that trade, given that he’s been crushing the ball when he gets into it. Perdomo has found power like never before in his professional career. His .240 isolated power rate (the difference between his slugging percentage and batting average, which isolates extra bases) is 60th in the league. It’s been just a few weeks, but for a frame of reference on how powerful Perdomo has been: There have been just 27 seasons since 2000 in which a qualifying shortstop has posted an ISO higher than .240, and four were Alex Rodriguez from 2000-03. Even assuming Perdomo cools off considerably, he could be an ultra-powerful shortstop. Manager Torey Lovullo is bringing Perdomo around with some caution, however. He has mostly hit eighth or ninth in the batting order, and from a place of less pressure he’s offered a .400/.516/.640 line and 213 OPS+, through Sunday. 

The Diamondbacks lost 110 games in 2021 but improved to 74-88 in 2022. This year, FiveThirtyEight’s predictive model sees Arizona hovering around .500, projecting an 80-82 record. The machine gives the D-backs a 32 percent chance to make the playoffs. Perdomo’s continued development is maybe the clearest way Arizona could make a run at its first postseason berth since 2017 or first postseason win since 2011. Similarly, Kelenic sustaining his early breakout would do wonders for the Mariners’ current playoff odds of 36 percent. Gore, by contrast, could be a combination of Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux and Nolan Ryan for the rest of the season, and the Nationals (projected record: 62-100) would not make the playoffs. But he at least has a chance to make Washington watchable every fifth day. And if Gore can do that, he’ll have gone a long way toward justifying his status as one of the sport’s rising stars.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

MLB

The Rays' Dominance Goes Even Deeper Than Their 13-0 Start

By Neil Paine

Apr. 17, 2023, at 10:58 AM

When we talk about the Tampa Bay Rays, it’s usually regarding their plucky ability to surprise the baseball world and win more games than expected despite a meager payroll, sparse attendance and imposing division rivals. But they’re seldom described as a clear-cut powerhouse dominating the league, without any of those small-market qualifiers or paeans to their canny exploitation of market inefficiencies.

This year, however, is different. The Rays tied the modern MLB record¹ last week with their 13th consecutive win to start the season, matching the 13-0 starts of the 1987 Milwaukee Brewers and 1982 Atlanta Braves. Though they did lose two of three against the Toronto Blue Jays over the weekend, the Rays still have the best record in baseball through the season’s first two-and-a-half weeks. And even by the standards of teams who began seasons on hot streaks, Tampa Bay absolutely demolished the competition. During the streak, they beat opponents by 5.5 runs on average, by far the most of any team that started a season at least 8-0.

Even now, Tampa Bay’s plus-4.5 runs per game differential is the best by a team that started 14-2 since the 1887 Detroit Wolverines. No matter how you slice it, the Rays have simply had the most dominant start to an MLB season in modern baseball history.

Yes, Tampa Bay has also faced the majors’ easiest schedule, with an average opposing Elo rating of 1470² — still 12 points worse than the second-easiest slate (that of the Los Angeles Angels, at 1482). And yes, it is still extremely early in the season. But we know that early performances can actually tell us a surprising amount about how a team will finish at the end of the season, between the wins they bank away and new information they provide about the team’s true talent level. And already, our forecast model has upgraded the Rays from 86 wins and a 52 percent chance of making the playoffs before the season to 94 wins and an 83 percent chance.

These streaking Rays haven’t exactly come out of nowhere. This is the same franchise that boasts MLB’s fourth-best record since 2018. But after recording 100 wins for the first time in team history in 2021, Tampa Bay won just 86 games last season — and its 2022-23 offseason drew mixed reviews at best from subjective graders, while also landing 21st in total spending and 25th in net WAR added. Add in a mid-pack ranking in MANFRED (our estimate of which teams MLB’s new rules might help or hurt), and we didn’t see a sudden Rays outburst on the horizon.

Perhaps the only hint that something special was brewing for Tampa Bay was the sheer amount of young talent on its roster. A farm system that never ranked lower than No. 5 in Baseball America’s organization rankings from 2018 to 2022 has produced a number of starters for the 2023 Rays, including Wander Franco, Shane McClanahan, Brandon Lowe and Josh Lowe.³ And in somewhat un-Rays-like fashion, the team’s production from non-homegrown players⁴ has been absolutely off the charts early this season. From Drew Rasmussen and Harold Ramirez to Randy Arozarena and Isaac Paredes, the talent Tampa Bay has spent the past handful of years shrewdly accumulating (why won’t opposing GMs learn — never trade with the Rays!) are blossoming all at once.

The natural question now is, how much more brightly can the Rays shine? Unlike most other power rankings, which are a lot quicker to (over?) react to hot streaks at any given moment, our Elo forecast still thinks four teams — the Atlanta Braves, New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets — are as or more likely to win the World Series than Tampa Bay. (Some of this is due to the Rays’ schedule going forward — Elo considers it the third-most difficult in MLB.)

And perhaps there’s nothing special about winning the first 13 games of the season; we’ve seen other, longer winning streaks that just happened to occur later in the schedule. But since 1969, all teams with a winning streak of at least 13 games (at any time) averaged 94 wins over the entire season.⁵ So past precedent says Tampa Bay should be a force to be reckoned with all year long — and after this record-breaking start, history is something these Rays ought to get used to being a part of.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

WNBA

Who Won The 2023 WNBA Draft?

By Howard Megdal

Apr. 14, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Every WNBA draft has the potential to reshape the league. But Monday’s picks might carry more of that capability than most.

Last year’s worst teams just got a lot better. The Indiana Fever added a massive amount of frontcourt help, headlined by No. 1 overall pick Aliyah Boston, plus the best pure point guard and the best perimeter shooter in this year’s class. The Minnesota Lynx selected the most intriguing all-around talent, the best international prospect, an intriguing modern center and the best perimeter defender available. 

Meanwhile, some good teams bided their time. The Washington Mystics parlayed their lottery pick into an intriguing package for the future and didn’t select their own pick until the 20th pick. And the New York Liberty and Las Vegas Aces didn’t select until the third round — though, let’s just say they didn’t need to, given the available talent on hand. 

It all made for a fascinating reshuffling of the league’s talent base, just a week after the NCAA Final Four and a little over a month until the 2023 season begins on May 19.

So who were the biggest winners?

Let’s start with general manager Lin Dunn’s Fever, who have utilized the last two drafts masterfully after — how do we put this? — not doing that prior to her arrival. The centerpiece of Indiana’s rebuild is Boston, a 6-foot-5 big out of South Carolina who was both the consensus best player available and fit the largest needs of the team.

Boston finished among the national leaders in every major defensive measure once again in 2022-23 for the Gamecocks’ top-ranked D, combining elite rim protection and defensive rebounding to single-handedly end many opposing possessions. To really appreciate Boston, though, you’ve got to watch her — she simply doesn’t miss defensive assignments. Like, ever. She’s always in the right place and will be an instant boon to new Fever head coach Christie Sides’s defensive scheme.

Indiana was also last in the WNBA in offensive rating in 2022, and getting easier baskets inside with Boston will be vital as well. During her senior season, Boston hit 58.7 percent of her twos. 

Expect that number to go up in the pros — not down — because Boston won’t face triple-teams in the WNBA.

“I’m pretty confident just because of just simply spacing,” Boston told assembled media on draft night. “I think it’s going to allow me to be able to work a little bit better. Just being able to watch the pros prior to joining the league, you can just see how they can just get to work […] It’s going to be pretty nice, I think.”

But the Fever’s haul was just getting started with Boston. They added Grace Berger of Indiana at the seventh overall pick, who took over point guard duties for the Hoosiers once Ali Patberg left to begin collecting Social Security. Berger promptly put up a 31 percent assist rate while hitting 65.4 percent of her shots at the rim, according to CBB Analytics.

“Obviously the midrange is my favorite shot,” Berger said on draft night. “Anybody that watches me knows that. But I think a part of my game that I’ve always known I could be good at is finishing at the rim. I worked countless hours with Coach [Glenn] Box, our assistant coach at Indiana, on different finishes, getting to a spot and finishing over bigger, stronger, quicker defenders. Obviously you can’t be a one-dimensional player at the next level. So me getting all the way to the rim in addition to my mid-range and my three is just going to hopefully serve me well in terms of making a roster and contributing.”

As for the Fever’s third pick, shooter extraordinaire Taylor Mikesell (No. 13 overall) shot 41.4 percent from deep on 7.8 attempts per game for Ohio State last season and will push Lexie Hull for minutes as a space-creator off the bench. And LaDazhia Williams of LSU (No. 17) and Victaria Saxton of South Carolina (No. 25) will give Sides extra competitors for her frontcourt slots during training camp.

For Minnesota, the haul began with No. 2 pick Diamond Miller, a 6-foot-3 wing who can comfortably guard positions 1 through 4 while scoring at all three levels. If she simply retains the efficiency she showed in her final year at Maryland, she’ll be an immediate contributor for Cheryl Reeve’s Lynx in Year 1 of the post-Sylvia Fowles Era. If she starts hitting threes, she’ll be an All-Star.

Be sure of this: Miller will work to make it happen.

“I think I’m just never satisfied,” Miller said following the draft. “Even now, I know I have so much more to develop. The player you see right now, or the last game I played, I’m not going to be in another two years. I’m just constantly trying to develop and be a sponge to the game and constantly find new things.”

Then at No. 12, the Lynx added 19-year-old Maïa Hirsch, a 6-foot-5 center from France who was a highly coveted prospect in many WNBA war rooms, and at No. 16 they took 6-foot-5 Dorka Juhász from Connecticut. Both are modern bigs at each end of the floor, providing spacing on offense and rim protection on defense. It’s a departure from what Fowles gave the Lynx, but let’s be real: There’s only one Sylvia Fowles. And at No. 24, Minnesota took Brea Beal, the 6-foot-1 South Carolina product who can guard four positions as well. Beal’s perimeter defense is an obvious calling card, but don’t sleep on her emerging offensive game — she shot 38 percent from three this year on 2.7 attempts per game.

Mike Thibault and the Mystics, meanwhile, gave themselves a future gift, dealing No. 4 pick Stephanie Soares to the Wings for Dallas’s second-round pick in 2024 and Atlanta’s first-round pick in 2025. The opportunity to punt on adding talent to what is already a win-now roster, while getting extra picks in what most observers expect will be overstocked draft classes, was a vintage bit of Thibault strategy.

In the meantime, New York, which drafted Okako Adika of USC with the 30th pick, and Las Vegas, which selected Brittany Davis with the last pick of the draft, may not have altered their fortunes much on Monday. But adding Breanna Stewart and Courtney Vandersloot did that back in free agency for the Liberty (along with the trade for Jonquel Jones earlier in the offseason), while Candace Parker and Alysha Clark did the same for the Aces.

So weep not for those two teams, despite their lack of draft-night excitement. But get excited for the teams that added the WNBA’s next generation of stars — including a Boston-led group that might turn the league on its head sooner than you think.

Economics

Why An Aging Population Might Not Doom The American Economy

By Santul Nerkar

Apr. 13, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The American economy is booming and robust. Just look at the chart below, which shows that the overall unemployment rate — the share of people within the labor force who are without work but are looking for it — is lower than it’s been in more than 50 years:

But wait! Americans just don’t want to work like they used to. As you can see in the following chart, the labor force participation rate — the share of all Americans in the labor force — was 62.6 percent in March 2023, considerably lower than the 67.3 percent peak it reached around Y2K:

There’s a paradox here, and it all goes back to how we measure different labor statistics and think about America’s economy. The first chart represents the sexy topline employment figure that presidents usually brag about. But it’s the second chart, representing the size of the labor force, that’s giving economists heartburn. And that’s because labor participation gets at the core of a growing concern for the American economy: It’s growing old. 

Like people in most developed countries, Americans are living longer and having fewer children. That has meant a shrinking pool of workers in recent decades — and a burgeoning cohort of Americans moving into retirement. According to one recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, the share of Americans age 65 or older is expected to grow faster over the next 30 years than the share of Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 — referred to as “prime working age.” A 2017 projection from the U.S. Census Bureau found that by 2060, nearly a quarter of all Americans will be of retirement age — up from 15 percent in 2016. The CBO expects the labor force participation rate to continue to dip over the coming decades, and most projections of the U.S. economy forecast a much slower growth rate in the coming decades than it has enjoyed for the past century.

“We’ve basically been in a plateau for the last 10 years, as the strengthening economy has been offset by this downward pull from aging,” said Harris Eppsteiner, a former research economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. 

In concert, those two forces suggest the coming decades will see fewer Americans working and more who need caregiving, creating a potentially crushing burden on the U.S. economy and welfare system. What’s unclear, though, is just how big of a deal that is for America’s economic future, as a lot hinges on what policymakers do in the coming years to beat back Father Time. For now, the good news is that America has a lot of time to solidify its approach to dealing with an aging population — and its existing welfare system is, perhaps surprisingly, resilient to the coming economic winds of change.

Now, we know from a fairly robust body of research that as a country’s population ages, there is generally a significant and negative impact on overall economic growth. A 2016 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that a 10 percent increase in the share of a population that’s 60 or older — more gentle than the projected increase in the U.S. over the next four decades — decreases growth in per capita gross domestic product by 5.5 percent. And a 2020 paper published in The Lancet found that a decline in the working-age population alone reduces GDP growth rates — and explains why China’s economy was forecasted to fall behind America’s by the end of the century.

We also know that an aging population makes it harder to measure economic recoveries — perhaps even obscuring real gains. For example, a 2017 paper from the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that population aging explained most of the decline in American labor-force participation since the Great Recession. The researchers found that if the U.S. economy had maintained the same age structure throughout the crisis, then an additional 1.7 million workers would be in the labor force. In other words, the labor force lost almost 2 million workers during the Great Recession thanks to aging alone.

“By the beginning of 2019, [labor-force participation] was still meaningfully lower than it was in the fourth quarter of 2007,” Eppsteiner, one of the paper’s co-authors, said. “So naively, you could say, ‘Well, the economy has a really long way to go [to get back to pre-recession levels],’ … but what we're trying to point out was, well, no, because we have this demographic transition happening. So you need to account for that.”

Beyond the measured effects on economic growth, population aging threatens to overwhelm the budgets of many wealthier, developed countries like the United States — and efforts to smooth the effects of demographic transitions on the welfare state have been met with backlash. It is quite possible that, as tens of millions more Americans are projected to need Social Security benefits in the coming decades, a similar upheaval will take place in the American political economy. Ronald Lee, a professor of demography and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, told me that he believes the biggest issue from America’s aging population isn’t declining GDP; rather, it’s how it might affect the distribution of the nation’s resources.¹⁴

“It becomes a problem because of our systems and arrangements for redistributing income to different ages in the population,” Lee said. “It's more about how we distribute the pie, rather than how big the pie is.”

The demographic transition could upset the existing order in a few different ways. As a consequence of population aging, more and more people will move out of working age into retirement, which means the welfare system will be burdened by having more people receiving Social Security benefits than those who pay into the system. For the system to maintain itself, then, younger Americans would have to pay more into the system, (i.e., through higher taxes), accept smaller benefits or stomach a later retirement age. That might be a tough political sell in a country where touching Social Security has been bandied about for generations but never come to pass — even for the most fiscally conservative political leaders.

But that doesn’t mean that the American economy, or even the welfare system, are doomed by an aging population. In fact, though overall economic growth is threatened by population aging, the opposite is true for per capita wages, consumption and productivity, which may actually rise in such a scenario. That’s because an aging population means more capital per available worker, assuming that savings rates stay the same. 

Some have even argued that aging presents an opportunity for growth and innovation in the U.S. economy — not just a challenge — and one that older Americans can have a say in building. Jim Johnson, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, told me that if viewed as an asset, America’s more than 70 million baby boomers could help build “the longevity economy,” or what the economy will have to look like to accommodate an aging population. That could have the added benefit, Johnson added, of helping the millions of workers who were forced to retire during the pandemic, who are disproportionately Black men with low savings.

“Everything has to change in both the built environment and the social environment to accommodate an aging population,” Johnson said. “We have [millions of] baby boomers, turning 65, at the rate of 10,000 per day, every day, seven days a week … a lot of them are working much longer past age 65, and they are major consumers in the marketplace. Given the labor market challenges that we're facing today, post-COVID, ‘encore careers’ are something that we're going to have to pursue in a major way.”

And there are a number of other ways policymakers can mitigate the effects of an aging population on the economy. One widely accepted solution is boosting immigration — particularly among a younger cohort. Higher rates of immigration help countries experiencing population aging because immigrants tend to be younger and therefore more able to work than the domestic population. And forecasts of the American economy tend to assume that by 2030, population growth from immigration will supersede that from natural increases (births minus deaths). Another potential solution, according to Eppsteiner, is promoting more “active labor market situations,” or policies that seek to boost employment among Americans of prime working age. According to a 2016 analysis by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, only two OECD countries spent less than the U.S. on programs to encourage labor market participation — like job training programs and employment subsidies — as a share of their GDP.

Moreover, Social Security, which has come under fire for its precarious future funding, might not be in all that much peril. According to Lee, what sets the U.S. apart from European countries is the share of income that its older residents draw from assets, rather than government transfers, in their old age. That arguably reflects poorly on the generosity of the American welfare system, but it also means that we’re potentially more insulated from disruptive demographic shifts.

“In the U.S., on average, about two-thirds of income and consumption [for the elderly] is coming from asset income, and only about a third for the elderly is coming from Social Security,” Lee said. “But if you look at other countries, particularly European countries, it's not uncommon to have close to 100 percent of old age consumption funded by public transfers.”

Perhaps the biggest lesson we can take from America’s ripening population is that there is no one settled conclusion of its ongoing demographic transition. Yes, the American public will continue aging, and the way Americans save, consume and live will likely look a whole lot different in 2043 than in 2023, but there’s no inevitable crisis involved — if we see to it.

“Demographics aren't destiny when it comes to this,” Eppsteiner said. “We have the ability to make policy choices to mitigate the challenges that the aging population poses. We shouldn’t assume that just because we had a baby boom, the baby boom is going to pass into retirement and that we're sort of stuck. Because there are things that we can do.”

NHL

The NHL Playoffs Are Here. Can Anyone Stop The Big, Bad Bruins?

We break down why each contender will — or won't — win Lord Stanley's Cup.

By Neil Paine and Terrence Doyle and Neil Paine and Terrence Doyle

Apr. 13, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The puck drops on the 2023 NHL playoffs on Monday, which means the most grueling postseason in all of professional sports will soon commence. In anticipation, let’s run down the list of top Stanley Cup contenders (every team with at least a 5 percent chance,¹ according to our NHL predictions model) and detail why they will — or won’t — hoist Lord Stanley’s mug in June.

Boston Bruins

Seeding: No. 1 in Atlantic division

Stanley Cup odds: 39 percent

Why they can win: To put it simply, the 2022-23 Bruins have had the greatest regular season in the history of the NHL, which has existed in one form or another since 1917. After 81 games, the Bruins are 64-12-5. That’s good for the most wins and the most points (133) in regular season history. 

How have the Bruins done it? For starters, they’ve scored the second-most goals in the league while conceding by far the fewest. Their goal differential is a gaudy 63 better than their closest challenger.² They also rank second in both offensive and defensive goals above replacement.³

Boston also has the best penalty kill in the league,⁴ and the best save percentage⁵ — which accounts for a higher proportion of a team’s success than any other factor. It helps that starting netminder Linus Ullmark posted the seventh-best single-season save percentage in NHL history⁶ — he’s a couple of months away from winning the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goalie — and backup Jeremy Swayman has the fourth-best save percentage in the league this season among goalies who have made at least 10 starts.

And while Boston’s power play has been just above average — it ranks 11th — the Bs are the NHL’s best 5-on-5 team by goal differential. (Being just above average on the man advantage is fine when you’re dominating at 5-on-5 because the majority of an average NHL game is played 5-on-5.)

Why they can’t win: Ummm … because the Hockey Gods are Montreal Canadiens fans? 

Honestly, this is going to sound very boring, but after the regular season the Bruins have had, potential injuries to key players — Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, David Pastrňák, Ullmark or Charlie McAvoy, for example — might be the only thing that can stop this team from going the distance. Aside from the beginning of the season when Marchand and McAvoy missed considerable time to injury, this team has been pretty darn healthy. But we saw what injuries can do to great teams during the regular season. (See: the first half of the 2022-23 season for the defending Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche.) 

So if the Bruins can stay healthy-ish, it’s their Stanley Cup to lose. Of course, a 39 percent chance to win also means a 61 percent chance to lose — and this being the chaos of playoff hockey, things might not be as straightforward for Boston in the postseason as they’ve been in the regular season. But then again, this team might just be dominant enough for that not to matter. 

Colorado Avalanche

Seeding: No. 1 in Central division

Stanley Cup odds: 16 percent

Why they can win: The Avs have done this whole Stanley Cup thing before, knocking off the dynastic Tampa Bay Lightning in the Final a year ago. While it’s not quite the same team it was then, Colorado still possesses a ton of top-end talent — Nathan MacKinnon and Mikko Rantanen both eclipsed 100 points, Cale Makar is still Cale Makar, etc. — to go with strong goaltending from newcomer Alexandar Georgiev in his first year as starter, a deadly power play (No. 5 in the league) and few glaring weaknesses. In spite of what was, at times, a challenging campaign, the Avs rank among the NHL’s top 13 teams in GAR on offense, defense and goaltending this season.

Most importantly, the Avalanche are healthier now than they were earlier in the season, when injuries threatened to wipe out their title defense before it could really get started. Of the nine Colorado skaters who’ve produced at least 2 GAR but also missed double-digit games this season,⁷ seven are either back in the lineup now or set to return soon. Not coincidentally, the Avalanche have the league’s second-most wins since the season’s midpoint and a higher Elo rating (1606) than they had entering last year’s playoffs (1601).

Why they can’t win: Health is still a concern, even if Colorado’s situation has improved from the dumpster fire it was around New Year’s. Although Makar’s lower-body problem sounds less worrisome than the “out indefinitely” tag would suggest, any disruption in availability for the league’s top defenseman by GAR over the past three seasons would be a major blow. And it remains unclear if the Avalanche will see their captain, Gabriel Landeskog, play a single game this season as he recovers from knee surgery; Landeskog was fourth on the team in playoff scoring with 22 points in 20 games last year. All of this points to maybe the biggest red flag for Colorado this postseason: its relative lack of depth. Whereas the 2021-22 Avs had nine players accumulate at least 10 GAR during the regular season, this year’s version has only five. Between key offseason losses and all the injuries, the Avalanche can’t throw as much sheer talent at opponents as they could a year ago.

Edmonton Oilers

Seeding: No. 2 in Pacific division

Stanley Cup odds: 10 percent

Why they can win: For starters: Connor McDavid. The two-time Hart Memorial Trophy winner⁸ is all but certain to become a three-time winner in June. McDavid led the NHL in goals, assists and points,⁹ and his 152 points are the most scored in a season since Mario Lemieux notched 161 in 1995-96. McDavid is just the sixth player to score 150 or more points in a single NHL season. He’s been downright ridiculous in 2022-23.

Having the best player in the league — and one of the best players ever — is a good starting point. But the Oilers aren’t merely the “Connor McDavid Show.” Leon Draisaitl ranked fourth in goals and assists (and second in points) and probably would have been the Hart front-runner if McDavid didn’t exist. Unsurprisingly, the Oilers also have an excellent power play — like, historically excellent. They’ve scored on 32.4 percent of their man advantages in 2022-23, the best mark in NHL history. Edmonton can win because Edmonton is an offensive juggernaut. 

Why they can’t win: The Oilers are about as bad on the defensive side of the puck as they are good on the offensive. Their penalty kill currently ranks 19th in the league — a heavy counterweight to that obscenely productive power play. The Oilers are also giving up the joint 13th-most shots per game and were below average in defensive GAR. Plus, Edmonton goalies are posting a league-average save percentage of .900 — not the kind of goaltending required for a deep Stanley Cup run. 

Carolina Hurricanes

Seeding: No. 1 in Metropolitan division

Stanley Cup odds: 6 percent

Why they can win: No team in the playoff field is more airtight defensively than the Canes, who own the league’s second-best penalty kill (spoiling 84.3 percent of opposing power plays) and allow its fewest shots per game (25.9, more than a full shot per game fewer than the No. 2 Seattle Kraken). We dare you to find a better top-to-bottom blueline corps than Carolina’s lineup of Brent Burns, Brady Skjei, Brett Pesce, Jaccob Slavin, Jalen Chatfield and Shayne Gostisbehere. You can’t — Carolina ranks No. 1 in total GAR from defensemen this season. And the Hurricanes are also a possession machine, dominating the Corsi rankings at 5-on-5 with the score close. Playoff opponents had better make the most of their scoring chances against Carolina, because they won’t get very many.

Why they can’t win: Despite everything the Hurricanes seem to have going for them, they don’t cut an especially imposing statistical figure overall — ranking tied for seventh in goal differential, seventh in Hockey-Reference.com’s Simple Rating System and fifth in Elo. Much of this is because Carolina’s offense is tied for 17th in goals per game with just the 19th-best power play in the league. Despite this being the highest-scoring NHL season in nearly 30 years, only one Hurricane (Martin Nečas) has topped 70 points, as Carolina’s attack dropped eight spots from its 2021-22 ranking. And things aren’t primed to improve anytime soon, with two of the team’s most talented offensive weapons, Andrei Svechnikov and Max Pacioretty, both out for the season.

Then there’s the netminding, another area where the Canes have been surprisingly pedestrian; the team ranks 12th in save percentage and 19th in goaltending GAR after sitting third and ninth, respectively, last season. The starting tandem of Antti Raanta and Frederik Andersen isn’t bad, but 27 goalies have more goals saved above average this season¹⁰ than either of Carolina’s playoff netminders.

New York Rangers

Seeding: No. 3 in Metropolitan division

Stanley Cup odds: 6 percent

Why they can win: The Rangers are one of the most well-rounded teams in the postseason field. New York ranks 10th in scoring and third in goal prevention; its defense is allowing the league’s seventh-fewest shots per game; its goalies rank seventh in save percentage; and its special teams are in the top half of the league on both the power play (No. 7) and penalty kill (No. 13). And few, if any, NHL teams have more star power: The Broadway Blueshirts are tied with Colorado and Edmonton for the most players in the league with at least 20 GAR (three) and trail only Boston for the most players with at least 10 GAR (eight). And that number doesn’t even include partial seasons with the club from Vladimir Tarasenko and Patrick Kane, both of whom were picked up in midseason trades to bolster an offense that had already made a leap from its 17th-place finish last year.

Why they can’t win: If a possession-focused style wins in the postseason, the Rangers are still working on that — they sit 18th in close-score Corsi at 5-on-5 for the season, a ranking that has actually gotten worse since the trade deadline.¹¹ And for stars who were supposed to help New York achieve “superteam” status, neither Tarasenko nor Kane has produced points at the same rate since taking up residency at Madison Square Garden. That’s not any huge indictment of this team, since even if their shiny new headliners aren’t quite what they used to be, the Rangers are still in much better shape on paper than last year — a season when New York went all the way to the Eastern Conference finals. But in the same conference with a juggernaut like the big, bad Bruins — or even a daunting first-round matchup looming against the up-and-coming New Jersey Devils — it might take a true superteam firing on all cylinders to ride the playoffs out intact.

Vegas Golden Knights

Seeding: No. 1 in Pacific division

Stanley Cup odds: 5 percent

Why they can win: Despite leading their division, the Golden Knights are the kind of solid-if-unspectacular team that flies under the radar going into the postseason. After missing the playoffs for the first time in franchise history last year, Vegas has rebounded to post roughly the same goals-per-game differential (+0.49) as it had during its magical expansion-year run to the Final in 2017-18 (+0.54). But while that team was more offensively focused, these Knights have embraced goal prevention in coach Bruce Cassidy’s first season at the helm, allowing the 11th-fewest goals per game. Despite numerous injuries between the pipes, Vegas’s netminders rank ninth in save percentage and seventh in goaltending GAR — and the team has no shortage of candidates to start in net for a playoff run, including the solid Logan Thompson (depending on his return from a lower-body injury) and a multi-time Cup-winning goalie in former L.A. Kings icon Jonathan Quick.

Why they can’t win: Aside from special teams and possession stats, where Vegas ranks a mediocre 18th on the power play, 20th on the penalty kill and 21st in Corsi, the Golden Knights aren’t bad at much. But they’re also not particularly great in any area, either, with the exception of goaltending — which, as we noted, is depleted by injuries at the moment. They have a middle-of-the-road offense (14th in scoring), middle-of-the-road defense (14th-most shots allowed per game) and virtually no standout individual performers despite rolling out such recognizable names as Jack Eichel, Alex Pietrangelo, Shea Theodore and Phil Kessel. Zero Knights accumulated even 15 GAR this season, making Vegas the only playoff team to feature such a dearth of productive stars. Perhaps that speaks to the machine-like quality of a roster where no single cog is more important than another, but no team since the 1966-67 Maple Leafs has won the Cup after a regular season where its best player had fewer than 15 GAR per 82 team games. 

Toronto Maple Leafs

Seeding: No. 2 in Atlantic division

Stanley Cup odds: 5 percent

Why they can win: Because it’s been too damned long! 

OK, that’s not a good reason, but it is worth dwelling for a moment on just how much playoff pain Maple Leafs fans have endured. They are the only Original Six team that hasn’t won the Stanley Cup at least once in the NHL’s post-expansion era. Heck, they haven’t even won a measly playoff series since before the lockout, back when Mats Sundin was still the captain and current superstar Auston Matthews was just a six-year-old Phoenix Coyotes fan. All told during that time, they’ve made seven trips to the playoffs and seven first-round exits. 

This year, though, could be different (yeah, we know Toronto fans have heard that before). The Leafs have a top-three power play — thanks in large part to current captain John Tavares, whose 18 goals on the man advantage are tied for sixth with Pastrňák — and their 5-on-5 scoring chance percentage is higher than all but four teams.

The Leafs aren’t just a difficult proposition for opposition defenses — they’re also stingy in their own end. They rank fifth in defensive GAR and give up the sixth-fewest shots per game. Couple that with better-than-league-average goaltending, and the Leafs can make a pretty reasonable case for themselves as a playoff contender. They should at least be able to get past the first round this year. 

Why they can’t win: Because history is a cruel arbiter? Because the ghost of Harold Ballard hasn’t yet made amends for all the things he needs to make amends for?¹² The real answer, though, is probably that the Leafs remain very good but not truly great (No. 5 in 5-on-5 scoring chance percentage, No. 6 in goal differential and SRS) and they’re going to have to go through some combination of the Lightning, Hurricanes, and/or Bruins to escape the East. Tampa is dynastic; the Hurricanes don’t give up many scoring chances, let alone many goals; and the Bruins are, well, the greatest regular season team in league history. 

With its roster of young, world-class talent, Toronto could reasonably expect to be in the middle of its own dynasty at the moment. Instead, the Leafs are fighting history and their own demons as much as they are other hockey teams. Is this the year they finally take the narrative back into their own sweaty hockey mitts? Or are the Leafs and their long-suffering fans destined to exist in an indefinite state of existential dread? 

The rest of the field

Stanley Cup odds: 13 percent

According to the betting markets, the New Jersey Devils (7 percent implied Cup probability¹³ versus 2 percent in our model) are our most undervalued contender, and it’s hard to argue with that. New Jersey is young and hasn’t been to the playoffs since 2018, but we’d be discounting the Devils’ two-way talent at our own risk. Another team to keep an eye on is the Dallas Stars; along with the Bruins and Devils, Dallas is the only team to be at least 0.3 goals per game better than average on both offense and defense this season. And we can’t forget about the Tampa Bay Lightning, who have visited each of the previous three Stanley Cup finals. Tampa Bay’s goals-per-game differential is down substantially from its usual form, but no team with Andrei Vasilevskiy, Brayden Point, Nikita Kucherov, Steven Stamkos and Victor Hedman can be taken lightly in the postseason.

Check out our latest NHL predictions.

MLB

The Mets Assembled The Most Expensive Baseball Team Ever. Is That Enough To Make Them MLB's Best Team?

By Alex Kirshner

Apr. 12, 2023, at 6:00 AM

As the 2022 season ended, the New York Mets and owner Steve Cohen were wrapping up a major-league payroll record by shelling out about $430 million in salaries plus luxury tax penalties. Then Cohen doubled down, going on a further spending spree in the run-up to 2023. In free agency, the Mets added future Hall of Fame pitcher Justin Verlander (two years, $86.7 million), Japanese pitching star Kodai Senga (five years, $75 million) and veteran starter ​​José Quintana (two years, $26 million). Those weren’t even the team’s biggest outlays of the winter: Center fielder Brandon Nimmo re-signed for $162 million over eight years, and closer Edwin Díaz did the same for $102 million over five.¹

All of this added up to $501.3 million doled out by Cohen in hot-stove contracts — a number that could, in theory, have been as much as $816 million if shortstop Carlos Correa had finalized a 12-year, $315 million deal that fell apart. As it is, the Mets are poised to shell out something on the order of $380 million in salary and tax commitments this season, the highest figure in MLB by more than $80 million. Having already won 101 games just last year, the Mets have turned into baseball’s impossible-to-ignore elephant in the room. Mets fans are captivated as their owner tries to win. Opposing fans aren’t jazzed about a financial behemoth trying to outspend the entire league, or they wish their team would be the one doing it. And Cohen’s fellow owners are even less jazzed about expanding player salaries, creating an “economic reform committee” that might as well be called the “stop Steve Cohen committee.”

Against that backdrop, the Most Expensive Team That Money Can Buy has to actually get down to the business of playing ball games. And after an offseason that was built to generate excitement, the first few weeks of New York’s regular season have been boring at best and frustrating at worst. Through 11 games, the Mets are 6-5, enough to nudge their FiveThirtyEight season forecast down from a 92-70 record projection and 75 percent chance to make the playoffs in preseason to 91-71 and 74 percent, respectively.² The Mets’ computer outlook is dimmer in part because FiveThirtyEight’s model bakes in injuries to starting pitchers (though not to relievers or position players), and the Mets are heavy on injured starters. Verlander went on the 15-day injured list on March 30 and has yet to make his Mets debut as he rehabilitates a strained shoulder. He expects to be back before April is over, but Quintana, who had bone graft surgery on his rib, will not pitch for the Mets until at least July. The Mets’ planned starting rotation has five pitchers aged 30 or older, and so far, 40 percent of the staff hasn’t stayed healthy. 

What remains has been a mixed bag: Max Scherzer has had an uncharacteristically shaky start and was striking batters out at a rate of just 7.71 per nine innings (with a 4.41 ERA) in his first three trips to the hill, but he pitched five shutout innings on Monday. Carlos Carrasco has walked 7.27 hitters per nine and shown a general inability to get anyone out.  But fortunately, Senga has already been both good and fun to watch. Through two starts, he has struck out better than 11 hitters per nine innings while flashing a legitimate four-pitch arsenal — highlighted by a very spinny 97-mile-per-hour fastball and, maybe more importantly, his terrifyingly named “ghost fork”.  

The other compelling Mets starter through the first 11 games has been Tylor Megill, who’s gotten sporadic starts over the past two seasons. Megill’s 1.64 ERA in two outings won’t hold up, but a 3.85 fielding-independent pitching mark (to follow up on last year’s 3.77) is encouraging. In the extremely early going, Megill’s slider has been the fourth-most valuable pitch in the major leagues. Hitters have an .056 batting average in 18 plate appearances that have finished with that pitch. 

With Senga and Megill looking promising and their injured rotation mates returning eventually, the Mets’ most challenging pitcher injury may not be to a starter. In his capacity as New York’s closer, Díaz was comfortably the best reliever in baseball last year. His 3.0 FanGraphs wins above replacement were 0.6 more than anyone else from any team’s bullpen. His FIP of 0.90 (to go with a 1.31 ERA that arguably rendered him unlucky) was the fifth-best for any reliever this century and sat within 0.04 of every season ahead of his, save for Craig Kimbrel’s 2012 (0.78) with Atlanta. 

Díaz also became a cultural sensation as much as he was an unhittable closer. His entrance to a Timmy Trumpets tune is now in “MLB The Show.” But it will not be in real Mets games this year, because Díaz tore his right patellar tendon in a horribly unlucky celebration after closing a game for Puerto Rico in the World Baseball Classic. Whether Díaz ultimately justifies his $102 million deal on pure wins-per-dollar terms is almost immaterial, given Cohen’s practically bottomless pockets. A more relevant fact is that the Mets had a reliever who’d been worth a combined five wins on his own the previous two years … and for all of 2023, they will not. 

Non-Díaz Mets relievers were worth a mere 1.4 fWAR in 2022. That would’ve been 27th in the league on its own, but merely having Díaz in the fold brought the Mets to 11th. The good news is that the Mets were proactive about beefing up their bullpen supporting cast even before their best pitcher got hurt. The (very, very) early returns have been good on recent signee David Robertson, who hadn’t allowed a run in five appearances through Monday. Fellow relievers Stephen Nogosek and John Curtiss each had sub-1.7 ERAs in their first handful of innings of the year. Adam Ottavino had seven strikeouts, no walks and one run allowed in his first five appearances covering four innings. The bullpen has been worth 0 fWAR through 11 games, because a few relievers have gotten tagged. But someone could squint and see a path to the Mets, holding up OK in the pen, even without Díaz. 

Save for the Correa non-signing, Mets’ acquisitions, re-signings, and general headline-making did not revolve around the team’s lineup. Headed into the season, the offense was in more of a set-and-forget mode, and with good reason: The Mets had the majors’ No. 3 offense last year by wRC+ (116, which translates to 16 percent more runs created per trip to the plate than league average) and got the fourth-most fWAR out of their position players (31.3). Every player in the team’s go-to lineup was in the organization by last July, and most long before that. For the bench and a platooning role, the Mets signed outfielder Tommy Pham, who has played mostly against lefties so far, and outfielder Tim Locastro, who has never hit a lot but brings world-class wheels that manager Buck Showalter could use in a range of ways (particularly with new rules encouraging speed). Locastro’s average baserunning sprint speed last year, per Statcast, was No. 6 in MLB at 30.2 feet per second. 

The Mets’ bats have yet to stir much. The teamwide wRC+ through Monday was 92, equating to 8 percent worse than the league average. But most of the Mets’ big mashers have been somewhere between excellent and fine, led by Pete Alonso and his five homers in the first 11 games. The only regulars who really haven’t hit are third baseman Eduardo Escobar, catcher Tomás Nido and infielder Luis Guillorme. Escobar has a wRC+ of -2 (that’s “negative-two,” not “two” or “two under”), but major projection systems peg him as about a league-average hitter for the rest of the season. If he is one, the Mets will be able to give fewer at-bats to Guillorme. And Nido may have just been keeping a seat warm for the sport’s No. 1 prospect, Francisco Álvarez, who came up from the minors to make his season debut on Sunday. (Nido’s negative-19 wRC+ in his first 20 plate appearances should stabilize, too.) 

All of which is to say: The Mets are not likely to remain a picture of mediocrity, although early injuries to their old and expensive pitching staff could certainly turn into a longer-term problem. At the moment, the Amazins are subject to the same noise that all of MLB’s less-expensive teams face, too. In some areas, April volatility has even been good to the Mets. They were third in the league in Defensive Runs Saved through Monday’s games, despite a fielding configuration that changed very little after finishing a few runs below average in 2022. Maybe the Mets have figured some things out in their efforts to turn batted balls into outs. 

Either way, all forms of regression to the mean should come soon enough. That will mostly be a good thing for the Mets — and the guy who spent all that cheddar trying to make them great. 

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

NBA

No Play-In Team Has Won An NBA Playoff Series. Will That Change This Season?

By Jared Dubin

Apr. 11, 2023, at 6:00 AM

As the NBA’s annual play-in tournament plays out over the next few days, we’re sure to hear a lot of talk about which of the teams involved is the greatest threat to “make some noise” in the playoffs. The fact that three of those teams have made the NBA Finals in recent years (and one of them is LeBron James’s team) surely has a lot to do with that, but so does the perception that this year’s title race is more wide-open than in years past — a perception that has been present since before the season even began. Throw in the fact that the play-in teams are the only ones playing actual games until the weekend, and you’ve got the perfect environment for the pundits to fire off some hot takes about which of them poses the greatest danger to the top seeds. 

A word of caution, though: In the three years of the play-in’s existence — either as a one-game format in 2020 or a multi-game bracket starting in 2021 — not a single team that made it out has won a first-round playoff series. Those teams are 0-9 overall, and none of the nine series in which they’ve been involved has even made it to a seventh game.

You might think that poor track record is indicative of the recent play-in victors being particularly weak seventh- or eighth-seeded teams, but that’s not the case. According to Basketball-Reference’s Simple Rating System, the nine teams that have escaped the play-in to become a No. 7 or 8 seed have been of almost the exact same quality as the average No. 7 or 8 seed in the preceding 17 seasons (2003 through 2019), a span that encompasses the entirety of the seven-game first-round series era. During that span, they have also faced off against opponents (seeds No. 1 or 2) of roughly similar quality, and they have had remarkably similar results to their predecessors.

A three-year sample is obviously much smaller (and thus inherently less meaningful) than a 17-year sample, but the fact that the results are so similar is quite striking. Really, the main differences to date are the fact that the pre-play-in era teams got swept more often (20 of the 64 series losers were dispatched of within four games, while just one of the nine play-in winners has been swept) but also took series the distance more often (10 of 64 series losers made it to a Game 7 before being eliminated). And of course, four of them actually won the series outright.

What do we know about those four teams who won? We’re glad you asked.

These teams should all be quite familiar to basketball fans. The 2007 Golden State Warriors squad that defeated Dirk Nowitzki (who was weeks away from being crowned the league’s MVP) and the Dallas Mavericks are known as the “We Believe” Warriors, perhaps the most famous underdogs in recent league history. The 2012 Philadelphia 76ers team that topped the Chicago Bulls had the good fortune of seeing their opponent’s best player (Derrick Rose) tear his ACL near the end of Game 1 and miss the remainder of the series. The 2010 San Antonio Spurs were a better team than the Mavericks by almost every conceivable measure except win-loss record; they just happened to underperform their expected record by five games during the regular season (tied for the second-largest margin in the league), while the Mavericks simultaneously overperformed by a league-high six games. The following season, the Spurs were knocked out in the first round by a physically overpowering Memphis Grizzlies team, and that loss inspired them to dramatically alter their style of play, which would result in yet another Gregg Popovich-Tim Duncan championship a few years later.

What can the performances of these teams tell us about the likelihood of any of this year’s play-in teams pulling off a similar upset? Well, the first thing you might notice is that three of the four upsetters were unusually strong 7- or 8-seeds. The 2010 Spurs, 2011 Grizzlies and 2012 76ers all had an SRS of plus-2.5 or better. That puts them each among the 15 best 7- or 8-seeds since 2003, with the Spurs unsurprisingly ranking as the very best of the bunch.

None of this year’s play-in teams are particularly close to achieving that level of performance. The New Orleans Pelicans came the closest with an SRS of plus-1.63, but even that ranks outside the top 25 teams since 2002-03. And among the eight candidates in this year’s crop, only the Toronto Raptors (plus-1.59) and Chicago Bulls (plus-1.37) joined the Pelicans in potentially being among the top third of 7- and 8-seed teams since ’03.¹³

But while the potential seventh and eighth seeds might be relatively weak this season, the same is true for most of this year’s top-seeded teams as well. Yes, the Boston Celtics are better than average among recent 1- and 2-seeds, with a plus-6.38 SRS. But the Denver Nuggets, Memphis Grizzlies and Milwaukee Bucks all check in among the 15 “worst” 1- and 2-seeds since 2003, with the Nuggets ranking particularly close to the bottom.

Of course, it’s worth noting that of the four No. 1 or 2 seeds that have lost in the first round since 2003, only one of them (the 2010 Mavs) appears on the above list. The others were much stronger squads that just happened to get upset anyway.  

Taken together, this all means we should consider it highly unlikely that any of the individual teams participating in the play-in tournament pulls off a first-round upset and truly “makes noise” in the playoffs. The 80 teams seeded at Nos. 7 or 8 over the past 20 years are just 4-76 in the first round, after all, and this year’s crop of play-in participants does not appear to be notably stronger than the teams that typically occupy those seeds. But still, the top seeds being a bit weaker than usual offers some glimmer of hope for underdogs looking to pull an upset that shocks us all.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

NBA

Our New Live In-Game Win Probabilities Are Here For The NBA Playoffs

But first, check out how it worked for the regular season’s most exciting contests.

By Ryan Best and Jay Boice and Ryan Best and Jay Boice

Apr. 11, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The NBA playoffs are almost here, with the play-in tournament tipping off later tonight. But while the regular season was careening toward a dramatic finish, we were hard at work creating a live in-game win probability model — and we’re pretty damn excited to share it. We officially added this model to our forecast page this morning, and you can read more about the ins and outs of how it works here.¹

With this shiny new feature, we can see how likely each team is to win every game in real time — and how their odds to bring home the Larry O’Brien Trophy are impacted by each play as well. We’ve even backfilled in-game win probabilities for all 1,230 games played in the 2022-23 regular season. So to give you a sense of what to expect from the interactive during the playoffs, let’s take a look back at some of the most exciting and memorable games this regular season to see what our new win probability model thought about each contest.

Donovan Mitchell’s explosive performance in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ improbable overtime win over the Chicago Bulls on Jan. 2 was one for the books. Not only were his 71 points the eighth-highest game total in league history and most in Cavaliers team history, they also propelled an inspired comeback. The Bulls took the reins as in-game favorites early on, first earning the edge up 32-26 with 31.9 seconds left in the first quarter, with an Alex Caruso steal² pushing their win probability up to 54 percent. The Bulls would hold onto their win probability advantage for the next solid three quarters. But the Cavs clawed back to tie the score, and Bulls guard Zach LaVine missed a 28-foot stepback 3-pointer with 50.4 seconds left in the fourth quarter, giving the Cavs a 55-45 percent edge in win probability.

The Bulls quickly wrestled back the advantage, though, earning a 130-127 lead and 91 percent win probability with 7.4 seconds left in regulation. But sending Mitchell to the line a few seconds later came back to bite the Bulls. After making his first free throw attempt with 4.4 seconds left in the game, Mitchell intentionally missed his second attempt, corralled his own offensive rebound and made his quick-release putback attempt. This game-tying flurry with the clock stopped improved the Cavs’ win probability by a whopping 38 percentage points. After Bulls guard DeMar DeRozan airballed a buzzer-beating 3-pointer, the game went into overtime — where the Cavs scored the first 10 points and cruised to an 11-point win, capping off one of the more exciting and drama-filled comebacks in the league this season.

Luka Dončić’s 60-point triple-double and last-second, game-tying bucket that fueled the Dallas Mavericks’ wild comeback against the New York Knicks on Dec. 27 might be one of the few bright spots for Mavs fans in what was an otherwise incredibly disappointing regular season. When Dončić stepped to the line to shoot two free throws with 4.2 seconds left at the American Airlines Center, the Mavericks were down by three points with only a 7 percent chance to win the game according to our new model. But Luka hit his first free throw,³ intentionally missed the second,⁴ corralled the loose ball⁵ and hit a game-tying bucket⁶ in a dramatic sequence that ended up forcing overtime.⁷ Finishing the season outside the play-in tournament was a disaster for a franchise with title aspirations, but Mavs fans can at least look back fondly on this game and their superstar’s performance.

The marathon double-overtime game between the Sacramento Kings and Los Angeles Clippers on Feb. 24 had pretty much everything you could want in an NBA game⁸ — two overtimes, multiple dramatic moments,⁹ a close finish and the second-highest point total in NBA history. The Kings may have not outplayed the Clippers throughout their game at Crypto.com Arena, but they certainly outlasted them.¹⁰ They fought for four full quarters and almost two full overtimes as underdogs before our win probability model thought they had a better than 50 percent chance to win, when they were up 176-175 with 29.8 seconds left in double overtime and Kawhi Leonard missed a 17-foot stepback jumper. This impressive win showcases the kind of stick-to-itiveness this young, exciting Kings team needed to finally end a 16-year playoff drought, the longest in NBA history.

With 10.9 seconds left in the third quarter of the Los Angeles Lakers’ Feb. 7 clash with the Oklahoma City Thunder at Crypto.com Arena, LeBron James hit a 14-foot fadeaway jumper — a shot he’s worked so hard to add to his scoring arsenal throughout his career — to break Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time NBA scoring record. These 2 points were a landmark in the career of one of game’s all-time greats, but ultimately came in a futile effort for the Lakers. After James’s historic shot, the Lakers were down 104-99 with only a 33 percent chance to win according to our model. They briefly retook the edge in the first few minutes of the fourth quarter, but ultimately let the game slip away. It was a discouraging loss for a superstar-laden team that came into the year with a title-or-bust mentality, but now finds itself needing to survive the play-in tournament to avoid missing the playoffs for a second straight season.

The Chicago Bulls’ double-overtime road win against the Philadelphia 76ers on March 20 was a thrilling, back-and-forth contest. The Sixers came into the game on an eight-game winning streak and were pretty hefty favorites according to our model, which gave them an 80 percent chance to win. But Joel Embiid, James Harden and company ran into a frisky Bulls team fighting for one of the last play-in spots in the East. The two teams went back and forth all game, with neither team leading by more than eight points throughout the entire game.

Our model’s favorite flipped back and forth a whopping 31 times during the second half and both overtimes. Ultimately, Zach LaVine’s offensive rebound after a Patrick Beverly missed 3-pointer with 57.8 seconds left in double OT turned the tide in Chicago’s favor for good. The Bulls held a 55 percent win probability after the rebound, and kept the edge until they finished off the Sixers by four points. It was a crucial win that helped them stay afloat in the playoff hunt in the Eastern Conference at the time.¹¹

Those were just a handful of the games from a wildly entertaining NBA season. Lucky for us, our new win probability model does the same thing for each and every contest, analyzing how each play influenced each team’s odds to win. It will also be updating live over on our NBA forecast page during upcoming play-in and playoff games, allowing you to see how each turnover, stepback three and buzzer-beater affects your favorite team’s¹² chances to be crowned world champions. We hope you’ll follow along with us!

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

NBA

It's Rough Out There In Dallas. But It's Not Kyrie Irving's Fault.

By Louis Zatzman

Apr. 10, 2023, at 10:59 AM

Kyrie Irving’s tenure with the Dallas Mavericks could not have had a brighter beginning. Following a Feb. 6 trade, Irving faced the Los Angeles Clippers without Dallas’s superstar leader Luka Dončić alongside him, and Uncle Drew scored 24 points in the win over a championship contender.

So who could have predicted that such a promising start might have been the peak of the Irving-in-Dallas saga? On Friday, Dallas was officially eliminated from playoff contention after an absurd defeat to the Chicago Bulls, in which the Mavs rested Irving and pulled Dončić and two other starters after just one quarter. (The NBA is now investigating Dallas over whether it tanked to improve its NBA draft odds.) It’s a shocking state of affairs for a team that sat at a 98 percent chance to make the playoffs — and was tied for the league’s second-best title odds — less than a week after trading for Irving, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast.

Dallas struggled to a 9-18 record after Irving first took the floor as a Maverick. It had the 10th-best offensive rating but the fourth-worst defensive rating, continuing a trend that has plagued Irving-led teams. That Irving missed seven games and Dončić eight didn’t help, but the Mavericks were only 5-11 in games in which both appeared. 

Last year, the Mavericks reached the Western Conference finals by building a well-oiled machine around Dončić. But while the driver in Dončić remained extraordinary in the playoffs against the Golden State Warriors, the car around him fell apart. (Dončić-run pick and rolls scored more efficiently in the series than they had in the regular season, for instance, but Jalen Brunson- and Spencer Dinwiddie-run pick and rolls fell off a cliff. Now, neither remains a Maverick.) Arguably, a lack of versatility limited Dallas against the eventual champions. 

The Irving trade seemed intended to address that problem. And despite Dallas’s losing record since making the deal, the team was more versatile on offense. It’s important to note that, in this sense at least, Dallas’s gamble paid off magnificently. Dallas needed diversity, and Irving is extraordinary in a variety of play types.

Furthermore, Irving gave Dallas a threat without the ball in his hands — a crucial addition alongside Dončić, who finished fifth in the league in touches per game and received more double-teams per game than any other player. Off-ball play can win championships for a shooter and scorer like Irving. 

Irving led the Mavericks in off-ball cuts since Feb. 8 and was second in handoffs received, per Second Spectrum. Both are ways to get him the ball if it’s starting in Dončić’s hands. When preceded by a wide pindown screen, receiving a handoff is called “Chicago” or “Zoom” action, and it is one of Irving’s specialties. He used such plays to create elite offense with Dončić on the bench:

Or, he initiated plays via Chicago action as a means of creating weak-side isolations for Dončić against a moving defense. Dončić led the league in isolation frequency,¹ so any softening of the defense by Irving beforehand was akin to sharpening the chisel for Michelangelo.

The changes made to integrate Irving revamped the structure of Dallas’s offense. According to Second Spectrum tracking data, the Mavs were 26th in the league in frequency of off-ball screens before Irving’s first game as a Mav and were 18th after. Their frequency of handoffs jumped from 25th to 10th. The team’s pace quickened. And its offense improved, going from a rating of 115.2 before Irving suited up to 117.2 after. 

Theoretically, this added complexity and dynamism would have benefited the Mavericks even more in the playoffs, making them more difficult to limit because of their multi-dimensionality. But the cost of adding those extra abilities for a hypothetical playoff run was apparently an increased chance of missing the playoffs altogether. The Mavericks put the postseason cart before the regular-season horse; solving offensive problems introduced a plethora of defensive ones.

Dončić and Irving received much of the criticism for their team’s sieve-like defense, but they don’t seem to be at fault. Excluding garbage time, the Brooklyn Nets were better on defense with Irving on the floor than off, and so too were the Mavericks this season. Opposing possessions involving pick and rolls and isolations defended by Irving or Dončić were less efficient than when other Mavs defenders faced those play types on average. Furthermore, the two stars were Dallas’s two best defenders against opposing shots, holding shooters to the lowest effective field goal percentages, according to Second Spectrum.² (That could also be indicative of a problem, as most teams want their big men to be their best shot defenders — not their lead ball handlers.) Neither star was intended to be a defensive savior, yet somehow they’ve been among the team’s most effective defenders. 

In many ways, Dallas’s defense has been trying to draw blood from a stone, hoping for passable results without size in the middle or a host of defensive-minded supporting players around its stars. Dorian Finney-Smith had been Dallas’s wing stopper in the playoffs, recording team-high possessions guarding Donovan Mitchell and Devin Booker in the 2021-22 playoffs. After shipping him to Brooklyn in the Irving deal, the Mavericks simply haven’t had answers to questions posed by opposing offenses. Furthermore, Dallas was the fourth-worst team at defending the rim after Irving’s first game in The Big D, while Dallas’s trio of centers — Dwight Powell, Maxi Kleber and Christian Wood — combined to allow opponents to shoot more than 6 percentage points better than expected on shots at the rim or in the paint since Irving took the floor. 

There’s no defensive solution coming. Last season, the Mavericks were the eighth-ranked defense in the regular season, yet they allowed an offensive rating of 123.9 to Golden State in the Western Conference finals. This year’s Mavericks, by contrast, were the 23rd-ranked defense. After the Irving trade, Dallas narrowed its possible outcomes; with this personnel, a flamethrowing offense was the only path to victory. Even though the Irving trade diversified the means by which the Mavericks could score, they still couldn’t score quite enough to win games. 

As a result, Dallas is left in a strange limbo. In seeking offensive improvement, the Mavs also scorched and charred their defense. Irving’s time so far in Dallas has proved the importance of versatility. But unfortunately for Dallas, that applies to both ends of the court. 

Irving is a free agent after this season, and there’s little reason to expect him to remain in Dallas. He hasn’t been there long enough to establish roots, and it’s not like Irving will make meaningful playoff memories that bond him to the city. (Irving refused to discuss his free agency and declined exit interviews with the media.) So the Mavericks may be left continuing their long-running search for a co-star to pair with Dončić. Since acquiring Dončić in a draft-night trade in 2018, Dallas has had only two players average at least 20 points per game alongside him: Kristaps Porziņģis and now Irving. Irving may well have been an ideal fit alongside Dončić, but the team didn’t have the defensive infrastructure to support the pair.

Over the same time period, Dallas’s defense has spent only one season better than league average. This season represented the lowest winning percentage Dallas has managed since Dončić’s rookie season and its worst defensive rating relative to league average. If Irving departs in free agency, it will also devastate the Mavericks’ flexibility to improve around the incumbent leader. The team has tried to weave a roster that fits its superstar, but it just doesn’t have enough thread right now. At this rate, Dallas might learn the hard way the moral of Phoebe Gilman’s classic: You can’t make something from nothing.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

Golf

Will One Of Golf's Big 3 Win The Masters?

By Alex Kirshner

Apr. 7, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Before the Masters Tournament comes around every year in early April,¹ it’s common for one golfer to sit head and shoulders above the rest. In most current fans’ minds, that player was Tiger Woods — who had two separate reigns of at least 250 weeks at No. 1 in the Official World Golf Rankings between 1999 and 2010 — but before him there were singular stretches of dominance by Greg Norman and Nick Faldo, and since 2010 we’ve also seen long runs by Rory McIlroy and, later, Dustin Johnson.

The top of the pecking order as the 2023 tournament gets underway, however, feels different. Instead of a lone standout, there are three of them: Scottie Scheffler, McIlroy and Jon Rahm are the world’s three best players by nearly any measure. They are Nos. 1-3 in the world rankings, respectively, and they form the top three in Data Golf’s strokes-gained metric over either the past 12 or six months, in varying orders. In the most important golf success metric — tournament wins against strong fields — the current Big Three are also standouts. Scheffler and Rahm each have six wins over the past two seasons, and McIlroy has five. Those include Scheffler’s 2022 Masters win, McIlroy’s Tour Championship triumph to take the FedEx Cup from Scheffler, and Rahm and Scheffler winning four of the first six “elevated events” on the new PGA Tour schedule. 

This year’s Masters isn’t the very first time that a group of players, rather than just one, has been the clear class of the sport as the Masters arrives. But it’s the first time in a long time that such a group has been this entrenched — not just as the best players of the moment, but as the best players for, well, who knows? Because another thing about the Scheffler-Rahm-McIlroy triumvirate is that it could reign for quite a while. 

The fun of these three players lies in their stylistic differences. Scheffler has the relaxed on-course demeanor of an after-work beer-league player — and a pretty awkward-looking swing to match, which nonetheless yields him superb control of the ball. Rahm is much different: a hothead whose swing conveys violence but, like Scheffler’s, has a knack for getting the ball to the perfect place. And McIlroy is the expressive, vulnerable former prodigy who makes the sport look like an art form as he chases that long-elusive Green Jacket and the career grand slam it would signify. (He’s been trying for nine years.) In a way, picking between the three is as much a personality test as an exercise in fandom.

Parsing the statistical differences between Scheffler, Rahm and McIlroy is harder, because — spoiler alert — they’re all good at almost everything. But each boasts standout traits that have made him an on-course assassin. 

Scheffler’s success is about ball-striking, ball-striking and more ball-striking. Scheffler destroys the ball off the tee, for starters. His 1.00 strokes gained per round off the tee in the past 12 months trail only McIlroy’s 1.11. And when he gets up to his tee shot, he tends to deliver again. Scheffler has gained 1.16 strokes per round on the field with his approach play, just a tick behind Collin Morikawa’s 1.18 to lead the PGA Tour, according to Data Golf. 

Scheffler is also quite good around the greens. His 0.34 strokes gained around the green per round don’t top the tour, but chipping and pitching have been essential to some of his biggest wins. A glorious uphill pitch shot on the third hole at Augusta on Sunday last year helped Scheffler put away a lurking Cameron Smith, who at that point was only a shot back of Scheffler’s lead: 

And a Sunday chip-in on the eighth hole at TPC Sawgrass helped Scheffler put away The Players Championship in March: 

The only thing Scheffler isn’t great at is putting, where he’s almost exactly average. (He’s gained 0.02 strokes per round on the greens over the past year.) No player in the world gains as many strokes tee to green as Scheffler does, so his lack of putting brilliance has barely slowed him down. Few sequences in golf history have been as illustrative of a player’s whole thing as Scheffler four-putting on the 72nd hole of last year’s Masters … and still winning the tournament by three shots. Some guys are just different. 

Rahm, for his part, is an excellent putter. He’s fourth in the world in strokes gained putting in the past year at 0.81 per round, easily the best of any of the world’s most elite players. (Smith, who left the PGA Tour for LIV Golf after last season, is next among that group at 0.73 strokes gained putting per round.) When Rahm’s putter heats up, he’s either winning or getting very close to winning. In his past 25 starts, Rahm has won two of the three tournaments in which he’s averaged 1.68 strokes gained putting or better and three of six when he’s averaged 1.5. He has a cartoonish putting highlight reel, and it was a pair of long putts that pushed Rahm over the top to win his first and still only major at the 2021 U.S. Open.

It’s not all putting, of course. Rahm is eighth over the past year in strokes gained tee to green (1.57 per round). He’s having the best iron season of his career, gaining 0.93 strokes on approach. But the flatstick is Rahm’s differentiator against other mega-elite ball-strikers. He also has an unquantifiable and possibly unmatched ability to get away with bad shots, such as the time he skipped a shot over a water hazard to make par in 2022 and the time a few weeks ago when he airmailed an approach shot off a grandstand before it rolled to 3 feet, 8 inches from the hole. Rahm made eagle and went on to win by two shots:

McIlroy is in the worst form of the three stars at the moment, a funny statement given how close he is to having four wins on the season already. He hasn’t actually won since the Dubai Desert Classic at the end of January, but he tied for second at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and lost in a semifinal playoff at the World Golf Championship Match Play event at the end of March. McIlroy is similar to the player he’s always been, which is to say he’s good at everything and rarely far from contention. (A notable exception was when a nightmarish short-game week caused him to miss the cut at the Players in March.) 

The most impressive thing about McIlroy may be the age-defying shape of his play. At 33, he leads the PGA Tour in driving distance by 6 yards. His average drive is 25 yards longer than the tour average, only the second time he’s put that much distance between himself and his typical competitor off the tee. He’s paired his pulverization of the ball with his second-best approach season ever (0.94 strokes gained per round, behind only a 2012 season when he averaged 1.22). Somehow, McIlroy got older but also got better at playing a young man’s game. It’s how he competes with Rahm, 28, and Scheffler, 26.    

The three have formed their own statistical tier, though who looks strongest among them depends on how far one looks back. In the past six months, Rahm’s 3.02 strokes gained per round lead Scheffler’s 2.78 and McIlroy’s 2.63. The order flips over a 12-month window. But in either case, nobody else in the world is within 0.2 strokes per round of the tier containing Scheffler, McIlroy and Rahm. 

Given that Rahm and Scheffler are still in their 20s and McIlroy is playing like he’s in his 20s, it’s possible that these three players monopolize the top of the world ranking for some time. And in fact, they’ve actually already done that. One or the other has been No. 1 in the world since Rahm supplanted Johnson for the top spot on July 18, 2021. And one of the Scheffler/Rahm/McIlroy trio has been No. 1 for nearly 90 percent of all weeks over the past two years:

Three stars passing around the No. 1 spot for 89 percent of weeks over two years is not a terribly large share in the annals of world ranking history, though it starts to feel longer if one excludes stretches where Tiger held the No. 1 spot 100 percent of the time for five or more years on end. That’s particularly the case since Scheffler, Rahm and McIlroy have all held the No. 1 spot for at least 16 percent of possible weeks each over the past two years. Taken together with Johnson’s own 11 percent share of No. 1 weeks during the same span — compiled before he moved to LIV Golf in June 2022 — only twice before in OWGR history have we seen so many different players claim a double-digit share of time at No. 1 over a two-year period: From summer 2018 to summer 2020, when McIlroy, Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Justin Rose all held the crown for at least 10 percent of weeks apiece, and from July 1990 through July 1992, when Ian Woosnam, Greg Norman, Fred Couples and Nick Faldo could say the same. 

The Official World Golf Ranking covers a bigger slice of golf history than the sliver for which we have strokes-gained data, but it remains hard to compare McIlroy, Scheffler and Rahm to players from older eras. The lack of a pre-1986 ranking standard makes comparisons of today’s stars to the last century’s like comparing apples to oranges or, maybe more aptly, comparing Tigers to Bears. Jack Nicklaus and a few peers dominated the game for decades, but all of them spent less time as the official world No. 1 than Tom Lehman’s one week. 

Willie Park Sr., Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris — that’s indeed how the father and son were known — at one point won 11 of 12 majors. Of course, it was the 1860s and ‘70s, and there only was one major: the British Open. But they were more dominant than Scheffler, McIlroy and Rahm, who have six major titles between them and two since McIlroy won his second PGA Championship in 2014. Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Bobby Locke won 17 of the 32 majors between 1946 and ‘53. Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Lee Trevino and Tom Watson bit off whole chunks of the sport in the decades after that.

But in Nicklaus’s day, as in Woods’s, golf still had an undisputed king. That’s not currently the case. Rahm, Scheffler and McIlroy have all taken their own turns at No. 1 over the past 90 weeks, but nobody has firmly established himself on a plane above the other two. Who is the best golfer in the world circa the early 2020s? Well, there are three equally viable choices. But maybe Scheffler, Rahm or McIlroy can offer a more definitive answer on Sunday at Augusta.

MLB

Your MLB Team Just Started Hot (Or Cold). How Much Does That Matter?

By Neil Paine

Apr. 5, 2023, at 9:05 AM

It warms this writer’s baseball-loving heart to see the MLB standings finally beginning to fill in anew this spring. Yes, that’s with an emphasis on “beginning” — we’re only a week into the season, after all. The temptation is always to overanalyze these super-early results, since it’s all we’ve seen of the fun new rules, new rookies and new roster configurations in games that actually count. But even though you shouldn’t get too excited (or down) about a team’s April results, there is still some signal in the early-season noise.

First, let’s look at how we would predict a team to finish the regular season if we knew nothing else except its record in April. Here’s a plot of April winning percentage versus full-season wins for all teams since 1996 (excluding 2020, when no games were played at all in April due to the COVID-19 pandemic):

There is a definite, if noisy, relationship between the two values — which makes sense, as good teams are more likely than bad ones to get off to good starts over a sample of nearly 800 team-seasons.¹ But however much a ballclub’s April winning percentage strays from .500 (on either the high or low side), we need to regress that figure back to the mean by about 62 percent to best predict the team’s final record. So if a team starts the year, say, 21-5 (an .808 winning percentage), we would expect it to finish the season with a 99-63 record (or a .611 winning percentage) rather than maintaining an .800 mark like it was the 1943 Homestead Grays or 1880 Chicago White Stockings and ending up with 130 wins.

Of course, we do actually know more things about a team early on than just its April record. For instance, we know how good the preseason prognosticators thought it would be — and while such forecasts are far from perfect, they do add extra information that helps temper a team’s expectations in the face of unforeseen results.² And what’s really informative for telling us how much stock to put in early records is to see how much those preseason priors move based on different April performances.

If a team was expected to go .500 and instead goes, say, 18-8 in April (a .692 winning percentage), suddenly we would expect it to finish the season with about 90 wins. If that same predicted .500 team goes 8-18 instead, we would expect it to finish with just 72 wins. Such is the power of a hot or cold start to the season. Yes, some of that is because the team gets to “keep” the record it had early on, even if its true talent was still just .500. But those expected records are still a few games better or worse than we would expect if it was all about banking away April records.³ A team’s early performance also tells us something real about how it will play going forward.

Now, there are limits to this. A team projected to win 60 games before the season would need to go 22-4 in April — a record no team has produced to start a season since the 1984 Detroit Tigers⁴ — just to be predicted to finish 81-81. (Sorry to be a wet blanket for when the Washington Nationals win their next 21 games.) However, for a team that was expected to be on the fringes of the playoff chase at the beginning of the month, a strong start could go surprisingly far toward solidifying its postseason positioning — and a weak one could put a damper on those hopes before they ever had a chance to develop.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

2023 NCAA Tournament

UConn Left No Doubt About Its Greatness. But Did The Huskies Finally Win Respect?

By Santul Nerkar

Apr. 4, 2023, at 1:15 PM

This article is part of our March Madness series.

With apologies to fans of Florida Atlantic, Miami and San Diego State, three-quarters of the 2023 men’s Final Four didn’t look like they belonged there. One year after we got four of the game’s preeminent programs,¹ this year’s event welcomed three programs that entered March Madness with a higher combined seed total (19) than all-time tournament wins (17) — and zero Final Fours between them. This anonymous trio was symbolic of a tournament in which zero No. 1 seeds advanced to the Elite Eight, a No. 15 seed advanced to the Sweet 16 and just one of the sport’s blue bloods² advanced to the second weekend.

But the remaining quarter of the Final Four was the Connecticut Huskies — no stranger to the sport’s greatest heights — and UConn had no interest in ceding basketball immortality to the game’s lesser beings. On Monday night, the Huskies finished a dream season with a near-wire-to-wire 76-59 victory over San Diego State. Led by Most Outstanding Player Adama Sanogo, who averaged 19 points and 10 rebounds in Houston, UConn was never truly threatened by feisty San Diego State, as the Aztecs couldn’t bring the second-half margin below 5 points against the taller and more offensively potent Huskies. 

It was UConn’s fifth title in the past 25 seasons — the most national championships in that stretch of any program, and the third time a program has won as many titles in a 25-year stretch — and its 45th NCAA Tournament win in that span, solidifying the Huskies’ No. 1 spot in tourney winning percentage dating back to its first title in 1999. UConn’s long-standing exclusion from the sport’s royalty is getting harder to justify, though it may owe to the program’s relative irrelevance outside of those five runs: No team among the top 10 in qualified winning percentage has piled up a higher share of its tournament wins during title runs.

In a tournament (and season) defined by the seeming absence of good teams — and good teams proving fraudulent when it counted most — you might be tempted to chalk up UConn’s title run to facing a historically weak field. This was just the third season in Ken Pomeroy’s database (since 2002) in which the best team ended the season with an adjusted efficiency margin below plus-30 points per 100 possessions, and the first since 2006. Plus, the highest seed UConn faced on its run was No. 3 Gonzaga, making the Huskies just the third champion since 1985³ to not face a 1 or a 2 seed. All of this would seem to suggest the Huskies are one of the least impressive winners of the past 20-plus years.

But as the saying goes, you can only beat the teams in front of you — and the Huskies did so in resounding fashion. UConn trounced that Gonzaga team in the Elite Eight by 28 points, coming off of victories by 23, 15 and 24 points in the first three rounds. Then the Huskies made easy work of Miami in Saturday’s second semifinal matchup, winning by 13 in a game that was more lopsided than the final margin made it appear.⁴ And before a second-half Aztec run injected some ephemeral drama on Monday night, the only uncertainty was whether UConn would set a new record for tournament point differential this millennium. In the end, the Huskies had to settle for the third-best average tournament margin of victory since 2000 — and they became just the fifth team since 2008⁵ to finish the season as No. 1 in KenPom’s adjusted efficiency rankings and have the best in-tournament adjusted efficiency by Bart Torvik’s rankings:

But even though the Huskies’ run might now appear predetermined, UConn had to defy expectations and sheer odds in the way only UConn can. The 2023 Huskies are the first title winners who were unranked in the preseason since, perhaps fittingly, the 2011 Kemba Walker-led UConn team that put on a show for the ages. And just like in 2011, when Walker burst onto the scene in an early-season tournament, it was immediately apparent in November that voters had underestimated UConn; the Huskies dismantled future No. 1 overall seed Alabama as part of an unbeaten nonconference slate, showcasing a mature balance between an offense that feasted on second-chance opportunities and a defense that offered nothing easy inside or outside the 3-point arc. A disastrous eight-game stretch from New Year’s Eve to late January saw UConn go 2-6, but that midseason swoon might have obscured a truly dominant profile: The Huskies never fell below No. 6 in KenPom’s rankings after Dec. 1, even throughout that skid, and rebounded to enter the Big Dance as winners of nine of their previous 11. 

In some ways, this season was a microcosm of the UConn men’s basketball experience over the past quarter-century. Despite winning more titles than any program in that period, UConn had not earned a seat at the blue blood table — a denial often justified by yearslong stretches of mediocrity or missing the tournament entirely. This season, it looked like the Huskies were headed for more of the same after that shaky eight-game stretch at midseason, perhaps punctuated by a blown 17-point lead to unranked Seton Hall. Despite an efficiency profile that screamed “No. 1 seed”, the disrespected Huskies only got a No. 4 from the selection committee, and only 3 percent of brackets in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge foretold UConn cutting down the nets.

But if history has been any tell, UConn is at its most magical when the sport’s collective gaze has fallen on someone else. While college basketball’s giants were sent home early — or not invited to the party altogether — Connecticut was content to plow through the competition until fans and media had no choice but to notice them. These Huskies sure had that dog in them, but they were no underdog — and might have finally ascended to college basketball royalty.

2023 NCAA Tournament

LSU Played The Perfect Game To Take Down Caitlin Clark And Iowa

By Neil Paine

Apr. 3, 2023, at 12:19 PM

This article is part of our March Madness series.

There were many impressive things about LSU’s victory over Iowa in the women’s NCAA Tournament championship game Sunday — from the Tigers’ first basketball title in school history to Kim Mulkey’s turnaround of the program within two years of arriving in Baton Rouge, and forward Angel Reese’s ascendance to first-team All-America status immediately after transferring from Maryland. But maybe the most incredible part of LSU’s triumph was how thoroughly it was able to play its game against Iowa in a way that previously undefeated No. 1 South Carolina couldn’t in its semifinal loss to Caitlin Clark and the Hawkeyes Friday night.

Against the seemingly unbeatable Gamecocks, Clark scored 41 points (on a scorching .606 true shooting percentage) and added eight assists as the Hawkeyes produced a 106.9 offensive rating — the second-highest South Carolina had allowed all season. Iowa’s defense also forced South Carolina into one of its worst offensive ratings of the year (101.4), mitigating the Gamecocks’ fearsome advantage inside and on the glass by holding them to just 7-for-33 shooting outside of the paint (including 4-for-20 on 3-pointers). Despite a massive edge in second-chance points (24 to 8), South Carolina’s plus-10 advantage on 2-pointers couldn’t overcome its minus-14 deficit on threes and free throws in the four-point loss.

LSU vowed to not let Iowa get away with the same game plan in the national title game — and the Tigers made good on that promise. Just like South Carolina, they outrebounded the Hawkeyes, doubling them up on the offensive glass, and won the battle for points in the paint. But the Tigers also scored 20 points off of 2-pointers not in the paint, and went 11-for-17 (65 percent) on threes for good measure. And between LSU’s offensive rebounding and its defense forcing 16 Iowa turnovers, the Tigers shot 14 more times from the floor than the Hawkeyes did, which helped compound their advantage in field goal percentage (54.3 percent versus 50.0).

The Tigers also slowed down Clark just enough from her usual output this tournament. While the Hawkeyes’ brilliant star had a strong game (30 points on a .615 TS%, eight assists), her usage rate and assist rate were both down from their absurd highs in the South Carolina game, and she was held to just one basket from inside the arc after making 10 against the Gamecocks.

In the end, this all helped LSU run up a massive plus-26-point edge over Iowa on 2-pointers and hold even on free throws, making the Hawkeyes’ 9-point advantage on threes moot. It turned what could have been a close game into a blowout, then eventually a coronation for both Mulkey — who became the first women’s coach to lead two separate schools to titles — and Reese — who was one of five Tigers to score in double figures while her team’s 102 points set the all-time record for a championship game.

None of this was easy to see coming for a team that went 9-13 a few years ago and who even entered this year’s tourney with only a 3 percent chance of cutting down the nets in Dallas. For one thing, it was hard to envision South Carolina ever losing to anybody; as part of its undefeated regular season, Dawn Staley’s team had beaten LSU by 24 points in mid-February. But the Tigers’ title bid gained steam as the tournament went on, and they ultimately had an answer for Clark and the giant-killing Hawkeyes that the Gamecocks didn’t.