NBA

LeBron’s Path To The NBA’s All-Time Scoring Crown, In 2 Charts

By Neil Paine

Feb. 7, 2023, at 10:19 AM

While it has been far from a banner season for the Los Angeles Lakers, one bright spot has been LeBron James’s pursuit of an NBA record that was once considered unbreakable: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time scoring mark of 38,387 career points. After James notched 27 points against the New Orleans Pelicans on Saturday, his lifetime tally of 38,352 sits just 35 points shy of Abdul-Jabbar’s record. 

Since James has scored at least 35 points in 11 of the 43 games he’s played this season (about 26 percent of the time), there is a decent chance he ties or breaks the record Tuesday night against the Oklahoma City Thunder — and he is all but certain to break it by Thursday’s game against the Milwaukee Bucks.¹ Although NBA players are usually measured more on championships and per-game output than raw totals, the scoring record will regardless be one of the shinier items on James’s long list of career accomplishments — one that truly underscores his longevity, durability and continued production, even at age 38 (and counting).

One way we can see this is by comparing James’s career points with Abdul-Jabbar’s over time, through each game of their careers. It may surprise contemporary fans to know that Abdul-Jabbar had more points through each and every game of their respective careers up until Game No. 1,120; the 33 points LeBron scored then, on Feb. 25, 2018, finally allowed him to overtake Abdul-Jabbar’s pace — and he’s never looked back since. While Abdul-Jabbar’s point total followed a gently arcing path during the late stages of his career, reflecting the normal career trajectory that sees a player’s production tail off as he ages, James’s total has steadily increased along roughly the same straight line it always has, perhaps even getting steeper in recent seasons as he approached the record number.

Thanks to his remarkable ability to defy Father Time, James should be able to chase down Abdul-Jabbar’s career scoring mark in about 150 fewer games than it took the great sky-hooking big man to originally compile it.

There is another important explanation for the difference in scoring pace between the two legends, however. By virtue of being able to skip college basketball and leap straight to the pros out of high school in 2003, James also got a sizable head start on Abdul-Jabbar, who played four years at UCLA (three on the varsity team) before being drafted No. 1 by the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969.² By the time James was the age Abdul-Jabbar was on the day of his NBA debut (22 years and 185 days), LeBron already had 8,439 career NBA points.

That’s also why, by the time Abdul-Jabbar got to James’s current total of 1,409 games, he was nearly two and a half years older than James is now, and his production was seriously slowing. But the head start of skipping college wasn’t exactly an automatic record-breaking cheat code for James, either. It’s worth pointing out that other preps-to-pros stars — such as Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Tracy McGrady and Dwight Howard — ran out of steam well before the age at which LeBron is currently maintaining his greatness. (Bryant was 37 years and 234 days old on the date of his 60-point career finale — about six months younger than James is right now.)

And besides, if his place on the timeline of basketball history gave James an advantage earlier generations lacked, it also gives him an opportunity. LeBron is currently averaging 30.0 points per game this season — well above his career average of 27.2 — and presumably has a number of good years left in the tank, especially if he plays into his 40s the way Abdul-Jabbar did. That will give him a unique chance to push the NBA's all-time scoring record to even greater heights: If Abdul-Jabbar left it in the stratosphere, James might leave it in the mesosphere or even the thermosphere. And that means this time, the record really, truly might be unbreakable for future generations of NBA stars.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

Super Bowl LVII

The 5 Most Exciting Super Bowls Ever

Will Super Bowl LVII match up to these classics?

By Elena Mejia, Maya Sweedler and Jay Boice, Elena Mejia, Maya Sweedler and Jay Boice and Elena Mejia, Maya Sweedler and Jay Boice

Feb. 7, 2023, at 6:00 AM

There are plenty of reasons to think Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs will be an instant classic. The teams are evenly matched, led by a couple of great quarterbacks, and there is no shortage of star power on either side. But of course, if the history of the Big Game tells us anything, it’s that we have a hard time predicting which Super Bowls will turn out to be thrillers, and which will be duds. Only in retrospect can we truly quantify the games that left us on the edges of our seats until the bitter end.

And to do that, we’re breaking out what is known as the “excitement index,” using data provided by ESPN that contains every play in Super Bowl history and its associated change in win probability. We summed the net changes in win probability associated with each play to rank the Super Bowls by excitability. A full ranking can be found in the table at the bottom of the story.

The top five games are charted below. Because we’re looking at the sum of all swings, the games you see included here might not feature the most exciting individual plays (apologies to anyone who was hoping to see the Helmet Catch) or even the wildest finishes (it’s safe to read on, Atlanta Falcons fans). For the most part, they’re low-scoring, close-fought games that saw late lead changes. But out of these close-fought brawls came some of the most iconic and heart-stopping moments in Super Bowl history.

Two years before Super Bowl XXXVIII, the Panthers and Patriots were in very different places. The 1-15 Panthers, who had joined the NFL as an expansion team less than a decade prior, had one winning season in franchise history; the Patriots had just won their first Super Bowl with a first-year starter named Tom Brady. 

But by February of 2004, both teams had played their way into the big game. Entering the Super Bowl, the Panthers — with a strong ground game and tough defensive front seven — were 7-point underdogs against the Patriots, who had a rangy secondary and an emergent star in Brady. And as you might expect in a battle between two grind-it-out teams, this one didn’t start with a lot of promise. But a torrent of late scoring in both halves would see this matchup turn into the most exciting game in Super Bowl history by our metric. 

The two teams were initially locked in a defensive battle, holding one another scoreless through the first quarter. The Patriots broke open scoring after forcing a fumble at Carolina’s 20-yard line and scoring a touchdown with 3:05 remaining in the first half — the longest scoreless period to open a Super Bowl in history. That unleashed a cascade of points: The Panthers answered with a two-minute, 95-yard touchdown drive, then the Patriots needed less than a minute to drive 78 yards for another touchdown, and Carolina ended the half by kicking a field goal. By the time the dust settled, 24 points had been scored in 185 seconds, and New England had a 14-10 lead going into the game’s infamous halftime show.

The second half started off much the same as the first, with neither team finding the end zone in the third quarter. The Patriots added 7 more points in the opening seconds of the fourth quarter, extending their lead to 11, but after two consecutive touchdowns from the Panthers — the second of which was an 85-yard catch-and-run from Jake Delhomme to Muhsin Muhammad that remains the longest passing touchdown in Super Bowl History (and the biggest play of the game by win-probability swing) — Carolina had both the lead and were favored in win probability for the first time. The teams would trade touchdowns in another feverish final three minutes, and after Delhomme found receiver Ricky Proehl in the end zone from 12 yards out, they were tied at 29 apiece with 1:13 remaining in the game. It was after this touchdown that Panthers kicker John Kasay made an error that swung the win probability by 7 percentage points: He sailed the kickoff out of bounds, giving Brady and crew the ball at the 40-yard line. Brady found receiver Troy Brown on three consecutive completions totaling 46 yards, then tacked on another 17-yard completion to Deion Branch. With each completion, the Patriots’ chances rose, and as kicker Adam Vinateri’s field-goal attempt with 9 seconds left in the game sailed through the uprights, finally reached 100 percent — ending the roller-coaster ride of the most exciting Super Bowl.

If you just watched the beginning of Super Bowl XXIII, you probably wouldn’t have guessed that it ended with an edge-of-your-seat fourth quarter to make this game the second-most thrilling Super Bowl in history.

In fact, the first half was … kind of boring. The Cincinnati Bengals and San Francisco 49ers — who had met in the Super Bowl seven years earlier (in a game the Niners led wire-to-wire) — traded field goals deep into the third quarter. Cincinnati quarterback Boomer Esiason struggled against a muscular San Francisco defense, taking five sacks and passing for just 144 yards on 11 completions. His counterpart, two-time Super Bowl winner Joe Montana, was a much more efficient 23-for-36 for 357 yards, including six completions that went for at least 20 yards, but didn’t throw a touchdown until the final quarter.

It wasn’t until Bengals running back Stanford Jennings broke off a 93-yard kickoff return that either team found the end zone. But within a minute and a half, Montana drove the Niners 85 yards to tie the game at 13. Cincinnati added another field goal after a five-and-a-half minute drive, at which point it had a 3-point lead and a 72 percent chance to win the game. But as the rest of the NFL learned time and time again, any amount of time was too much time for Joe Cool. With 3:04 remaining, Montana and the Niners got the ball on their own 8-yard line and proceeded to march down the field. The drive saw several plays that produced pretty big swings in win probability — most notably a 4-yard rush from running back Roger Craig on third-and-2 and a 27-yard completion to eventual MVP Jerry Rice on second-and-20 — but it wasn’t until Montana found receiver John Taylor in the end zone from 10 yards out that the Niners actually took the lead. The 34 seconds left on the clock weren’t enough for a response from Esiason and Co. Legendary Niners coach Bill Walsh was able to retire after this game as a champion once again.

That this game ranks in the top five should come as no surprise, as it features the game-changing play that launched an entire offseason of think pieces and commentary. In the final 30 seconds of the game, should the Seattle Seahawks, trailing by 4 points and in possession of the ball at the New England Patriots’ 1-yard line, have handed the ball off to likely Hall of Fame running back Marshawn Lynch?

Well, they didn’t, and Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler made perhaps the most famous end zone interception of all time, denying the Seahawks a second consecutive Super Bowl.

But even before that final thrilling play, Super Bowl XLIX had been pretty exciting. It was a one-possession game throughout most of the first three quarters, with the teams trading the lead. Seattle’s Legion of Boom secondary played a smart game, holding Brady to less than 6.6 yards per attempt. The Seahawks opened up a 10-point lead five minutes left in the third quarter, scoring a touchdown to go up 24-14. But the Patriots scored on consecutive drives in the next quarter, holding the Seahawks to three-and-outs in between, to kick off with a 4-point lead and 2:06 left on the clock. Quarterback Russell Wilson orchestrated a pitch-perfect two-minute drill, completing three of his five attempts (including a would-have-been-iconic 33-yard bobbled catch by Jermaine Kearse) to take the Seahawks from their own 20-yard line to New England’s 5-yard line. After a 4-yard run from Lynch, Seattle was on the 1-yard line with 26 seconds remaining. But instead of handing it off, Wilson tried to find Ricardo Lockette on a slant route that Butler read perfectly, bumping the receiver before stepping in front of the ball at the line of scrimmage. Butler’s pick created an 81-point swing in win probability, making it the single-most-impactful play in Super Bowl history. The Patriots took over, kneeled twice and walked away with the fourth Lombardi Trophy of the Brady-Bill Belichick era.

Raise your hand like Cowboys running back Dan Reeves if you remember this game! The oldest game on the list, Super Bowl V, is as famous for its series of bloopers as it is for being Baltimore Colts legend Johnny Unitas’s only Super Bowl victory.

Dallas and Baltimore both brought solid defenses to the game. The Cowboys’ defense had allowed just one touchdown in the six games leading up to the Super Bowl, while the Colts had picked off opposing quarterbacks 25 times. 

But in the Super Bowl, it was Baltimore that struggled to keep control of the ball. Unitas threw two interceptions and lost a fumble before being knocked out of the game in the second quarter with a rib injury, and replacement Earl Morrall would later throw another pick in the end zone. All in all, the Colts turned the ball over seven times in the game while scoring just one touchdown in the first three quarters. (In keeping with the “Blunder Bowl,” as it came to be known, the Cowboys blocked the Colts’ first extra point attempt.) Dallas, meanwhile, put up two field goals and a touchdown in the first half but also committed 10 penalties for 133 yards, which hamstrung quarterback Craig Morton and company. Dallas held a 13-6 lead throughout the third quarter.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/chaotic-fictional-football-coach-fivethirtyeight-74531599

As odd as the mistake-filled first three quarters were, the fourth quarter got even odder. Five of the game’s record 11 turnovers occurred in this quarter, as did one of the strangest plays in Super Bowl history. The Colts ran a flea-flicker that was tracking to pick up at least 20 yards until receiver Eddie Hinton fumbled the ball, setting off a scramble in the red zone that saw no less than a half-dozen players fail to recover. The ball rolled out of the end zone, giving Dallas the ball at its own 20-yard line. But Morton threw an interception three plays later that Colts safety Rick Volk brought down to the Dallas 3-yard line. The Colts punched it in two plays later, tying the game at 13 and giving them their best odds of winning thus far, at 59 percent.

After trading possessions, the Cowboys drove into Colts territory with less than two minutes on the clock. However, a holding penalty pushed Dallas out of field goal range and cost them 25 percentage points of win probability. The next play was even worse: Morton threw his second interception of the game, a ball that bounced off the hands of Reeves and landed in the arms of Colts linebacker Mike Curtis, who then returned the ball 13 yards to the Cowboys’ 28-yard line. In the final minute of play, it was easy money. The Colts called two runs and booted a 32-yard field goal with nine seconds remaining, finally sealing the game. It wasn’t a masterpiece by any means, but sometimes a series of back-and-forth blunders can also produce big swings in win probability — and an exciting finish.

Surprised to see the second iteration of Giants-Patriots here, rather than the first? We were, too — until we remembered that the biggest upset in NFL history remained within 4 points throughout the entire game. The rematch, four years later, was a much more back-and-forth affair. Scoring opened with a safety (of all things) after Brady was called for intentional grounding six minutes into the game. The Giants notched one more touchdown before the Patriots put up 17 unanswered points in the second and third quarters. With 11:13 remaining in the game, New England had a 82 percent chance to avenge its loss in Super Bowl XLII.

But there was a lot more game to play. The Giants kicked two field goals in the back half of the third quarter, but the fourth quarter was consumed by two long drives that both ended in punts. Down by 2 points with 3:46 remaining, the Giants started their final drive on their own 12-yard line. On the first play of the drive, quarterback Eli Manning uncorked a 38-yard pass to Mario Manningham, who made a toe-tapping catch along the left sideline to improve the Giants’ chances from 30 percent to 47 percent. Four more short completions and two gains on the ground followed; by the time running back Ahmad Bradshaw fell backwards into the end zone to put the Giants up with 1:04 remaining, Giants fans were wondering if they had left too much time on the clock for Brady.

And the Patriots did give them a scare! With under 40 seconds to go, Brady had back-to-back completions that moved the ball 30 yards. But three incompletions later, the clock hit zero and the Giants — 3-point underdogs coming into the game — were once again Super Bowl champions.

Those were just the top five Super Bowls by excitement index. Below is the full list of games, ranging from that Pats-Panthers shootout at the top to the 49ers’ one-sided rout of the San Diego Chargers in Super Bowl XXIX at the bottom. Where will Super Bowl LVII rank on the list? The entire football-following public must watch on Sunday to find out.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

NFL

How Massive The NFL Really Is, In 4 Charts

By Ryan Best

Feb. 6, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The NFL has had quite an eventful year. In fact, the 2022 season has been characterized by a series of controversies that, when taken together, seem like a microcosm of the criticisms and existential threats facing the league as a whole. In just the past year, there have been major stories centered around how the NFL handles (or downplays) sexual assault allegations against its star players, scary concussions, the physical brutality of the sport and the league’s racial regressiveness — especially in disadvantaging Black coaches in a predominantly Black league. 

But while it might be reasonable to expect the league to take a hit from this slew of negative attention, the NFL seems to have a Teflon-like ability to keep scandals from sticking. Fans are still watching games in droves despite all the controversies, even giving the league its highest-rated regular-season game on record this Thanksgiving. So, with the Super Bowl just around the corner, we wanted to take a few different looks at just how massive the NFL really is — and why rumors of its decline continue to be greatly exaggerated.

First, take the Big Game itself. This Sunday, tens of millions of Americans will tune in as the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII. Every year, the Super Bowl is by far the biggest cultural event in America — or, maybe more accurately, it is the defining event for American culture. While similar events grapple with fractured media environments and the rise of streaming, millions more Americans still turn on their TVs and sit down on their couch with friends or seven-layer dip (or both) to watch the Super Bowl than any other major sports championship in the country.

But of course, football’s grip on American sports fandom expands well beyond just watching the Super Bowl. More generally, Gallup has been asking Americans about their favorite sport to watch since 1937³ — and for the past half-century, American sports fans have come to a pretty clear consensus: Football is king. Football first claimed the top spot from baseball in 1972, and nothing has come close to it ever since. Meanwhile, baseball is on a precipitous decline — only 9 percent of all respondents said it was their favorite sport in 2017, the lowest total since Gallup first asked the question 80 years earlier.

We also can see football’s seemingly unimpeachable position as America’s favorite sport in how many fans it is able to draw to each game. Put simply, NFL games are massively bigger spectacles than contests in any other American sport, with thousands more people showing up to NFL stadiums during football season than we see at MLB, NBA or NHL games.

The Washington Commanders drew the smallest crowds in the NFL in 2022 — with just over 58,000 fans showing up to the average game at FedEx Field — while the Los Angeles Dodgers had the biggest games of any team outside the NFL in the same year. Their games averaged more than 10,000 fewer fans than the Commanders’. Yes, some of this is a function of venue capacity — no basketball or hockey arena can contain even 35 percent as many fans as the NFL’s smallest stadium (Soldier Field in Chicago) — as well as the NFL’s once-a-week business model, which stands in contrast with other leagues’ more daily scheduling rhythms. But even so, the NFL draws big enough crowds to justify massive stadiums and make its once-a-week model worth it. Simply put, the sheer drawing power of pro football is undeniable.

And these unencumbered decades of unwavering attention and butts-in-seats have helped NFL franchises themselves grow to enormous proportions, too. Of the 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world according to Forbes’ 2022 rankings, 30 are NFL teams.⁴ The Dallas Cowboys top the list as the most valuable team in the world, with an estimated worth around $8 billion — $1.6 billion higher than the second-ranked New England Patriots. Combined, all the NFL teams on the list are worth a staggering $136.8 billion.

Any way you slice it, the NFL is simply America’s No. 1 obsession. And while it does face some real existential threats (including reports of declining popularity among the next generation of would-be fans), it’s still a behemoth that dominates America’s culture and economy. The NFL is so far out ahead of any other sport that a competitor usurping its title as America’s favorite league probably won’t happen for decades — if at all.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/chaotic-fictional-football-coach-fivethirtyeight-74531599

NBA

Aaron Gordon's Career-Year Recipe? All The Dunks.

By Jared Dubin

Feb. 3, 2023, at 8:00 AM

Typically, when an NBA player finally puts together the best season of his career, it’s the result of some sort of expansion in his game. He adds some stretch to his jumper, improves his ball-handling, finds the balance between scoring and playmaking, or at long last masters the nuances of team defense.

Such is not the case with Denver Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon, who in the ninth year of his career is doing the most, mostly by doing less than ever before. According to most all-in-one metrics, Gordon has been a top-30 player in the league this season: He checks in 23rd in Estimated Plus-Minus, 28th in ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus and 29th in FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR plus/minus — each of which peg him as being worth between 3.9 and 4.6 points per 100 possessions to the Nuggets’ scoring margin so far this season. In the cases of EPM and RAPTOR, the figures also are by far the best of Gordon’s career to date.

As mentioned, though, Gordon has achieved these results not through an increase in his role, but by narrowing its focus.

Back in 2016, when Gordon was still with the Orlando Magic, he practically gushed about the possibility of expanding his game under then-incoming head coach Frank Vogel. He told ESPN’s Zach Lowe, “I’m gonna be like a third guard. I’ll have a much bigger ball-handling responsibility, and I’m all for that.”

That’s a far cry from what he told The Denver Post last month: “If I need to hit threes, I’ll hit threes. If I need to post up, I’ll post up. If I need to make plays, I’ll make plays. If I need to just rebound and do dirty work and play defense, I’ll do that. I’m here to do anything that I can to help this team win a championship, to help [Nikola Jokić] win a championship, to help Jamal [Murray] win a championship, to help Michael Malone win a championship. That’s it. Winning is the end-all, be-all, so I’ll do whatever it takes to win.”

To his credit, Gordon has put his money where his mouth is. According to Second Spectrum tracking data, for example, Gordon has been directly involved in fewer actions per 100 possessions this season than at any time in his career.

The Nuggets hardly ever run plays for him. Instead, Gordon makes a living offensively by lurking on the edges of the action. He slices through the defense with perfectly-timed cuts. He has become extremely adept at ducking deep into the lane, sealing his man and giving Jokić a huge target to hit with a pass. When on the weak side, he spaces properly and punishes closing-out defenders by making quick shoot-pass-drive decisions.

And at the tail end of his plays, he finishes quite often with dunks. Sooooo many dunks. Like, an absurd number of dunks. So far this year, an incredible 27.8 percent of Gordon’s shot attempts have been dunks. How outlandish is that? Consider the following: Last season, when Gordon established a new career high with 130 slams (far surpassing his previous mark of 104, set back in 2018-19), dunks accounted for 17.3 percent of his shot attempts.

Gordon accumulated those 130 jams in 75 games, meaning he powered the ball through the rim 1.73 times per night. Again, that was his career high. So far this season, the Nuggets have played 52 games, of which Gordon has participated in 46. And he already has 125 (ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE!) dunks. That is almost a full dunk more per game (2.72) than he had last year. He’ll soon set a new career high once again, perhaps by the time you’re reading this sentence.

Unsurprisingly, a fair number of those dunks have been created by Jokić. According to Second Spectrum, no player has assisted a teammate on more dunks than the 60 on which Jokić has assisted Gordon.⁵ If those 60 dunks were Gordon’s only dunks of the season, he would still be tied with LeBron James and sit ahead of Jayson Tatum (57) in total dunks. That’s how often Jokić is finding Gordon for the easiest finishes. 

So it’s no wonder that this has been (by far) the most efficient shooting season of Gordon’s career: Shots within 3 feet of the basket (i.e., dunks and layups) make up a majority of his attempts for the first time ever, while he now rarely attempts long or even medium-length midrange shots.

Gordon has benefited greatly from being attached to Jokić in the Nuggets’ rotation. Denver used to match Jokić and Murray, but the chemistry between Jokić and Gordon has led to a change, and you now rarely see Gordon on the floor without the two-time reigning MVP. He has been on the floor sans Jokić for just 16.1 percent of his minutes played this season, according to PBP Stats, and a significant share of those minutes have come in the games when Jokić has sat out.

It makes sense that Denver would pair the duo together. The Nuggets have absolutely demolished their opponents with Jokić and Gordon on the floor at the same time. Across 1,165 minutes, they have a plus-14.3 net rating, according to PBP Stats. That’s compared with plus-3.5 in Jokić-only minutes, plus-3.0 in Gordon-only minutes, and minus-12.9 in the minutes with both on the bench.

The reason they fit so well is that they accentuate each other’s strengths while mitigating each other’s weaknesses. When Gordon was tasked with creating his own offense, his efficiency suffered. But there is perhaps no greater creator of efficient offense in the league today than Jokić, and he has weaponized Gordon as an elite play-finisher.

Meanwhile, Jokić is not a particularly mobile, nimble or versatile defender. But Gordon is one of the NBA’s most athletic players, and one who can handle just about any defensive assignment the Nuggets throw his way. According to Bball-Index, Gordon ranks 37th out of 306 players who have played 500 or more minutes this season in Matchup Difficulty, and is one of just 25 players who has guarded point guards, shooting guards, small forwards, power forwards and centers on at least 12 percent of his half-court defensive possessions each. He’s also one of just seven players⁶ who appears on both of those lists.

That type of synergy between frontcourt players is enviable, and it makes Gordon fit like a glove alongside the most important player on his team. His versatile skill set also means he can fit equally as well alongside Denver’s supersized 3-point sniper Michael Porter Jr. as he does with miniature Swiss Army knife Bruce Brown. He and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope can smother opposing scorers. He and Brown and Bones Hyland can get out on the break, while he and Murray can provide disparately challenging inverted pick-and-roll partners for Jokić. Michael Malone has been reluctant to use Gordon as a small-ball center (only 15 non-garbage-time possessions this season, according to Cleaning the Glass), but probably could against certain opponents if he wanted to. 

Such is the benefit of a player with Gordon’s skill and athleticism and, now, willingness to do whatever is asked of him. While his All-Star candidacy ultimately fell short, that doesn't diminish what he's accomplished this year. It sometimes takes a while for hyper-competent role players on contenders to get their recognition, after all. But if Gordon continues to play at this level, the Nuggets will continue to win — and the accolades will eventually follow. Even if they don't, there's something to be said for recognizing that the best way you can contribute is by doing only the things you do best, as best as you can, and then doing exactly that.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

Skiing

Mikaela Shiffrin Is The Greatest — And She Has Time To Become Even Greater

By Josh Planos

Feb. 2, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Last weekend in the Czech Republic, appropriately as most of her countrymen and women slept, Mikaela Shiffrin moved one snow-propelled ski run closer to “resetting” a 34-year-old record when she became the second alpine skier (male or female) to win 85 World Cup races. After topping the slalom Saturday at the same resort where she made her professional debut 12 years ago, Shiffrin then came within six-hundredths of a second Sunday of matching the all-time record for World Cup victories, set by Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark.

Not that Shiffrin needed to vanquish another stopwatch, claim another medal or pop another bottle of Champagne to have a legitimate case as the best ever to glide into the starting blocks. That is already apparent from her overall body of work — a resume Shiffrin has compiled by age 27.

Shiffrin emerged on the professional circuit in 2011 as a teenage prodigy, her abilities honed by ski-obsessed parents on Colorado and New England slopes. From Mickey Mouse skis to international mountains, a data-driven approach helped Shiffrin develop into a transcendent tactician. She is unparalleled in the slalom, a discipline that requires two runs, hairpin turns and dozens of gates to navigate. But the breadth of Shiffrin’s skill set is what sets her apart: She stands as the only skier to win a race in all six World Cup disciplines — combined, downhill, giant slalom, parallel, super-G and slalom. For comparison, Lindsey Vonn won World Cup events in five disciplines, while Stenmark won his 86 World Cup races across only two disciplines.⁷

And such World Cup records form the backbone of any skier’s claim to greatness. When they hear her name, American sports fans might only remember Shiffrin’s pair of gold medals, which she won at the 2014 and 2018 Olympics. But while the Olympics serve as the lone opportunity for competitors in numerous sports to garner mainstream coverage, a more accurate appraisal of a skier’s performance is found on the global circuit. Each year, the best skiers on Earth compete in a five-month World Cup season in events that are mostly hosted in Europe. Those who finish in the top 30 at these events earn points toward seasonlong championships, and the best in each discipline contend for an overall title. Shiffrin has competed in more than 240 World Cup races over 13 seasons. Her aggregate performance is staggering: Shiffrin has podiumed in more than half and won more than a third of those starts. In events that involve slalom⁸, Shiffrin has podiumed in 59 percent and won 38 percent. 

Even as Vonn rocketed up various leaderboards as the greatest American alpine skier of all time, Shiffrin’s brilliance was widely anticipated. Back in 2019, my FiveThirtyEight colleague Neil Paine suggested that it was only a matter of time before the torch of greatest American skier was passed to Shiffrin. “She’s the best skier who has ever lived,” Vonn said in December. But Shiffrin’s success hasn’t always been linear. It was only a year ago that she entered the Beijing Olympics with the chance to win an unprecedented three individual gold medals and five medals overall. She left without any, an experience that forced her to “second-guess, like, the last 15 years, everything I thought I knew about my own skiing and slalom and racing mentality.” 

But in the year following her “fantastically failed” Olympics, Shiffrin has reclaimed her dominant form, winning nine of her last 15 races. She has a commanding 700-point lead in the race for the biggest prize in ski racing, the World Cup overall title, which would give her her fifth career overall crown. Despite a narrow second-place finish in Spindleruv over the weekend, Shiffrin accomplished another historic feat when she cemented her 2023 slalom title with two races still on the schedule. With it, Shiffrin became the first woman to bank seven slalom titles; she’ll have a chance to tie Vonn’s record for most titles in single discipline (eight; in Vonn’s case, in downhill) next season.

More impressive is the reality that, at 27, Shiffrin potentially has years to add to her total.⁹ Stenmark was 32 when the record was set, and Vonn was 33 when she earned her final World Cup victory. In a perilous sport, injury risk is substantially lower for slalom specialists than it is for the high-speed downhill enthusiasts.¹⁰ Shiffrin figures to race for years to come, with her eyes reportedly trained on the 2026 Olympics at the well-known Cortina d’Ampezzo Italian resort — a place where Shiffrin has won once and podiumed twice.

“Anything could happen, and I could decide to retire,” Shiffrin told NBC Sports. “But I don’t see it happening before the [next] Olympics.”

In a sport where racers carve near identical lines in the snow and results are separated by hundredths of a second, Shiffrin has made a habit of charting a unique path to reach the finish line well before her contemporaries. Last weekend’s win materialized like so many others before it: a wire-to-wire tactical exhibition of angles and velocity unmatched by the field. Hers is a record of sustained dominance across continents and disciplines. Shiffrin will need to wait until the World Championships conclude in late February for her next chance to match Stenmark, but the subtext of the feat — becoming the greatest competitive skier of all time — has already been accomplished.

NFL

Which Stars Are Going To Blow Up In Super Bowl LVII?

By Neil Paine and Josh Hermsmeyer and Neil Paine and Josh Hermsmeyer

Feb. 1, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The teams are set for Super Bowl LVII, and now it’s time for the longest two weeks in sports — the wait between the NFL’s conference championships and the Big Game itself. One upside of the layoff, however, is the chance it will give fans to get to know the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles inside and out. So with that in mind, we wanted to highlight a handful of the key players on each side of this matchup who are certain to play a central role in determining the outcome.

Philadelphia Eagles

QB Jalen Hurts

Any discussion of the Eagles’ Super Bowl flight has to begin with Hurts, Philadelphia’s field general and one of the league’s five MVP finalists. The Eagles are 16-1 in games Hurts has started this season (including playoffs) and they are scoring a league-best 29.5 points per game in those starts.¹¹ But what really has enabled Philadelphia’s rise to the edge of a championship has been Hurts’s individual passing improvement this season, one of the largest year-over-year leaps in performance by any young Super Bowl QB since the merger:

Before this season, Hurts was merely a solid starter, with roughly a league-average passer rating index (according to Pro-Football-Reference.com), and the Eagles went 8-7 in his starts. But in 2022, Hurts improved his index by nearly 25 points, rising to become one of the league’s most efficient passers — and in turn, Philadelphia’s offense, which had been decent but not great last year, ended up ranking second in scoring. (This mirrors the same sudden, championship-caliber improvement we’ve seen from other young Super Bowl signal-callers over the years, most recently with Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow last season.) Add in Hurts’s 760 rushing yards with 13 rushing TDs — easily the most among QBs — and you can see why he made this Philly offense nearly impossible to defend all season long. Without Hurts giving the Eagles such a dramatic upgrade under center, it’s hard to imagine them soaring anywhere near as high as they have this year.

WR A.J. Brown

As impressive as Hurts’s growth has been in leading Philadelphia’s offense, he has hardly done it alone. For one thing, he was supported by a balanced system that featured the league’s second-best run-blocking offensive line (according to ESPN’s win rate statistics) and a multi-pronged rushing attack led by Miles Sanders — one of only five runners with at least 1,200 yards and double-digit TDs this year. Even more importantly, Hurts had an improved group of receivers to target, headlined by the huge addition of A.J. Brown in a trade from the Tennessee Titans. During his first season as an Eagle, all Brown did was tie for third in the league in receiving TDs (11) and rank fourth in yards (1,496), giving Philly its most prolific receiver by yards per game since Mike Quick in 1983. But that’s only scratching the surface of what Brown brought to this offense.

If you look at yards per route run — a great measure of production per opportunity for receivers, since it blends the ability to get downfield, get open and reliably catch the ball — only Miami’s Tyreek Hill ranked ahead of Brown this season. And what sets Brown apart is that he is also one of the best at running after the catch, particularly after adjusting for where he is catching it. According to NFL Next Gen Stats, Brown was fifth-best in the NFL at gaining more yards after the catch than expected per reception. Basically, Brown gave Philadelphia a unique threat that defenses needed to respect before, during and after the ball was thrown — and that opened up chances for his teammates to shine. For instance, fellow wideout DeVonta Smith continued to blossom alongside Brown, notching 1,196 yards while using the extra operating space to post one of the highest catch rates ever for a player with that many yards. And for his part, Hurts went from completing a smaller share of his passes than expected to ranking fourth in completion percentage above expected while throwing to his revamped receiving corps.

DE Haason Reddick

When the Arizona Cardinals drafted Haason Reddick with the 13th pick in 2017, they did so assuming Reddick was too small to rush the quarterback. Instead they envisioned him as an inside linebacker, a position Reddick had never played in college, and one of the least valuable position groups in the NFL. It took Reddick demanding a position change back to edge rusher in his final season in Arizona¹² for his career to finally flourish. Since 2020 Reddick has registered 39.5 regular-season sacks, third most in the NFL over that span behind only Myles Garrett and T.J. Watt.

When the Eagles signed him as a free agent prior to this season,¹³ making him the 17th-highest-paid edge rusher in the NFL, they certainly expected him to get after the quarterback. But they couldn’t have expected the season Reddick and the rest of the defensive line put together in 2022. 

The Eagles improved from 31st in the league (29) in sacks in 2021 all the way to first (70), the largest year-to-year improvement in NFL history. Four different Eagles finished the regular season with 10 or more sacks — also an NFL record. For his part, Reddick led the league with 18.5 sacks created, was tied for second in sacks (16) and finished the season second in overall pass rush win rate. And despite the prolific totals put up by his teammates, Reddick wasn’t just padding his numbers: He was out there beating double-teams at a near league-leading rate.

CB Darius Slay

The Eagles run a version of Vic Fangio’s defense and rely heavily on Cover 4 — or Quarters — coverage, where four defensive backs split the responsibilities for covering the deep part of the field. In those coverages Slay was typically asked to play man-to-man, or “man match”¹⁴ on the left side, and he did a good job: Slay ranked 17th in the league in man coverage on 101 snaps, according to Pro Football Focus. 

But where Big Play Slay really shined was when he was asked to play zone and cover a full third of the deep part of the field. In these Cover 3 defensive looks, Slay was the best defender in the NFL, according to PFF.

Slay is dangerous when he can keep his eyes on the quarterback while dropping into coverage, and the Eagles like to run “inverted” coverages where deep defenders switch roles. On these calls, the Eagles turn what looks like a four-deep, three-under coverage pre-snap into a three-deep, four-under coverage post-snap to help take away the short and intermediate routes. With Patrick Mahomes’s ankle injured and the Eagles pass rush elite, Philly may want that extra defender underneath in the Super Bowl to defend against short, quick passes. If they do, they can rely on Slay to do his job and lock down his third of the field.

Kansas City Chiefs

QB Patrick Mahomes

For the next few weeks, the entire focus of the football world will be on one body part: Patrick Mahomes’s right ankle. The 2022 MVP favorite sprained it against the Jacksonville Jaguars during the divisional round, hobbled to the finish of that game, and then gritted his way through the pain in the AFC title contest. But while Mahomes picked up the most important gain of the game with his feet, he was limited to eight rushing yards in the game and it’s a safe bet that his trademark mobility could be hampered against the Eagles as well. But will that matter? One of the many special things about Mahomes is that he can beat you as a pocket passer every bit as well as he can using his improvisational magic. Since his debut as a starter in 2018, Mahomes’s overall wizardry has made him the NFL’s best quarterback by Total QBR — but he actually ranks higher in QBR from within the pocket (No. 2) than outside the pocket (No. 3) over that span, and his raw QBR between the two categories has been essentially identical.

Perhaps that helps explain why the Chiefs’ record when Mahomes isn’t a factor with his legs — an .818 winning percentage when he is their primary QB but has single-digit rushing yards — is actually slightly better than their .776 winning percentage when he cracks double digits on the ground. The best part of having Mahomes at QB is that when a defense (or an injury) limits one aspect of his brilliance, his Plan B is still better than just about anyone else’s Plan A.

C Creed Humphrey (and friends)

Of course, we have seen the limits of Mahomes’s greatness when the protection in front of him completely breaks down. (The highlights from Super Bowl LV can be hard to watch for that reason.) And the Eagles pose a particular risk for a repeat of that performance, given that they recorded the third-most sacks in a season in NFL history. But for a team known for its explosive skill-position talent, one of the Chiefs’ most important weapons is their ability to block would-be pass-rushers in the trenches, starting up the middle.

According to ESPN’s pass block win rate metric, the highest overall success rate for any pass blocker in the entire league this season belonged to center Creed Humphrey, who sustained his block for at least 2.5 seconds in 97.9 percent of encounters with opposing pass-rushers. But Humphrey was merely the strongest link in a very strong chain, as the second-best pass block win rate (96.9 percent) also belonged to a K.C. lineman — guard Joe Thuney. And so did the seventh-best, for that matter, with guard Trey Smith (95.9 percent). The NFL average for tackles is lower than for centers and guards, but both bookends on the Chiefs line — Orlando Brown Jr. and Andrew Wylie — were above average for their position as well.

As a result, the Chiefs’ offensive line had the No. 1 pass block win rate in the league, with the gap between them and the No. 2 Chicago Bears roughly equaling the gap between the Bears and the No. 12 Eagles (of all teams). And with Mahomes hobbled against the fearsome Philadelphia pass rush, the stalwart Kansas City blockers could be the antidote to one of K.C.’s biggest potential trouble spots.

DE Chris Jones

As impressive as Reddick’s 2022 season was, Chris Jones’s might have been better. Why? Well, for one he plays a different position (interior defensive line), which typically doesn’t lend itself to sacks — unless your name is Aaron Donald. Yet Jones notched just a half-sack less (15.5) than Reddick on the season. 

Second, Jones did it without the supporting cast that Reddick enjoyed: Rather than four rushers with 11 or more sacks, the Chiefs trotted out Jones and three other players with six or fewer.¹⁵. Teams could game plan for Jones in ways they couldn’t against Reddick.

But perhaps most impressively, Jones nearly matched Reddick’s production while being double-teamed over five times more often (251 vs. 48 for Reddick). In fact Jones was double-teamed more than any other player in the league. 

It wasn’t like teams had much of a choice, either. They doubled Jones because they had to — because when they didn’t, he wrecked the game. Jones’s pass rush win rate versus single-teams was the fourth-highest in the league. That kind of production from the middle of the line is rare, and against a Philly offensive line that’s one of the league’s best, the Chiefs will need “the most unstoppable man in football” to show up big.

CB L’Jarius Sneed

Chiefs cornerback L’Jarius Sneed was a key part of an underrated Chiefs defense all season. Typically lining up across the opposing team’s top receiver, Sneed tied for the team lead in interceptions with three, and led all Chiefs in passes defensed with 11. Among NFL cornerbacks, Sneed ranked seventh in PFF WAR, a measure of how many wins a player adds to the team.

What may surprise, particularly given Jones’s exploits in 2022, is that Sneed was the third-most valuable Chief this season according to PFF WAR, trailing only Patrick Mahomes (shocker) and tight end Travis Kelce.

In the AFC championship game, Sneed suffered a concussion while tackling Bengals running back Samaje Perine early in the first quarter, leaving his availability for the Super Bowl in question. If PFF WAR is any indication, losing Sneed is no small thing. If he’s able to play, his skills will surely help the Chiefs game plan to stop A.J. Brown and the rest of the Eagles passing attack. And if he can’t go, Jones and the rest of the Kansas City pass rush is going to have to conjure up a repeat of their performance in the AFC championship game, where they pressured Joe Burrow relentlessly to help cover for the loss of their best defensive back. Only this time they’ll be going against one of the most dangerous mobile quarterbacks in the league, potentially without one of their most valuable players.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

Soccer

Look Out, Messi: Erling Haaland Is Coming For Your 50-Goal Club

By Daniel Levitt

Jan. 31, 2023, at 6:00 AM

After Erling Haaland scored twice in his first league game after the World Cup break, one British newspaper described him as “Head and shoulders above the rest.” It was a reference to the Norwegian’s striking long blond hair and a popular shampoo brand. Ever since he signed with Manchester City last summer, there’s no better way to capture how much Haaland has dominated English football.

While the reigning English Premier League champions have yet to storm to their third consecutive league title — City trails this season’s surprise team, Arsenal, by five points with 18 games left to play — Haaland has, on an individual level, more than justified the fear opposing managers felt when a player with his combination of size (he’s 6-foot-3), speed and skill arrived from German side Borussia Dortmund. Entering the new season, the main question was how large the forward’s scoring tally would be. Some said he’d break Andy Cole and Alan Shearer’s single-season EPL record of 34. Others went further and predicted 40.

Few, if any, went on record saying he’d eclipse 50. But after 19 games, Haaland has already netted 25 goals. Among the EPL records he’s already broken include: quickest player to score 10 goals (six games); quickest player to score three hat tricks (eight games); fastest player to 20 goals (13 games) and only player to ever score 20 times before January, despite this season containing a six-week break for the World Cup. With 18 games to go, he’s currently on pace for a previously-unheard-of-in-English-football 49 if he plays all of City’s remaining matches and maintains his per-game rate of scoring.

Whenever Haaland touches the ball — or is even near it — defenders throughout the league are on high alert for potential embarrassment. Surrounded by some of the world’s most gifted playmakers — Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden, to name just three — the 50-goal mark is not out of the question this season.

And it’s not just English records Haaland has in his path of destruction, either. Looking at the best single-season totals ever in Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, Germany’s Bundesliga and France’s Ligue 1, Haaland is quickly climbing the combined record books of Europe’s Big Five leagues. If the Norwegian forward continues at his current strike rate, only Lionel Messi’s mesmerizing 50-goal La Liga campaign for Barcelona in the 2011-12 season will stand in his way for the most in the Big Five leagues’ history.

What makes Haaland’s inaugural EPL campaign even more outstanding, though, is that he’s doing it at just 22 years old. Messi was 24 when he scored 50 and had spent the previous seven seasons building rapport with Barcelona’s first team. When Cristiano Ronaldo netted 48 times for Real Madrid three seasons later, he was 29 and well into his prime. Then there’s the fact that Haaland is doing this in a league regarded as the richest — the EPL is forecast to generate €7.1 billion this season, almost double that of second-place La Liga, according to Statista — and best in the world — English teams have performed best in UEFA’s Champions League and Europa League in the past three seasons, according to UEFA’s Country coefficients.

Similar to Messi and Ronaldo before him, Haaland will forever be compared to a contemporary star: Kylian Mbappé. The French phenom burst onto the scene in the 2016-17 season, when he helped Monaco win its first league title in almost two decades with 15 goals as a 17-year-old. PSG then shelled out £166 million to make him the most expensive teenager ever, and the second-most expensive player in the world. So far in his already illustrious career, Mbappé has won five Ligue 1 titles, three French Cups and the 2018 FIFA World Cup with France. After his hat trick in the 2022 FIFA World Cup final last month, the 24-year-old is generally considered as the best in the world.

Haaland’s trophy cabinet is a lot emptier by comparison — Haaland won the Austrian Bundesliga and Austrian Cup with RB Salzburg, and the German Cup with Dortmund. But in terms of individual scoring prowess, it’s Haaland who has been most clinical in front of goal to start his career, compared with any of his three peers.

As Haaland continues to assault the record books, it’s fitting the man leading him toward the game’s pinnacle is the same manager who guided Messi to the top. Pep Guardiola is a serial winner — the Spaniard won 14 trophies with Barcelona, seven with Bayern Munich, and in Manchester he has 11 and counting. More so, Guardiola has taken countless players with strong potential and made them elite. At Barcelona, aside from Messi, Pep helped the likes of Andres Iniesta and current Barcelona manager Xavi Hernandez take their games to the next level. At Bayern, he did the same with Robert Lewandowski. And now at City, De Bruyne, Rodri and João Cancelo have all become arguably the best in the world at their position.

But with Haaland, Guardiola has arguably his most advanced player of all at such a young age. As one more measure of his greatness, Haaland took just 20 games to score 25 goals under Guardiola — the quickest to do so, in eight fewer games than Messi. Perhaps the scariest factor of all is how great Haaland might end up becoming under Pep when he becomes even more polished.

Haaland’s ascent isn’t totally limitless. His country’s lack of international success might end up becoming Haaland’s kryptonite in the GOAT debate. The world just witnessed how Messi’s World Cup triumph with Argentina may have cemented his place above Ronaldo, Pelé and Diego Maradona. But Norway, on the other hand, has qualified for only three of the 22 FIFA World Cups — the most recent coming in 1998 before Haaland was even born — and has made just one of the 16 UEFA European Championships. That said, if Haaland can somehow drag his nation to the latter stages of a major tournament, it could be his greatest achievement — aside from the assault he’s currently conducting on the Premier League’s record books.

Check out our latest soccer predictions.

NFL

The Chiefs And Eagles Made The Super Bowl With Grit, Talent, Heart And (Yes) Luck

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Jan. 30, 2023, at 4:15 PM

maya (Maya Sweedler, editor): We have our Super Bowl! And just like we all predicted in last week’s chat, it’ll be the Philadelphia Eagles versus the Kansas City Chiefs. (My crow … it’s delicious.) The two teams advanced Sunday in games that, at least in the moment, felt as though they were defined as much by injuries as they were by the play itself.

As Tony Romo discovered while calling the AFC championship game on CBS last night, sometimes the best comparison for a football game in 2023 is an NBA game from the 1990s. So in the spirit of that, I ask: Are we looking at the 1996 NBA Finals, in terms of the inevitability of the two No. 1 seeds advancing?

joshua.hermsmeyer (Josh Hermsmeyer, NFL analyst): Googles the NBA

I guess I would push back on inevitability, just because these games were coin flips in the betting markets heading in.

Salfino (Michael Salfino, FiveThirtyEight contributor):  I feel like the Eagles were more of a true No. 1 seed than the Chiefs, especially given the uncertainty of quarterback Patrick Mahomes, physically.

neil (Neil Paine, acting sports editor): To me, both K.C. and (especially) Philly were extremely lucky to advance. 

Not saying they are not deserving.

But practically any team in the league could have beaten San Francisco and their zero QBs yesterday. And the Chiefs benefited greatly from timely calls by the officials.

Salfino: I think it’s legit to question what, if anything, the Eagles have proved not just this postseason but down the stretch of the regular season, too, given the quality of their opponents/QBs faced.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Neil, that was NOT a 31-point offensive performance. Around 10 expected points added came from net penalty advantage, and 10 EPA came off turnovers, net. That was an 11-point offensive performance by Philly.

neil: I just don’t think we can take anything away from that game whatsoever.

It was basically the same as that Denver Broncos game during the COVID-19 season, when they had to start a WR at QB.

Salfino: Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts seemed to play very tight. That’s what I’m taking away from it. It was one of the worst throwing performances by a winning championship game that I’ve ever seen. Maybe the year Peyton Manning was playing on fumes compares. I can’t remember one good pass by Hurts, though I guess there had to be a couple.

neil: There was one Hurts pass that produced a great “catch”, Mike!

joshua.hermsmeyer: The rushing wasn’t great either, Mike — 3.36 YPA!

maya: Wait, guys, we’re still talking about a 14-3 team that has almost 80 sacks on the season and a quarterback who’s rushed for 15 TDs on the year.

That’s not nothing.

Salfino: Yes, Hurts has been so good so I think that NFC championship performance is more descriptive than predictive.

neil: Oh yeah, I don’t actually think we should doubt the Eagles based on that game. The script of the game very quickly became obvious — gain a lead and don’t turn the ball over, chew clock, and it will be impossible for the Niners to come back because they literally cannot throw.

The stats on either side of a game like that are going to be warped.

Salfino: Right, it was clear that the Eagles just had to avoid beating themselves and maybe it’s harder to play that way. Hurts seemed really tight and maybe that’s just always thinking of not making a mistake instead of just playing. Maybe he was aiming those throws too much.

joshua.hermsmeyer: There was hope, for one fleeting moment, that Christian McCaffrey could put the Niners on his back. But after his long, almost impossible touchdown run, the Niners never sniffed the goal line again. In fact they ran zero (0) plays in the red zone.

neil: That was never going to be sustainable.

Salfino: My thinking after the CMC TD was “Brock Purdy’s probably not even good and Josh Johnson can be just as good as he would have been, maybe.” But then, Johnson got concussed and it was Game Over.

neil: This is why they should have an emergency backup QB in the stadium at all times. You know how they have an emergency backup goalie in hockey? A random goalie off the street who can play for either team if needed? We need that in football, too. Because if a team has no functional QB, the game becomes a sham.

maya: Yeah. But credit where credit is due — the Eagles controlled the pace of the game, coach Nick Sirianni had some smart situational calls (including the hurry-up play after the fourth-and-3 “catch”) and I didn’t see a ton of mistakes in either the box score or the game itself.

Salfino: I’d argue the Eagles made their own QB luck with that pass rush. They legit got two KOs.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I’m not really giving the Eagles credit. They had one of the easier paths to the Super Bowl I can think of. They are a good team, but we still just don’t really know anything about Hurts and his shoulder and what a comeback push out of this team might look like.

Sorry, Eagles.

Salfino: Maya, I do not get Kyle Shanahan not challenging when the offense clearly is telling you they maybe got a good call by hurrying up. Plus that play had the threshold of down and distance to warrant a challenge that early.

maya: I can’t decide what I’m looking forward to less, two weeks of speculation on Hurts’s shoulder, Mahomes’s ankle or being inundated by the Kelce brothers storyline.

Salfino: The last team that had this easy a postseason draw was the 2007 Patriots, who beat David Garrard and then faced Philip Rivers with a torn ACL in the AFC championship game. I forget what happened next.

neil: Nothing historically notable.

maya: LOL

neil: So yeah, that’s a point well taken, Mike, that you do kind of make your own QB injury luck with a ferocious pass rush. But I would have liked to have seen a full game of the 49ers with Purdy against the Eagles. It’s a huge what-if, and we were robbed of what was supposed to be an NFC title game classic.

maya: Yeah, this was a matchup that, on paper, looked so promising. Strengths versus strengths, question marks versus question marks (with the exception of Purdy versus that pass rush, I guess ). But let’s take a step back. I know we’ve been pretty down on the NFC as the weaker conference throughout the season. Should we go as far as to read the Eagles’ overall season as a function of that? Or just their postseason?

joshua.hermsmeyer: The Eagles’ regular season was legit across the board. It wasn’t positive variance all over the place (though the Eagles were one of the least-injured teams). I just think the postseason casts doubt on our ability to know the true strength of this team at the moment.

Salfino: Josh, I’m curious about your view on whether the Eagles are showing that maybe building around pass rush (over pass coverage) is a smart defensive model. I know analytics says the opposite.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Well “analytics” are not a monolith. I’m of the school that pass rush is more important, Eric Eager has done studies when he was at PFF that show pass coverage is more impactful, at least as a unit. The issue is pass rush is more individual and predictable, and pass coverage is a weak-link system where player performance varies wildly each season. So I lean pass rush as the better way to build a team, at least initially.

Salfino: The Eagles are truly great in net yards per attempt for minus allowed, my favorite predictive stat. They are 7.1 for and 4.9 allowed, for a plus-2.2 margin. That’s just massive. Win that stat by any margin since the merger, and you win about 75 percent of games, irrespective of anything else. And the Chiefs were plus-1.9, by the way. So these are two of the strongest teams in history facing off in the Super Bowl. 

It’s rare when both teams are around plus-2.0. This is just the second Super Bowl since the 1973 season with two teams that were at least 1.8 yards better in net YPA than their opponents. (The other was in 2019, Chiefs vs. Niners.) And including this year, only 86 teams have done it in the Super Bowl era.

neil: Yeah, I don’t want us to get to a place where we’re saying these teams are frauds to get to the Super Bowl or something.

They played like Super Bowl teams all year long.

maya: Oh thank goodness. Someone else sticking up for the Eagles. I cannot in good faith defend them any longer.

What am I, the Empire State Building?

joshua.hermsmeyer: LOL

neil: That was the saddest NYC moment in a long time.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Sad when the social media account of a once-great building is hacked.

Salfino: I saw the lights and thought the New York Jets traded for Aaron Rodgers.

maya: Honestly, what bummed me out the most was knowing that the lights were definitely designed for the Jets, but the building has never needed to use them.

Salfino: As a Jets fan, I would have been happier with the Eagles colors last week. I think that whole thing is weird. It’s like the Empire State Building is trying to be a national building instead of a local one with sports, but just look at your own name.

And in terms of the NFC being weaker, it’s so weird when the conferences are this different. But that’s a function of the QB position.

maya: Ooh, say more, Mike.

Here’s my thing: I am fully confident that the mean quarterback in the AFC is better than the mean quarterback in the NFC. But the AFC is so top heavy that if we were to look at the median, I’m not sure we’d see as large a gap.

Salfino: Does the AFC have more terrible QBs? That’s interesting. I haven’t thought about it this way. I’m just thinking the top four in the AFC are all championship-caliber, plus the fifth is Trevor Lawrence probably. And we’re sort of forgetting about Lamar Jackson.

maya: The bottom of the AFC this year, in terms of Total QBR, was Davis Mills, Mac Jones, Russell Wilson and Matt Ryan.

Salfino: Russell Wilson being down there is just mind-blowing, Maya.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Yeah, the NFC got all his best years, I guess?

neil: Matt Ryan’s, too.

But again, if we’re looking at QBR, we’re getting Nos. 1 and 4 in QBR across the whole season, in Mahomes and Hurts. 

(Pay no attention to Josh Allen and Tua Tagovailoa sandwiched in between them.)

So the Super Bowl really is the cream of the crop, even if the conference title games were decided by factors that you can’t always count on.

maya: I’m still kind of impressed that Kansas City had a quarterback with one working ankle and was missing four of its top five wide receivers (though not top five pass-catchers) by game’s end and still managed to move the ball enough to get the win.

Salfino: Barely enough and oddly not really at all on the winning “drive.” But yeah, Mahomes is just amazing. He is probably the GOAT, and what he did on that ankle with the receivers out was off-the-charts greatness. But he did not look healthy to me, at all. And I don’t see this ankle getting better. So if the Eagles win, people will say they were lucky in not facing the “real” Mahomes.

joshua.hermsmeyer: The Chiefs had the only pass-catcher that matters. Our King Kelce. 

Salfino: The mayor of Cincinnati has to pipe down. That dude was way out of his lane. 

But I will say that I don’t think the Cincy trash-talking had any impact on the game. Mahomes is going to be just as motivated regardless. The man is dangerous. He’s a killer.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I think motivation has to matter. It did for Michael Jordan.

neil: We’ve seen the Flu Game. This was the Taped-Up-Shoe Game.

Salfino: When was Jordan not motivated?

joshua.hermsmeyer: Insert “and I took that personally” meme.

maya: I didn’t think Mahomes was the only guy playing out of his mind. Chris Jones looked terrific. He got his first two career postseason sacks, and on his 38 defensive snaps as a pass-rusher, had a pressure rate of 21.1 percent.

Salfino: Chris Jones was the best player on the field. Massive impact on that game.

neil: Yes, Jones and the K.C. pass rush got to Joe Burrow five times after the Bills had only sacked him once. That especially played a big role early, and it made the Bengals adjust their scheme on the fly.

Salfino: They got four sacks while the first beer was still cold. That really mattered. It staggered the Bengals. Took them out of whatever their game plan was.

joshua.hermsmeyer: The Chiefs deserved to win, but the Bengals and their fans have a legit argument that penalties decided the game. K.C. lost 2.3 points to penalties, the Bengals 6.9. That’s more than the difference in the game.

neil: That was, uh, not a crisply officiated game.

Anytime the refs are declaring do-over plays, there might be some problems.

Salfino: My biggest problem with the officiating was the Marquez Valdes-Scantling reach. You don’t get to treat a yard marker like the goal line. He pulled the ball back. You don’t even get a re-spot on a review if you don’t get the first down, either. I just don’t understand that call. 

maya: Zac Taylor kept it together admirably.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Germaine Pratt did not keep it together after the game was over. 

Salfino: That flag on the hit out of bounds has to be called. People are saying, “You can’t decide the game.” But if you don’t call an obvious foul, you’re deciding the game.

neil: Yeah, it was the correct call.

I feel for Joseph Ossai. He was taking it HARD after the game. He literally made a Rookie Mistake.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I think K.C. should honor Ossai. Name a hot sauce after him or something.

Salfino: This is the Bengals version of the Gastineau roughing call against Kosar. Only worse. That play will never be forgotten.

maya: I think this Cincy team is still in the early days of its championship window. There were so many small moments in the game yesterday where I found myself just sitting there, mouth open.

I keep going back to the 35-yard downfield pass to Ja’Marr Chase on fourth-and-6. 

joshua.hermsmeyer: I mean I was agog, but the process seemed not so great to me?

Salfino: I’m not a big fan of “early in the championship window.” It closes fast. I think it’s closed for the Bills, who will never forget those 13 seconds last year. That was their window.

joshua.hermsmeyer: The down and distance, the coverage … 

Salfino: I liked the Chase play, Josh. They were a two-man passing offense with Tyler Boyd hurt. The pass rush didn’t give you a chance to go through progressions. Let your great player make a great play. I like those odds.

joshua.hermsmeyer: These types of plays are hard to reason through when you know the result. To be fair, at least one model liked the call to go for it, though it was of course silent on the actual play design. But I don’t think I want my team attempting that play.

Salfino: A play like that won the Super Bowl for Mahomes when it was to Tyreek Hill.

joshua.hermsmeyer: On the other hand, lots of TDs were scored on drives extended by fourth-down plays this weekend. So, huzzah. 

maya: Sure, there’s definitely an element of ex post facto here. If it had been a turnover on downs, we certainly wouldn’t be talking about it. On the other hand, I thought the late-down play-calling was pretty terrific, generally, in that game yesterday. Only the QB-less Niners had negative EPA on third- and fourth-down plays yesterday.

Neil: They may also have felt like it was necessary to strike right then and there after the Mahomes fumble.

You’re at their 41 and down by a TD. They just gifted you a chance to get back in. And you know neither Burrow nor Chase are afraid of that moment.

I can’t say I am 100 percent sure the better team won. But the heart both teams showed was great to watch.

Salfino: I think Burrow was too aggressive on the pick he threw on the third down deep to Tee Higgins. That was four-down territory. It was only third-and-3.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Oh, you don’t like the play that didn’t work, and you like the play that did work? I mean, we are really resulting now.

neil: Live by Burrow’s swagger, die by Burrow’s swagger.

Salfino: Burrow was outplayed pretty significantly by one-legged Mahomes. That was unexpected. This loss is on Burrow.

maya: There were both some aggressive play calls and some surprisingly non-aggressive ones. What about the K.C. punt with 2:36 left in the game? It was fourth-and-8 on the Cincy 37.

neil: Maya, I was somewhat surprised the Chiefs punted there, for the same reasons.

maya: Felt very un-Andy-Reid-like to me.

neil: This after multiple times trying a hook-and-lateral 20 yards downfield in the ordinary flow of the offense earlier in the game.

Salfino: I don’t think Reid had any confidence in his receivers on that fourth down after the Bengals first accepted and then declined (wisely) the penalty. If they fail to convert there, it’s likely game over given the short distance to get into field goal range. Or at least a lot more likely to lose than by punting.

maya: But speaking of Reid, we have a one-man Reid bowl! The winningest coach of the Eagles will be on the opposite sideline in two weeks. Any matchups you guys are particularly looking forward to?

neil:I don’t have the stat on this, but has a Super Bowl coach ever faced a team that he is the all-time coaching wins leader of?

Reid is Philly’s wins leader and it is not remotely close.

Salfino: Maybe Weeb Ewbank versus the Colts in Super Bowl III, Neil?

neil: Great pull, Mike! 

Salfino: Even if not, this certainly has the same vibe as that game, given that Weeb won two championships for the Colts.

joshua.hermsmeyer: The Chiefs had a 91 percent pass block win rate against the Bengals, according to ESPN. I don’t expect that to continue, but that battle in the trenches is the one I’ll be watching closely. 

maya: Yeah, Chris Jones vs. the world should be a good one. I also am curious to see how the Chiefs defend the Eagles’ two-tight end sets.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I’ll also be keeping tabs on the injury status of K.C.’s best coverage player, L’Jarius Sneed. Hopefully two weeks is enough time to recover from what looked like a concussion when he tried to tackle Samaje Perine in the first quarter.

maya: And I guess the next obvious factor is Mahomes’s ankle and mobility.

neil: Yes. And that matters a lot because, in many ways, this is also a battle of balance (Philly is good on offense and defense) versus one-dimensionality (K.C. is elite offensively and below-average on defense. Plus, K.C.’s special teams have been among the worst by EPA all season; Philly is solid there.)

In fact, you could really just distill down to the team that is good (if not great) at everything — the Eagles — against the team that is really only good at one thing (K.C. passing). But in that one thing, they are far and away the best.

maya: Gasps in Isiah Pacheco.

neil: K.C.’s rushing offense this season was merely average by EPA.

(Sorry, Isiah. And I know that unit’s personnel has morphed over the course of the season. But even after weighting recent games more heavily, they are basically average.)

Salfino: Is the Chiefs defense underrated, Neil? OK, the 33 TD passes they allowed in the regular season are out of control. But their yards allowed and net YPA were very good. TDs are lucky. I put way more stock into average gain including sack yards and sacks as plays.

maya: Also, given we’ve spent approximately 30 seconds discussing special teams this season (basically entirely the light razzing of Dallas’s kicker), how important will that be?

joshua.hermsmeyer: Who can ever say?

Salfino: Special teams may be randomly important.

neil: Special teams is always an afterthought … until it’s not.

Salfino: Harrison Butker is shaky on extra points, seriously. 

maya: I thought that was the biggest factor in why K.C. punted from the 37-yard line. But Butker looked solid on the game winner.

Salfino: That barely cleared from a distance perspective. It was weird.

Mahomes is still going to be very limited. This is not the team you want a stationary QB against. I think the Eagles are going to keep reminding Mahomes he’s hurt, whereas the Bengals didn’t. Hurts’s mobility will give the Chiefs a lot of problems where the Niners are so fast defensively, it wasn’t a factor.

Add in the WR injuries and I see this being a TD win at least by the Eagles. 

maya: OK, Mike on the record for the Eagles!

Salfino: (Only because of Mahomes’s ankle, which is bad.)

neil: I think that’s right, Mike. I think that Philly’s terrifying pass rush will cause particular problems for Mahomes because of the ankle, and I think the Eagles’ offensive balance is going to cause problems for a K.C. team that is weak defending the run in particular.

It seems like a bad matchup for K.C.

Salfino: If the Eagles win, are the Mahomes Chiefs the new 1990s Atlanta Braves? (Complete with the same annoying/inappropriate tomahawk chop.)

maya: Please give in basketball terms, Mike.

neil: LOL.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I like two weeks of rest for Mahomes. They were lucky to avoid overtime and not put more stress on the ankle. He’ll have some of his banged-up receivers back. Couple that with my uncertainty about what the Eagles even are at this moment, I’m going Chiefs.

Salfino: That two weeks isn’t going to mean anything. This is a months-long injury.

maya: We don’t know that!

joshua.hermsmeyer: Dr. Salfino, please enlighten.

Salfino: We hear all the time that high ankle sprains limit a player for a season. It’s not getting better in two weeks, Josh. We’ve seen these injuries a million times. Mahomes looked like a different player out there and that ain’t changing.

neil: I will say, god knows what they injected in it seemed to at least get him through Sunday’s game enough for a solid performance.

joshua.hermsmeyer: He said he took no jabs!

neil: Then I have no idea what they did, but whatever it was, it made him functional!

Salfino: Oh, no, Neil. No “North Dallas Forty” situation here. We were ASSURED that Mahomes didn’t shoot up. (Who cares?)

neil: That’s between the Chiefs trainers and Mahomes’s ankle, none of my business.

Salfino: (I don’t believe it anyway; this is all LEGEND OF MAHOMES stuff.)

joshua.hermsmeyer: Plus Mahomes has his brother and wife cheering for him up in the booth, and posting on TikTok. Chiefs by 21.

neil: The brother is cringe. That knocks at least a TD off.

maya: Does Mahomes need this ring for his legacy?

This is three Super Bowls in five seasons.

Salfino: Yes, Maya. You can’t go to five straight championship games and win one Super Bowl. We heard Tom Brady even get knocked for this for a while.

I mean, that’s going to be the narrative. I’d take one championship game as a Jets fan.

maya: When the Empire State Building is lit green and white for the right reasons …

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NFL

What To Watch For In The NFL’s Conference Championship Games

By Drae Harris

Jan. 27, 2023, at 1:03 PM

If this weekend’s conference championship games feel as if they were predestined, it’s no accident. In fact, many prognosticators projected a version of this for these four teams — the San Francisco 49ers and Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC and the Kansas City Chiefs and Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC — as the season began. That means we could be in for an outstanding weekend of games between the very cream of the NFL’s crop.

In the NFC, this is a matchup of the conference’s top offense (the Eagles) versus its top defense (the 49ers). Philadelphia played like the NFL’s best team all season behind their Most Valuable Player award finalist Jalen Hurts at quarterback. However, uncertainty crept in as Hurts injured his shoulder late in the season (and his replacement, Gardner Minshew, appeared to be in over his head). Nonetheless, when Hurts returned from injury he regained the form that made Philadelphia one of the most dangerous teams in the league. Somehow, being injured and missing games only solidified his MVP case — only in his absence did we see just how valuable he truly is. 

Hurts is protected up front by arguably the NFL’s best offensive line — they ranked first in ProFootballFocus’s pass-blocking grade and third in run-blocking — led by center Jason Kelce, who could find himself in Canton when his career concludes. And when given enough time, Hurts has been able to efficiently get the ball to his dynamic wide receivers. DeVonta Smith had 1,196 yards on the season while his teammate A.J. Brown had 1,496. But the Eagles also have a well-balanced offensive attack. Running back Miles Sanders was fifth in the NFL in rushing yardage this season, eclipsing the 1,200-yard mark, and he wasn’t even the team’s leading rusher in the divisional round win over the rival New York Giants (that would be third-stringer Kenneth Gainwell, showcasing just how much depth Philly’s offense has). The Eagles also have the best defense by yards per game allowed, anchored by an elite pass-rusher in 2023 Pro Bowler Haason Reddick. And on the back end, they boast what most would consider the league’s best secondary with Darius Slay, C.J. Gardner-Johnson and James Bradberry — all considered in the upper tier at their respective positions in the NFL.

Lest you think the Eagles are alone in their across-the-board strength, the 49ers similarly boast a healthy balance of efficient offense paired with an exceptional defense. San Francisco sets the tone for its top-ranked defense by dominating the line of scrimmage. The Niners’ ability to generate pressure with their front four affords defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans great schematic flexibility. (And his ability to effectively implement his scheme is part of what has made him a hot head-coaching candidate this offseason.) It also helps to have one of the league’s premier pass rushers in Nick Bosa, who led the NFL in sacks this season. At the second level, Fred Warner and Dre Greenlaw are a formidable linebacking tandem and compliment each other’s style of play as well as any pair in the league. San Francisco’s secondary is solid — Charvarius Ward, signed from K.C., has been their most consistent cornerback, and Jimmie Ward continues to be a leader on defense — while 2023 Pro Bowler Talanoa Hufanga has been a breakout star.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/chaotic-fictional-football-coach-fivethirtyeight-74531599

Offensively, do-everything running back Christian McCaffrey has arguably been one of the best mid-season acquisitions in NFL history, when considering his immediate impact on a Super Bowl-caliber team. He brings another dynamic dimension for one of the league’s preeminent play-callers, Kyle Shanahan, in what will be a matchup of teams with more similarities than differences. This game might come down to how well rookie seventh-round pick Brock Purdy can continue to play under center. San Francisco’s offense hasn’t missed a beat with Purdy at the helm. Purdy is undefeated since taking over as starter. He continues to manage the game and get the ball into the hands of the team’s best playmakers. 

But given how strong both teams are in all facets of the game, this is likely to be a hard-fought game. The FiveThirtyEight model gives the Eagles a 59 percent chance of winning at home and advancing to the Super Bowl, and I don’t disagree with the idea of a narrow Philly victory.

If the NFC championship is a tale of two of the NFL’s best defenses, the AFC championship could very well be a showdown between the league’s most prolific offenses. 

The Bengals were the Cinderella story of 2021: In what was believed to be a “make or break” year for head coach Zac Taylor, all he did was guide Cincinnati to knock off the team that was favored to return to the Super Bowl, en route to Cincy’s own appearance in the Big Game. You’d think the Bengals would not sneak up on anyone again, but they upset another team considered the Super Bowl favorite this year — the Buffalo Bills — when Buffalo seemed poised for a huge win at home. The NFL even pre-sold over 50,000 tickets for a potential neutral-site AFC championship game between K.C. and Buffalo before the outcome of the Bills-Bengals game had been decided.

Last week’s win over Buffalo solidified the notion that Cincinnati has indeed found its franchise quarterback in Joe Burrow. Affectionately nicknamed “Joe Cool” for his unflappable demeanor, particularly in big games, he has led his Bengals to three consecutive victories over the Chiefs (including the postseason). He also has help: The Bengals’ offensive line, which has been an Achilles’ heel of sorts in the past, has played much better this season than last, when Burrow was sacked more than any QB in the NFL. The line could be missing as many as three starters heading into the AFC title game, but it has played its best down the stretch in 2022. Plus, Burrow has helped the protection some by getting the ball out more quickly to his dynamic weapons Tee Higgins, Tyler Boyd and Ja’Marr Chase. And Joe Mixon continues to run the ball effectively, helping give this team balance offensively. 

Mixon is key to the Bengals’ chances, as they will need to maintain an effective running game to ultimately keep the Kansas City offense on the sideline. Defending the prolific Chiefs offense will be a tall task for a Cincinnati pass defense that has been somewhat inconsistent this season. The Chiefs are led by a trio that are all but certain future Hall of Famers: coach Andy Reid, tight end Travis Kelce and possible two-time NFL MVP Patrick Mahomes.¹⁶ Mahomes orchestrates the wildly innovative Chiefs offense and all of their talented weapons. Rookie seventh-round draft pick Isiah Pacheco runs with a type of physicality that is a healthy complement to the Chiefs’ finesse passing game. Receivers Marquez Valdes-Scantling and JuJu Smith-Schuster offer a bigger physical presence, in contrast to the smaller “race car” types of Skyy Moore, Kadarius Toney and Mecole Hardman. And tight end Kelce is a matchup nightmare for defenders between the numbers.

For these reasons, the Chiefs are nearly impossible to consistently stop while at full strength. But it’s important to note that Kansas City’s most important player may not be fully healthy for Sunday’s game — Mahomes suffered a high ankle sprain early in K.C.’s divisional win over the Jacksonville Jaguars. While the Chiefs’ QB says he will be “ready to go” for the game against Cincinnati, there are lingering questions about how much the injury will limit Mahomes’ trademark mobility and ability to make plays with both his arm and legs.

In large part because of those injury concerns, the Chiefs might even be considered underdogs in this game according to the Vegas oddsmakers. (The game is listed as a toss-up now, but Cincinnati had been favored earlier in the week.) With all the talk that the Bengals have overtaken the Chiefs as the prettiest girl at the AFC dance, you can be assured that Reid will have his team motivated and ready to play. Since Mahomes is expected to start,¹⁷ the FiveThirtyEight model has K.C. installed as 58 percent favorites, and I personally would not be surprised if the Chiefs win by convincing margin.

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MLB

Meet Lewin Díaz, Baseball's Biggest Hot-Potato Prospect

By Brian Menéndez

Jan. 27, 2023, at 12:50 PM

During the MLB offseason, we can rely on at least two things: players changing uniforms via trades or free-agent signings, and the ensuing roster crunch that usually follows. Oftentimes, these moves require making space on the team for said new acquisition, resulting in bumping a player who either may not be a good fit for the organization, is in excess at his position (making him expendable) or both.

But all hope is not lost for these players. Getting removed from the 40-man roster — otherwise known as being designated for assignment, or “DFA’d” for short — means a club has seven days to trade the player or pass him through waivers (where another team can claim him). Players often change teams through this process, especially when they have upside, as these moves can sometimes involve younger players with fringe MLB potential. The catch? The acquiring or claiming team needs to fit the player onto their 40-man roster.

Such can begin a cycle of a player being in both too much demand and too little — and perhaps no one embodies that more than Baltimore Orioles first baseman Lewin Díaz. To say that Díaz has endured a roller-coaster of an offseason thus far would be an understatement: Since last November, he was DFA’d an astounding five times before finally clearing waivers and getting outrighted to the minors by the Orioles. As a result, Díaz’s transaction offseason sheet is now as long as a CVS receipt.

Getting DFA’d that often in one offseason isn’t just uncommon — it’s impressive. It signals that even though these clubs may not think he is good enough to stay on their respective 40-man rosters, Díaz still has a skill set that these organizations are willing to take a chance on, even if their plan is only to stash him in Triple-A until he is contributing at the major-league level.

And that makes sense if you dig into Díaz’s history. The Minnesota Twins signed him as an international free agent back in 2013, when he was 16 years old, and at the time, he was a top-10 international prospect, according to MLB.com. The Twins committed a sizable amount of money to him, too — $1.4 million, to be exact. Scouts immediately took notice of his big, raw power, even comparing him with Ryan Howard. His bat translated to the professional ranks immediately, posting a 142 weighted runs created plus in rookie ball, at the age of 17.

Díaz continued to hit as he ascended through the minors with the Twins, and he was acquired by the Marlins in 2019. He clubbed 27 homers and went into the 2020 season as Miami’s seventh-best prospect, having moved from the outfield to first base. He gained a reputation for being a plus defender at the position, and in 2020, he got his first taste of major-league action.

The problem? He just didn’t hit. Because there was no minor league season that year, Díaz had to adjust to facing MLB pitching without a single plate appearance in AAA. Though it was just a 14-game sample, Díaz posted a wRC+ mark of just 9. (Nine!) Things didn’t improve a whole lot over the next two seasons; although he showed some power (13 home runs in 98 games), a 60 wRC+ wasn’t enough to turn heads.

One thing that has translated to the major-league level, however, is Díaz’s aforementioned defensive prowess. Remarkably, he ranks second among all first basemen in Defensive Runs Saved (16) since the 2020 season, despite playing only 753 ⅔ innings. If we are to believe what DRS is telling us, then Díaz doesn’t just have a good glove at first base, it’s actually the best in baseball on a per-inning basis (and it isn’t even that close).

It’s that defensive value, combined with the power potential — particularly of the left-handed variety — that has made the Pirates, Orioles, Braves and Orioles (again) want to take a chance on Díaz. Based on his per-inning defensive track record, Díaz could be worth at least a win (if not much more) over a whole season with his glove alone. And we’ve seen shades of what he might do with the bat in a similar span of games: Over the past two years, he has swatted 39 homers in 156 AAA contests. We even got another taste of it when Díaz was playing in the Dominican Winter League last month, between DFAs:

Díaz will still be just 26 on opening day, so there is still reason to believe he can turn things around offensively. And the Orioles, a squad who made an unlikely playoff push in 2022, will now be able to stash Díaz as a depth piece in the minors, waiting for his chance to shine with the big club. As of now, the team has Ryan Mountcastle listed as the starting first baseman and Anthony Santander as the designated hitter. There is always the outside chance that Díaz could make the team out of spring training as a non-roster invitee, though it would likely take a monster March to do so. But those are just normal baseball-prospect hurdles to clear. Once you’ve changed organizations four times in the span of 44 days, simply knowing what franchise you’ll be competing for is half the battle.

NFL

How The Eagles Built A Winner By Overdrafting Quarterbacks

By Josh Hermsmeyer

Jan. 26, 2023, at 6:00 AM

According to most of the football world, Jalen Hurts should not be a Philadelphia Eagle. Even Hurts was incredulous at the beginning. When his phone rang on draft day and the area code was 215 — a Pennsylvania number — at first Hurts thought it was the Steelers calling. Instead, it was Eagles general manager Howie Roseman telling Hurts they were selecting him with the 53rd pick of the 2020 NFL draft. 

“I had no idea I would come here,” Hurts said on New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce.

Hurts wasn’t alone. Philadelphia fans — folks not known to be particularly temperate in expressing their emotions, even at the best of times — were apoplectic. NFL talking heads said the pick didn’t make sense; that Hurts couldn’t help enough immediately to justify his second-round selection; that owner Jeffrey Lurie should fire everyone if the Eagles moved on from 2019 starter Carson Wentz. Even sharp young analysts with an analytical bent declared it extremely unlikely that Hurts would ever deliver value to the Eagles. It seemed as if the entire football world was convinced Roseman had bungled things badly.

Perhaps the world can be forgiven for not imagining a future where Wentz would lose his job, or that just two short years later, Hurts would lead the Eagles to the NFC championship game. After all, Wentz was coming off a solid year in 2019 (6.7 YPA, 27 touchdowns, seven interceptions for a 62.8 QBR) and had led the team to the wild card while staying healthy. Perhaps more importantly, he’d just signed a $128 million extension the previous June. Most viewed Hurts as either an expensive insurance policy taken out against another Wentz injury, or an upscale version of the New Orleans Saints’ do-everything gadget player Taysom Hill. But no one gave the notion that Wentz could suddenly turn into a pumpkin any real credence … until it happened the very next season. In 2020, Wentz led the league in sacks (50), tied for the lead in interceptions (15) and ranked 28th in QBR. By the end of the year, Hurts was starting; soon after the season, coach Doug Pederson was fired and Wentz was traded.

Did the Eagles see the implosion coming when no one else did? Probably not. In his news conference after the Hurts pick, Roseman said that having a strong QB room was the bedrock of the team’s philosophy. When Roseman said, “Our priorities are that … quarterback position,” he was expressing the attitude that having multiple quarterbacks was simply sound team-building — not that Wentz’s downfall was assumed to be imminent.

We should probably take him at his word. Just look at how Roseman has allocated draft capital since he reclaimed personnel power over the Eagles in December 2015. If we include trades involving first-round picks,¹⁸ the Eagles have spent more draft capital (as defined by the net expected future value of each pick plus the net future value of players acquired for traded picks) on quarterbacks than any other position besides wide receivers — and they’ve used three times as many picks on receivers.

In fact, the Eagles’ allocation of draft capital has been nearly identical to what “the analytics” say about positional value. From the series of trades that landed the Eagles the No. 2 overall pick (ultimately used on Wentz); to the Hurts pick; to the nine selections that the team has spent on wide receivers;¹⁹ to the eight picks spent on edge rushers and the four shots taken on interior linemen²⁰ to provide a stout inside push (allowing those edge rushers to flourish): Roseman has followed an evidence-based approach to team-building almost perfectly. 

And when Wentz went all pear-shaped in 2020, that approach helped save the team. It certainly wasn’t Roseman’s ability to “pick the right players.” Every team misses on picks, and the Eagles are no exception. Roseman spent a first-, fourth- and sixth-round pick to move up three spots and draft tackle Andre Dillard at No. 22 in 2019. Dillard is a first-round bust who still hasn’t played more than 35 percent of the team’s offensive snaps in a season. Second-round cornerback Sidney Jones was waived after just three seasons in Philadelphia. And most egregiously, Roseman missed out on perhaps the best receiver in the league in 2020. He bet and lost on wide receiver Jalen Reagor in the same draft that he took Hurts, picking Reagor one spot ahead of future Minnesota Vikings superstar wideout Justin Jefferson. Reagor was eventually traded to the Vikings (of all teams) this past August for a 2023 seventh-rounder and a conditional 2024 pick.²¹

Yet despite all the failure, the power of allocating draft capital to high-value positions is that it gives a franchise the cushion to absorb the calamity of a missed premium pick, an unexpected injury or a precipitous decline in performance. It can even help a team survive the chaos of firing the only Super Bowl-winning head coach in franchise history. 

Spending premium draft capital selecting extra quarterbacks is an expensive insurance policy, but it’s insurance that should become table stakes across the league. It’s so obviously advantageous to have a better-than-average Plan B for your starting quarterback, as both the Eagles and the 49ers have shown, that other teams can’t help but take note. And it’s why it shouldn’t be shocking if the Eagles use a high pick on yet another quarterback this offseason. Injury or ineffectiveness lurks around the corner every year, and preparing for the worst is the most important thing a GM can do. 

So Hurts’s rise proves that another famous Philadelphian, Ben Franklin, had it backward: When it comes to quarterbacks, if you’re not planning to fail, you’re failing to plan.

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CORRECTION (Jan. 26, 2023, 2:20 p.m.): A previous version of this story said Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Sidney Jones was traded to the Seattle Seahawks for a sixth-round pick. Jones was waived by the Eagles and later traded to Seattle for a sixth-round pick by the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Soccer

Liverpool Can’t Spend Its Way Out Of This Mess

By Terrence Doyle

Jan. 25, 2023, at 6:00 AM

When the 2022-23 Premier League season began, the FiveThirtyEight Club Soccer Predictions model gave Liverpool the second-best odds of winning the title.²² More than five months and 20 matchweeks later, however,²³ the Reds sit ninth in the table, behind minnows like Brentford, newly promoted Fulham, and Brighton & Hove Albion, and the model gives them a less than 1 percent chance of domestic glory.²⁴

At the same time last season, Liverpool sat in third, nine points behind eventual champions Manchester City, but with a game in hand. The model favored City then — and was eventually vindicated — but Liverpool played nearly flawless soccer from that point forward, buoyed by the signing of former Porto forward and Colombia national team superstar Luis Díaz during the winter transfer window. The Díaz signing was, by and large, one of the great masterstrokes in the history of Premier League winter signings: His non-penalty expected goals plus expected assists per 90 minutes played (npxG+xAG/90) ranked in a tie for ninth (with Phil Foden and Riyad Mahrez) among players with at least 11 starts. 

Of course, the Reds ultimately fell agonizingly short in their pursuit of a record-tying 20th English top-flight title — thanks to an Aston Villa collapse — but their brilliant winter transfer business gave them a puncher’s chance. 

The same can’t be said this season, even if they did recently lure Dutch forward Cody Gakpo — one of Europe’s most exciting young attacking talents, and one of the breakout stars of the 2022 World Cup — away from PSV Eindhoven. As good as Gakpo is now (and as world-class as he may eventually become),²⁵ it’s far too little, far too late. Besides, Liverpool’s issues don’t lie with its forward line — they lie (mostly) with its midfield (and an inability to keep opponents from scoring first). 

To put it lightly, Liverpool’s midfield is a mess. It is a miserable combination of being too old and too injured. Club captain Jordan Henderson — whose presence at Liverpool has been simultaneously fraught (unfairly) and decorated — was probably never meant to play as many minutes as he has in his age-32 season. The same goes for maestro Thiago Alcántara and destroyer Fabinho, both of whom are on the wrong side of 29. 

A year ago, those three comprised one of the best midfields in world soccer — a combination that (more or less) brought Liverpool to the precipice of an unprecedented quadruple.²⁶ As such, they each played more than 2,300 minutes across all competitions, which is a lot of minutes for any player, let alone players in (or approaching) their 30s. It’s impossible to know what manager Jürgen Klopp was thinking at the beginning of the season, but it’s also somewhat unbelievable to think he planned to play his midfield elder statesmen as much as he’s been forced to this season. However, long-term injuries to Curtis Jones, Naby Keita, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and loanee Arthur have given Klopp precious few options but to run it back.

Signing a midfielder during the transfer window (which ends Jan. 31) would make sense — probably more sense than signing a forward, even as Díaz and fellow forward Diogo Jota are sidelined with long-term injuries of their own — but to this point, Liverpool hasn’t dipped its toes into the market to improve its fortunes. And it might just be that Liverpool can’t be fixed (at least not this season). When a team relies on a strong press — which is to say, when a team relies on defending from the front (Díaz and Jota are two fantastic pressing forwards, but have been out for months) — and the press is broken, it makes the midfield’s job, and the job of the back line, a lot harder.

So, is Liverpool’s season over? Not exactly. The league title is almost certainly out of touch, and the same can be said for a top-4 finish, which would be borderline catastrophic financially — Champions League qualification equals tens of millions of dollars that clubs can use to reinvest in the squad and facilities, making them more attractive to potential future signings. But the Reds are still alive in the FA Cup and the Champions League. Klopp’s teams have historically been monsters in knockout tournaments — Liverpool has reached the final in three of the past five Champions League campaigns, winning one, and won the FA Cup last season — so silverware is still a possibility.²⁷ But without signing a midfielder (or two, or three), that possibility is dwindling by the day.

Check out our latest soccer predictions.

NBA

Rudy Gobert Was Supposed To Take The T-Wolves To The Next Level. Why Isn't It Working?

By Andres Waters

Jan. 25, 2023, at 6:00 AM

After making just their second playoff appearance in nearly 20 years, the Minnesota Timberwolves entered full win-now mode with a blockbuster trade during the offseason — sending five players and four first-round picks to the Utah Jazz in exchange for superstar center Rudy Gobert. The expectation was that pairing Gobert with fellow All-Star big Karl-Anthony Towns would form a dominant frontcourt duo and allow the franchise to continue its ascent. 

While there’s still a chance that could happen, that has yet to be the case for Minnesota (24-25). Just past the midpoint of the season, the team sits ninth in the Western Conference and has hovered around .500 practically all season. While competing in the middle of the pack was viewed as a sign of progress for this team last season, that’s no longer the case after last season’s success and the acquisition of a player as decorated as Gobert.

In an interview after the trade, Gobert said his goal was to compete for a championship with this team. But how has the trade affected his play on the court? And has his addition to the team actually made the Timberwolves any better?

At first glance, Gobert’s performance this season appears comparable to what he did with Utah in the past. He’s averaging a double-double in points (13.3) and rebounds (11.6) while also recording over one block (1.3) per game. He’s also shooting 67.8 percent from the field, which ranks second-best in the NBA. But with a closer look, you’ll find that this has been one of the worst statistical seasons of the big man’s 10-year career.  

Gobert’s 13.3 points per game are the second-fewest he’s averaged since taking over as a full-time starter for the Jazz in 2014-15. And his 1.3 blocks and 0.8 assists per game are the fewest he has posted since his rookie season. If that holds up, this would be the only season since his rookie year that Gobert didn’t average at least two blocks per game. (It also would be the first year that he didn’t finish among the top 10 in the league in the category.)

Moreover, Gobert’s on-court impact has been surprisingly limited. After posting a career-best RAPTOR plus/minus of +7.8 in 2020-21 and following that up with a strong +6.9 mark last year, his RAPTOR is down to +1.7 this season — the second-worst performance of his career (again, ahead of only his rookie year). And according to NBA Advanced Stats, we’ve never seen a more porous Gobert-led defensive effort. Minnesota’s defensive efficiency rating with Gobert on the court, 108.7, is the worst that he’s ever had, and his team’s -1.2 net rating while he’s in the game is the lowest since his rookie season. 

Those are not exactly the results a team would expect when trading for a three-time defensive player of the year, particularly given what the T-Wolves’ needs were coming into the season. 

Last year, Minnesota had one of the best offenses in the NBA, leading the league in points per game, and the team also posted a top-10 offensive efficiency rating (114.3). But it was also among the worst defensive teams, giving up 113.3 points a night — the seventh-most in the NBA last season. One of the main goals of the Gobert deal was to improve at that end of the court.

Since trading for Gobert, Minnesota has taken a step back offensively, which — to an extent — was to be expected. The biggest knock on the French big man has been his limited offensive game. Although the team is scoring nearly the exact same amount of points per game this year (115.3), which would have been tied for the fourth-most last season, the league has caught up. This season, Minnesota is ranked 11th in points per game, and the team has fallen to 20th in offensive efficiency (113.6). But the surprising part is the lack of improvement Minnesota has shown on defense. Even with Gobert playing 40 out of a possible 49 games, the team is allowing the league’s 11th-most points (115.6), only a four-spot improvement from last year. And its defensive efficiency rating is actually worse this season, rising from 111.2 to 113.4.

With the addition of Gobert, the thought was that pairing a defense-minded big with a skilled, shooting big like Towns would allow both players to make up for each other’s deficiencies, but that simply hasn’t been the case so far. Before Towns was forced to miss time due to a calf injury, the two weren’t even among the Timberwolves’ top two-man lineups. Of the 19 pairs to log 400 or more minutes on the court together this season, Gobert and Towns have the worst offensive rating (106.6) and the seventh-worst net rating (-0.7).

Minnesota’s new big man hasn’t been much better with the team’s other young star, Anthony Edwards, either: The pair also has a -0.7 net rating when sharing the floor. And in the limited time that all three stars are on the court together, the production has been mixed. While it has been one of the team’s better defensive combos, posting a 106.6 defensive rating (second-best among three-man units on the team this season), the Gobert-Towns-Edwards trio has been the second-worst offensively of any three-man lineup with more than 350 minutes together this season (with a 107.4 offensive rating). That has led the trio’s overall net rating to just barely break-even (+0.8 points per 100 possessions) despite its abundance of talent.

It’s still too early to tell whether this newly formed Timberwolves core can eventually be good enough to play at the championship level Gobert referred to before the season. But it is clearly off to a bad start, and it is concerning that the big-ticket acquisition of Gobert has yet to make the team much better … if at all.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

MLB

3 Players Could Fall Agonizingly Short Of Baseball Hall Of Fame Election This Year

By Nathaniel Rakich

Jan. 24, 2023, at 10:17 AM

The election for the Baseball Hall of Fame is fun again — mostly. After a decade of debate over whether baseball bad boys such as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling were worthy of induction into the sport’s most sacred shrine, that trio has lapsed off the regular ballot (though they are still periodically eligible for reconsideration in a separate special election that is held every third December). By contrast, this year’s election — the results of which will be announced Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET — is headlined by Scott Rolen, Todd Helton and Billy Wagner, three candidates untainted by allegations of steroid use or other major controversies.

And each has a compelling case for his enshrinement. Though perhaps underappreciated in his day, Rolen’s combination of great offense and defense made him one of the top 10 most valuable third basemen of all time — and the Hall of Fame needs more third basemen. (There are only 17 of them in the Hall, fewer than any other position.) Helton is one of only 13 players in history with a career batting average over .300, an on-base percentage over .400 and a slugging percentage over .500 in at least 9,000 plate appearances, and one of only six who did it all for one team.²⁸ And Wagner has the lowest career opponent’s batting average and second-lowest WHIP of any pitcher who has thrown more than 800 innings. Relief pitchers of his ilk are also underrepresented in the Hall, with only three and a half modern-day closers enshrined.²⁹ 

All three are flirting with the magic number of 75 percent, the share of the vote they need to get elected. We know this thanks to baseball fans Ryan Thibodaux, Anthony Calamis and Adam Dore, who do the hard work of canvassing every Hall of Fame ballot that is publicly released before the announcement and publishing a running tracker of each candidate’s vote total so far. And as of Jan. 23 at 5 p.m. ET, Rolen and Helton were each above 75 percent, with Wagner just a few points behind.

But as I write every year, you can’t take these numbers at face value. Thibodaux and company’s tracker is the Hall of Fame election equivalent of an unweighted poll, and certain types of voters are more likely than others to respond to it. Specifically, voters willing to share their ballots publicly are also more likely to vote for players who score better on advanced metrics or who were connected to performance-enhancing drugs, and they’re also likely to use more slots on their ballot (voters can vote for anywhere between zero and 10 candidates). As a result, most candidates tend to underperform their “polls,” except those whose Hall of Fame cases are driven by vibes more than stats.

The table below shows how much lower each player’s final vote share was than their public vote share in Thibodaux and company’s tracker — both in last year’s election and on average across all the elections in which they’ve been candidates.

Rolen has historically seen the largest such drop-off of any player on this year’s ballot. On average for his career, his final vote share has been 6.8 percentage points lower than his public vote share. If that happens this year, he’ll finish at only 72.4 percent of the vote. In order to get elected this year, he’ll need to drop off by around 4.2 points or fewer — something he hasn’t done since the 2019 election.

Helton typically sees his support slip in the final results too, but not by as much: His average drop-off is just 3.1 points. Given that he’s currently sitting at 79.8 percent in public ballots, he can withstand a hit similar to his drop-offs from 2019 (1.2 points), 2020 (3.7 points) or 2021 (2.7 points) and still get elected. Unfortunately for Helton, though, his most recent drop-off (5.0 points in 2022) would be enough to sink his chances, so he’d better hope that that election was a fluke.

Finally, Wagner’s final vote share typically looks very similar to his public vote share; his average career drop-off has been just 0.6 points. However, since Wagner is currently pulling just 73.2 percent of the public vote, he’ll need to gain 1.8 points from private ballots in order to get elected. He’s never done that in his electoral career; the closest he’s come was gaining 1.4 points in 2016.

Based on all of this history, it would seem like Helton has the best chance of getting elected to the Hall this year, with Rolen and especially Wagner looking like longer shots. 

However, the Nate Silver of Hall of Fame elections disagrees. Jason Sardell’s Hall of Fame forecasting model divides voters into groups based on the number of candidates they vote for and their attitude toward steroid use, then extrapolates each candidate’s net gained or lost votes among public voters in each group to the group’s private voters in order to come up with projected final vote shares for each candidate. Sardell has been the most accurate Hall of Fame prognosticator for four straight election cycles, and this year, he thinks Rolen has the best shot — albeit with just a 9 percent chance of getting in. In other words, Sardell is currently predicting that Hall of Fame voters will pitch a shutout.

Rolen, Helton and Wagner aren’t the only players on the ballot, of course. I said that this year’s election was still only “mostly” fun; there are still a few controversial candidates whose finishes will be comment-worthy, even if they have no chance of getting in. 

Sardell is projecting Álex Rodríguez, the superstar infielder who was suspended for the entire 2014 season for using performance-enhancing drugs, to finish with 34 percent of the vote in his second year on the ballot, virtually identical to the share of votes he received last year. He’ll probably need something to fundamentally change in order for him to climb to 75 percent before his candidacy expires. 

Sardell also expects Carlos Beltrán to get around 50 percent of the vote in his ballot debut. The center fielder was once seen as a surefire Hall of Famer, but that was before he was identified as a central figure in the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal of 2017. There was a lot of speculation as to how many votes this would cost him, however, and a debut at 50 percent would still be pretty solid for him. Not counting the candidates still on the ballot, every player who has received 50 percent or more in a Hall of Fame election has eventually been elected, except for three. (You guessed it: Bonds, Clemens and Schilling.)

Rodríguez, Beltrán and most of the other candidates on the ballot will be back for another try in 2024 if they don’t get elected this year, but some won’t be so lucky. Candidates lapse off the ballot if they receive less than 5 percent of the vote, which will almost certainly happen to the 12 candidates who have received zero or one public votes to date. But it’s going to be a close call for Torii Hunter, who has received just 3.3 percent of the vote thus far. And finally, this is definitely the last time on the ballot for Jeff Kent — not because he will finish below 5 percent (Sardell currently projects him to get 45 percent), but because he debuted on the ballot in 2014 and candidates can appear on the ballot for a maximum of 10 years.

But like Bonds, Clemens and Schilling, Kent will have more opportunities to get elected in the future, thanks to those aforementioned special elections — the next of which is scheduled for December 2025. So just like the never-ending political election season, Baseball Hall of Fame elections are never really over.

NBA

How NBA Teams Are Bringing The Post-Up Back To Life

By Louis Zatzman

Jan. 24, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The NBA is in the midst of an offensive explosion, with 14 of the best 15 historical offensive ratings for teams coming in the past four seasons. The Boston Celtics currently boast the third-best offensive rating in NBA history,³⁰ and like so many teams in the new, high-scoring NBA, they do it in part by overloading the floor with shooting. Though they’ve cooled a bit from deep since the start of the season, they’re one of only 13 teams in history to attempt at least 40 triples per game, and they’re connecting on 37.1 percent with four rotation players³¹ over 40 percent.

Why, then, in crunch time of their Nov. 14 game against the Oklahoma City Thunder — to take just one example — did the Celtics opt to utilize MVP candidate Jayson Tatum on a post-up, far inside the 3-point arc, executing what many consider an outdated and obsolete type of play? 

For one reason, it was because Tatum is one of the game’s best overall scorers and was guarded in single-coverage by the opponent’s point guard. (It also worked: Tatum used his body to create space, took one dribble and pivoted to the rim for the inside-hand layup, helping the Celtics eventually grab the W.) But there’s another good reason: Because post-ups are actually the most efficient play in basketball. 

How did posting up go from “deader than dead” to the NBA’s best play? And does this mean big men are really having their revival at long last? (While centers may have been the purveyors of post-up buckets in decades past, forwards have actually surpassed them in post-up frequency — perhaps giving credence to Dr. James Naismith’s original positional conception of “forward” being the main attacking position.) 

Still, we should pump the brakes a bit on any notion that the days of Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon are upon us once again. Perhaps the most rudimentary explanation for the renewed success of the post-up is a form of selection bias: The play is now reserved mostly for those who do it best. Post-ups occur only 5.887 times per 100 possessions, and the 20 players with the most post-ups on the season combine for nearly half (43.6 percent) of the league’s total post-ups. Nikola Jokić accounts for an absurd 4.7 percent of leaguewide post-ups on his own. Only four teams, excluding the Denver Nuggets themselves, have posted up more than Jokić on his own this season,³² and he scores 1.263 points per chance on such plays. (The best offense in the league scores 1.065 points per chance.) 

As a point of comparison, the 20 players with the most pick-and-rolls in the league combine for just over a quarter (26.9 percent) of the league’s total pick and rolls, per Second Spectrum. If the NBA’s pick-and-roll leaders — Luka Dončić, for example, scoring 1.124 points per chance on pick and rolls — contributed more significantly to the total share of such plays, the play type would be more successful than its current 0.979 points per chance (but of course, it would also be used at a much lower frequency per 100 possessions). 

Thinking about post-ups in a vacuum, however, misses what makes them so valuable in the current NBA. The league is shifting away from static plays of any kind, and toward a fluid state of multiple actions layered on top of one another. The post-up as a primary playcall, with a ball handler dribbling downcourt and dumping the ball into the post, where a center promptly battles another center before shooting, is finished; that precise sequence has happened only twice this season.³³

Post-ups are now becoming dynamic. The percentage of post-ups that have featured a positional mismatch — with a center defended by a guard or forward (or a forward defended by a guard) — has increased from approximately one-quarter in 2013-14 to just over half this season, per Second Spectrum. Those mismatches have to come from somewhere, and such advantages can be created by other events on the court — like pick and rolls or handoffs — before being converted into points via the post.

The dropping frequency of the post-up has coincided with the rise of the hand-off. Similar to picks, approximately a quarter of hand-offs result in switches this season, creating a potentially advantageous mismatch. (Less than 10 percent of hand-offs were switched by the defense in 2013-14.) And as leaguewide frequency for post-ups has plummeted by almost 6 plays per 100 possessions from 2013-14 to today, hand-off frequency has increased by almost 8 plays per 100 possessions. But a post-up can flow out of a hand-off, especially after the defense is forced to switch or rotate or open up some other weakness. 

At the bare minimum, using a pick-and-roll and/or a hand-off to flow into a post-up can make sure that help defenders are as far away from the offensive player as possible, giving him plenty of time to work alone in the post.

There are correlations between the players who are best at posting up, those best at hand-offs and their teams’ offensive efficiency. Jokić and Sacramento Kings center Domantas Sabonis are two of the league’s most efficient and frequent post players, and so too are they the two most frequent hand-off providers. And both of their teams currently rank among the top 5 highest offensive ratings in history. 

One common thread is that Jokić and Sabonis are brilliant scorers and passers; using them in either capacity out of the post is a good tactic. That’s not unusual: Across the league, possessions with passes coming out of the post carry practically the same efficiency as possessions seeing shots coming off of post-ups. For today’s multi-talented bigs, the post can be used as a vehicle between every kind of event on the court, rather than an end in and of itself.

And yet, in the entirety of Second Spectrum’s database (beginning in 2013-14), 2022-23’s post-ups are the both most efficient play type on record and the least frequent. In fact, post-ups have been the most efficient and least frequent play type in every season in the database other than 2013-14 (when it was the most efficient and second-least frequent play type).

There is an inherent tension in a play slowly growing in efficiency yet shrinking in usage. Are teams now using post-ups too infrequently? Will there be diminishing returns if they’re used more often again? With (most) teams in the league maximizing efficiency and applying Moneyball principles to the NBA, there must exist to some extent a relative “objective” equilibrium between frequency and efficiency of individual play types.

Other factors impacting where such an equilibrium might settle haven’t shifted dramatically for the past few seasons. While 3-point attempts have generally been on the rise over the past few decades in the NBA, they’ve been stable for the last four seasons. So too has 3-point accuracy and pace. 

But unless the rules change, or post-up artists like Jokić and Sabonis lose their skills to alien invaders in a real-life Space Jam situation, it’s hard to see plays in the post becoming less efficient. More likely, their frequency could rise at some point. And wings like Tatum are perhaps the next frontier in the post-up’s reclamation of offensive attention. The Toronto Raptors last season went all-in on non-big post-ups. Wings like DeMar DeRozan have long been post-up wizards. But as post-ups are becoming tools to punish mismatches created elsewhere, or a means of chaining together events like hand-offs and pick-and-rolls, the wing’s ability in the post will be an important tool in any necromantic resurrection of the play.

The day of the post-up receiving the first billing is likely done; no realistic amount of equilibrium shift can undo so many years of tactical evolution. Teams can certainly turn to the post for simple, static buckets at times — like the Celtics did with Tatum against the Thunder. And it’s important to remember that modern NBA offensive sets are often in flux, with multiple pieces flowing together like a complex ballet. How post-ups can fit into the theater around them, as finishing moments to exploit mismatches or as continuation events to move players or the ball across the floor, is changing. There are now many advantageous uses for the post-up in the NBA. And as its efficiency continues to rise, teams are poised to recommit to more and more of them. 

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

NFL

We Are No Longer Disrespecting The Cincinnati Bengals Or Brock Purdy

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Jan. 23, 2023, at 3:24 PM

maya (Maya Sweedler, editor): After an almost (sorry, New York teams) equally fabulous divisional round, we’re looking ahead to some fabulous football in next week’s conference championships, when the San Francisco 49ers travel to Philadelphia to take on the Eagles and the Cincinnati Bengals head to Kansas City to play the Chiefs. We’re going to discuss all four games in more detail, but let’s get right into it.

Are these the four best teams in football right now?

neil (Neil Paine, acting sports editor): I don’t see how you could say they aren’t. They are four of the top five teams in our full-strength Elo ratings and four of the top six in points-per-game margin across the entire season. And the only interlopers in those categories are the Buffalo Bills and Dallas Cowboys, who just lost head-to-head (and not in particularly fluky fashion). In a top-heavy season, these are the cream of the crop by far.

ty (Ty Schalter, FiveThirtyEight contributor): The easy answer is “yes” — not just because they’re the last four teams in the tournament, but because the tournament seeding captured team strength well, and the results have been rather chalky. The only upset this weekend, the Bengals’ 27-10 road win over the Bills, looked definitive. But even including playoffs, the Bills (No. 3, 155.03) and Cowboys (No. 4, 137.22) bump the Bengals (No. 6, 125.44) and Kansas City Chiefs (No. 5, 131.16) out of the top four in total expected points added, per ESPN’s Stats & Information Group. Going by straight scoring margin gives us the exact same 1-6 ranking, by the way. DVOA still loves Buffalo so much that even recency-weighted DVOA has Buffalo at No. 2 overall.

joshua.hermsmeyer (Josh Hermsmeyer, NFL analyst): Agreed, Neil and Ty. In point margin this year through the playoffs, the only real outlier was the Giants, way down at No. 23 with negative-30 points. So the only real question is: What does that say about the strength of the Eagles relative to the rest of the playoff teams that had to face real tests this weekend?

neil: For me, the Eagles’ big question was about Jalen Hurts’s health, given how he looked in the regular-season finale and those reports about him not being 100 percent on Saturday morning. But let’s just say he dismissed those concerns.

The Giants are a bad defensive team, but that would have been a clinic against anybody.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I guess I would have liked to see Hurts be a bit more prolific with his arm, as 6.4 YPA and 154 passing yards isn’t incredible.

neil: There was no need Josh, given how the Eagles got off to literally the best start possible.

maya: Right, he didn’t have to be more prolific! The Eagles had 44 called runs in a game where they dominated time of possession by more than 11 minutes.

joshua.hermsmeyer: It was the week of one-handed tight end catches. Dallas Goedert’s first-quarter touchdown started the Eagles rolling on Saturday against the Giants, and George Kittle’s one-handed double-bobble reception against Dallas sparked the 49ers’ lone touchdown drive.

maya: I think if you had given me these semifinalists a month ago, I would’ve said no way are these the best four teams. But here is where I owe the city of Cincinnati a serious apology. I wrote this team off way too early and didn’t pay that much attention to the offensive resurgence they’ve had over the past few months. Cincy put up 51 combined points against two top-3 scoring defenses in back-to-back weeks.

ty: I’m with you on Cincy, Maya. Last year I rang the bell on the Bengals early and often — but when they started the season 4-4, I slept on them not losing a single game after that.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Joe Mixon looked like he was running on a different surface than the Bills defenders. It was wild.

neil: Talk about clinics. I understood the Eagles getting off to that start against the Giants (even though I picked the G-Men for vibe reasons, LOL), but what I did not expect at all was for Cincinnati to get out to a pretty similar start against the mighty Bills, in Buffalo.

Buffalo had ranked second in fewest PPG allowed during the regular season. Joe Burrow and company made them look like, IDK, the Texans.

joshua.hermsmeyer: The Bills needed Allen to put the team on his back like Mahomes does with such regularity. They have a very good team, but they need Allen playing his best ball to win Super Bowls, and he didn’t do that this postseason.

neil: What’s crazy, though, is that he had zero turnovers until that garbage-time pick late.

If you’d told me the Bengals went into Buffalo and won like that, I would have said for SURE that Allen turned it over four times or something.

joshua.hermsmeyer: He looked lost quite a bit though. His average time to throw was 3.2 seconds, higher even than Daniel Jones against the Eagles.

maya: I felt like Allen was spending a bit too much time looking downfield and not enough time looking for situational gains. I don’t want to call it hero ball, because that’s not really what it was, but he played more aggressively than I would’ve expected. As a result, he had the second-biggest gap between his air yards per attempt and actual yards per dropback this week, behind only Jones.

maya: Burrow should be first in that category, right? The Bengals had the most yards after the catch this week with 140.

Not bad for a team that came in with just one receiver in the top 40 in terms of regular-season YAC (Ja’Marr Chase, who tied for third on the weekend with 42 yards after the catch).

neil: One of the problems was that Cincy put them in a two-TD hole with just a little under 4 minutes left in the first quarter. Buffalo was battling back from that all game, and it seemed to send Allen into that aggressive mode early.

But the Bengals defense also shut down the Bills’ patented explosive offense, for the most part. They were fourth in explosive plays per game (7.1) during the regular season, but only got three of those Sunday (none of which went for scores).

joshua.hermsmeyer: Josh definitely chucked it up there, but he was off the mark in ways Buffalo fans aren’t accustomed to. Seeing Diggs yelling at him with his arms in the air on the sideline was a scene.

maya: His off-target rate of 15 percent this weekend was only off his regular-season average by three-tenths of a percentage point, though. Say more about how he was off the mark, Josh?

joshua.hermsmeyer: I’m thinking specifically of a sideline throw to Diggs that was overthrown, and the interception intended for Beasley. On passes over 10 air yards, ESPN charting has his off-target rate in the game at 26.7 percent, off his season average of 21.8 percent.

maya: Let’s move to the other team remaining in the AFC: The Kansas City Chiefs, who had a flawless first drive and then appeared to have a one-legged quarterback for most of the rest of the game. How much does a high ankle sprain for Patrick Mahomes cap the Chiefs’ ceiling?

neil: It seems like a significant problem for K.C. Mahomes ranked second in passing yards outside the pocket this regular season, so his ability to make those magic plays with his mobility is a key component of this Chiefs offense.

And with apologies to Jacksonville, the Bengals aren’t the Jaguars.

maya: Yeah, the out-of-pocket passing seems to be an issue. Per ESPN Stats & Info, Mahomes’s numbers were similar before and after the injury (he still managed a ridiculous QBR rating of 97.9 against man coverage on the game, the weekend’s best) — but he did not throw a single pass from outside the pocket after getting hurt.

ty: For what it’s worth, Mahomes has been No. 1 in raw QBR from inside the pocket all year.

joshua.hermsmeyer: If anyone not named Kyle Shanahan can design a game plan around a backup QB, it’s Andy Reid. But that’s probably small consolation to the Chiefs.

neil: Maybe this version of the Chiefs can survive a hobbling Mahomes more than, say, the 2020 version could. Their pass protection is much better this season, and they’ve relied on quick passing much more than in the past.

(If Mahomes plays, that is.)

maya: Mahomes has never beat the Burrow-led Bengals — Cincinnati is 3-0 against Kansas City since Burrow got there. Just sayin’!

joshua.hermsmeyer: Is this where we are supposed to mention the Chiefs’ improved run game?

neil: Give us the Isiah Pacheco love, Josh!

joshua.hermsmeyer: The seventh-rounder learned everything he knows from the first-round pick. You can’t spell Pacheco without C-E-H!

maya: Let’s return to the NFC, and the matchup we’ve got coming down the pike there. What’s the biggest wild card for the Eagles and the Niners?

joshua.hermsmeyer: I think the Eagles will need to continue to win on the ground, and I’m not sure how much success they’ll have if they try to do it the way they did against the G-Men. But most of their success — 11 of 16.6 EPA on runs — came outside the tackles. With the Niners’ rangy linebackers (that Fred Warner pass breakup on CeeDee Lamb was bananas), they will probably have to switch things up.

neil: Yes, the Niners defense is simply on another level compared with the Giants.

ty: The Eagles will need to cover the middle of the field. Per NFL NextGen Stats, the 49ers have targeted in-breaking routes at the highest rate in the league each of the last five seasons — and we saw Brock Purdy working those areas effectively against the Cowboys.

maya: How could it not be effective when you’re throwing to guys who need only one hand and one face to catch a ball?

neil: For San Francisco, I think one big wild card is that now they aren’t facing an opponent who will find ways to botch the end of a game in increasingly comical ways like the Cowboys did (and always do).

I don’t think the Eagles will be trotting out … whatever that last play call was by Dallas.

joshua.hermsmeyer:

maya: The Eagles also don’t need to game plan around keeping their kicker off the field for as long as possible.

neil: Hah, yes, although Brett Maher made a few in the end! (After yet another botched extra point.)

Who would have guessed Maher would be so low on the blame list for Dallas losing?

ty: In theory, Neil, I like lining up skill-position players as ineligible “linemen” if you’re doing a planned many-laterals play. But whatever practice time was dedicated to installing that (a) clearly wasn’t enough, and (b) should have been spent on getting the punt team ready to line up faster at the end of the previous series.

neil: Let’s just say that play had a lot of “Colts punt vs. the Patriots” energy.

joshua.hermsmeyer: As someone who revels in the pain of Cowboys fans, it was the perfect ending.

ty: As I said on Twitter, that second-to-last possession was really where the Cowboys lost the game. Dak had time to execute a full, normal game-winning drive, and he immediately threw what should have been a pick, severely underthrew an open receiver on what would have been a chunk play, and took a bad sack.

neil: Oh yeah, for sure. Mistakes had already been made long ago.

In fact, their win probability slide began with that decision to take an intentional delay of game at the Niners’ 40 and then punt.

That was literally the last time they were above 50 percent to win.

ty: Yeah, that tight end Dalton Schultz made an absolute hash of nearly all those endgame boundary passes wasn’t the difference here.

neil: (Although that didn’t help! LOL.)

maya: That was tough to watch. There were just mistakes across the board. The Cowboys had the second-highest drop rate on the weekend, and while I don’t want to fully blame Prescott for some bad decisions, we’ve known his turnovers have been a problem for a while now …

joshua.hermsmeyer: Instead of blaming Dak, I’m giving credit to Purdy. He once again did the unthinkable for the last pick of the draft, and led all passers in the divisional round with 7.38 YPA.

ty: Iiiiii’m still blaming Dak. After he was so superlative against Tampa, I hoped we’d see him at at least close to his best again this week — instead, his performance was in his personal bottom-four games played this year per raw QBR, completion percentage over expected, adjusted net yards per attempt, and passing EPA.

maya: This game convinced me that Purdy is Good. He was so cool under pressure, zipping balls all over the field for his bajillion weapons. This was his seventh start. His SEVENTH!

joshua.hermsmeyer: Niners are Super Bowl bound, baby.

neil: On the one hand, this was Purdy’s second-lowest QBR in a start (53.1), a far cry from the 89.4 he had against Seattle in the wild card.

On the other hand, if the floor is a 53.1 QBR, that’s not bad! Only 17 QBs were above that for the entire season, and big names like Tom Brady were not among them.

joshua.hermsmeyer: He should be expected to struggle! But as Maya mentioned, he is always looking to make plays, and his scrambles are mostly smart, not panicked. He’s a game manager in the very best sense.

maya: I think the difference for Purdy was a bit more pressure this week. He faced almost twice as many blitzes this week than last, and had a contact rate almost 5 percentage points higher against Dallas than against Seattle.

But even against pressure, he wasn’t that bad! Purdy took pressure on a career-high 14 dropbacks, going 3-of-10, but he didn’t turn the ball over. Plus, he completed a career-high 84 percent of his passes when not pressured, per ESPN Stats & Info.

joshua.hermsmeyer: He also completed more passes than expected — a knock against him in the Shanahan system, where for most of the year he’s had a negative CPOE.

neil: Now let’s see what he does against the defense that had 15 more sacks than any other team this season …

maya: Given how talented the skill players are in San Francisco, I’m particularly interested to see how the Eagles generate pressure.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I actually think that Dallas D-line was a great test for what he’s about to face in Philly. I remain all-in!

neil: Well, the Cowboys have one Micah Parsons. The Eagles have four of them. (Or at least, four guys with at least 11 sacks, which is insane.)

maya: It felt like every quarter featured a different Niners receiver popping free. Brandon Aiyuk! Kittle! Deebo Samuel! Christian McCaffrey! And Elijah Mitchell just scampering through every gap whenever the team needed to wind down the clock.

joshua.hermsmeyer: CMC even took large portions of two quarters off.

(I know because I bet the under on total carries for him, and was sweating it all game.)

maya: LOL. Hope you took the under on the point total, too.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Anyone think the NFC champ wins the Super Bowl? Or are the AFC teams the toast of the league?

I’m torn, hopefully NOT like Mahomes’ ankle.

maya: I think if the Chiefs win but Mahomes isn’t 100 percent, it’s going to be like that 2021 Buccaneers-Chiefs Super Bowl. I would take either the Niners or the Eagles in that case.

neil: So much of it depends on the Mahomes injury. But conditional on K.C. winning the AFC, you’d think that would mean he was healthier than we might think right now.

joshua.hermsmeyer: The Bengals disrespect remains. Still, they almost lost to a Lamar-less Ravens team.

neil: No Bengals disrespect here! This final four is all pretty evenly matched now. 

So I don’t think there’s any huge lopsided conference imbalance in a potential Super Bowl matchup, and the conference title games are also fairly close to 50-50.

The football should be really good next weekend.

maya: OK folks, I think it’s time to get everyone on the record. Let’s have your conference championship picks with some scorelines. I want circulate-on-Twitter-with-the-caption-freezing-cold-takes level stuff.

neil: I tried that last week, Maya.

(RIP Danny Dimes.)

maya:

joshua.hermsmeyer: Niners 27, Eagles 10

Bengals 35, Kansas City 28

maya: Bengals 28, Chiefs 24

Niners 12, Eagles 7

ty: I’ve been saying for the past couple of weeks that the experience of lucking into a Super Bowl appearance last year might have given them the experience they need to go head-to-head with the AFC’s best and win decisively. Zac Taylor is coaching his brains out, and the patched-together offensive line has handled as strong a test they’ll face. I’ll take the Bengals in a barnburner, 37-34.

On the other side, I think Purdy’s magic toe shoes run out of magic. Eagles 27, Niners 17.

neil: Eagles 24, Niners 21

Bengals 27, Chiefs 24

maya: Did we overcorrect on the Bengals disrespect? I can’t believe all of us are picking against Mahomes!

joshua.hermsmeyer: I have a bad feeling about this …

neil: The entire NFL season revolves around his ankle!

(Also, Cincy literally beat K.C. in December, 27-24, LOL.)

joshua.hermsmeyer: That’s cheating, Neil.

ty: And of course, this is literally a rematch of last year’s AFC championship game, which the Bengals also won … 27-24.

neil: Also Maya, 12-7? Why not just pick a Scoragami and get it over with.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Fire.

maya: Ooh, I should’ve done that. How low-scoring can I go without making it too weird?

Regardless, these games should be terrific. I’m looking forward to them almost as much as I’m looking forward to never seeing those Verizon commercials with Paul Giamatti as Albert Einstein again.

neil: That’s something we can ALL agree on.

joshua.hermsmeyer: One more crypto ad, for the memories. All I ask.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

NBA

NBA Stars Are Stuffing Stat Sheets Like Never Before. But Why?

By Santul Nerkar

Jan. 20, 2023, at 6:00 AM

It’s usually a special occasion when LeBron James has one of his patented statistical eruptions. In Monday’s victory over the Houston Rockets, James notched a hyper-efficient 48 points, to go with eight rebounds, nine assists and zero turnovers. It was an eye-popping output to help carry his short-handed Los Angeles Lakers — even from the player who keeps defying Father Time. 

But in this NBA season — and the modern NBA more generally — LeBron’s explosion was just another piece in the league’s big-game puzzle. Several weeks earlier, Luka Dončić posted the NBA’s second 60-point triple double ever, and then followed that up with a 51-6-9 stat line four days later. Two nights after that, Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell poured in 71(!) points against Michael Jordan’s former team — more than MJ himself ever mustered in a game — to go with eight rebounds and 11 assists. And one day after that, Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo went for a comparatively tame 55 points, 10 rebounds and seven assists.

These are just a few of the gaudy performances that have seemingly come a dime a dozen in the NBA this season … and it’s not clear when they’ll stop. In fact, we can demonstrate this visually. Using Basketball-Reference.com’s Game Score metric (which measures single-game statistical output using all of a player’s box score numbers), you can see that the average team leader³⁴ in game-by-game performance per 100 possessions has never been stuffing the stat sheet better in modern NBA history:

Critically, at this point in the season (more than halfway in), this overall mark implies that it’s not just one-off herculean performances like those of James, Dončić and Mitchell clouding our perception that individual player outputs are getting bigger and bigger. And it’s not just scoring, either: Though points hold the biggest weight in Game Score’s calculation,³⁵ it accounts for a number of other statistics as well, including rebounds, assists, steals, turnovers and more. 

So what might explain all of these individual statistical explosions sweeping across the league? And is it sustainable?

The easiest and most obvious answer to this recent uptick in top players’ raw output is that NBA offenses, as a whole, have never been better. The league’s collective offensive efficiency of 114.0 is the highest it’s been since at least the merger, as teams have moved to trim the fat out of their scoring diets, focusing on the choicest shots both inside and outside the 3-point arc. Outside of the occasional rule-breakers, NBA teams have found that winning basketball lies not just beyond the 3-point arc … but deep inside it, too.

According to Cleaning the Glass, teams are taking just 30.8 percent of their shots from the midrange, including just 9.4 percent from the long midrange, the latter of which is the lowest figure since at least the 2003-04 season. But it doesn’t appear as if the most recent uptick in offensive efficiency has been due to teams shooting more threes. Overall 3-point attempt rates have stabilized in 2023, but teams are taking a higher share of their attempts at the rim — and making more — than they did last season. 

What that may mean for the NBA’s stars, then, is that they have had more room to operate and are using it to great effect. As The Athletic’s Mike Prada noted recently, the effect of the 3-point revolution hasn’t just been on threes, but on all the other shots that have gotten easier with defenses needing to focus on the arc. Stars are still getting the same shots they got in past seasons, but they’ve never been better optimized to convert them so efficiently.

From the lens of player usage, too, it seems apparent that teams are asking their stars to burn brighter than ever — a not-so-surprising development in the heliocentric age of basketball that we live in — to the tune of three of the 10 highest Game Scores since the merger coming during the first half of the 2022-23 season alone. Not coincidentally, Antetokounmpo, Dončić and Joel Embiid are on pace this season to own three of the 10 highest usage rates in modern NBA history, too.

Playing time may also help explain why someone like Dončić has excelled — he’s No. 2 in minutes per game played this season — but even he’s not playing absurdly high minutes by historical standards, as his mark of 37.4 wouldn’t crack the top 200 of minutes per game played this century. It’s more about what Dončić and players of his ilk are being asked to do within those minutes, and how many eye-popping numbers they continue to put up on a night-by-night basis.

Of course, it’s not at all clear that this surge of individual box score power correlates to helping a team win. One notable holdout to the age of heliocentrism, perennial MVP candidate Nikola Jokić, hasn’t quite caught the attention of the traditional stat-stuffing metrics this season. Despite leading the league in FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR wins above replacement, Jokić’s average Game Score comes in just a hair below 26.0 per game, well below the average for an NBA star this season. And the track record of teams built around high-usage superstars isn’t a great one. Michael Jordan, who posted a 34.7 percent usage rate (good for 43rd all time) during his 1992-93 season with the Chicago Bulls, is the highest-usage player to win a championship since the merger. So with three of the game’s preeminent stars posting otherworldly usage rates — Dončić and Antetokounmpo at 38.2 and Embiid at 38.0 — we’re about to get a real test of whether modern basketball’s extreme heliocentric model can finally win in 2023.

But on a certain level, perhaps none of that matters. As the saying goes, big box scores do not lie, and the NBA’s biggest stars have irrefutably treated us to the best collective leading performances in the league’s history so far this year. When a 48-point barrage at age 38 by arguably the greatest player of all time is treated as an afterthought, you know the bar for individual excellence has been raised. 

Neil Paine contributed research.

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NFL

Patrick Mahomes And The Chiefs Are Still Improving On Excellence

By Neil Paine

Jan. 19, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The Patrick Mahomes-led Kansas City Chiefs have crossed over into that rarest territory of sports dominance — teams so consistently good that it’s easy to take them for granted if you’re not careful. With a 14-3 record this year, K.C. just wrapped up its fifth consecutive regular season winning at least 70 percent of its games, joining an exclusive club:

Now the team will face the Jacksonville Jaguars in a home playoff game this weekend, with an 84 percent chance of victory according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast — putting Mahomes and the Chiefs one win away from their fifth consecutive conference championship game appearance as well. (That would place K.C. in an even more exclusive club: one with only three other members in pro football history.)³⁶ 

Again, it’s all a very familiar sight for Kansas City, but it would be a mistake to view the Chiefs’ ongoing success as inevitable. The parity-obsessed NFL is designed to keep teams from staying at the top for long, and in some ways K.C. was facing more of those headwinds — talent departing, defenses specifically evolving to limit their best plays — than many would-be dynasties. Against factors that might have caused a lesser team to regress, however, Kansas City’s greatness lies in the fact that it instead continues to improve.

For one thing, the Chiefs were down a substantial amount of talent heading into 2022. The headline loss was speedy receiver Tyreek Hill, who’d piled up 1,239 yards and nine receiving touchdowns for Kansas City in 2021 before being shipped to the Miami Dolphins in March. But according to Pro-Football-Reference.com’s approximate value (AV) metric, the Chiefs lost 32.6 percent of their roster’s production over the offseason, in terms of value produced by players in the 2021 season who did not return to the team in 2022. That ranked 15th in the league, in the same neighborhood as famously unstable franchises like the Browns and New York Jets.

And that 2021 Chiefs squad wasn’t without its moments of uncertainty, anyway. At one point in the middle of the season, the team was 3-4 and facing major concerns about whether opposing defenses had found a formula to slow down its vaunted passing attack. Kansas City was saved by an abrupt defensive turnaround while Mahomes and head coach Andy Reid counter-adjusted their offense on the fly, but Mahomes’s first career slump still represented a crack in the armor — one that seemingly widened when K.C. blew a 21-3 lead at home in the AFC championship game against the Cincinnati Bengals, with Mahomes rendered totally ineffective in the game’s second half.

Facing personnel losses and a growing playbook on how to hinder their greatest strength, plus a division that looked stacked on paper, the Chiefs were far from a sure bet to extend their run of dominance this season. Based in part on the history of similar teams from throughout NFL history,³⁷ our preseason forecast model called for Kansas City to finish 10-7, with just a 66 percent chance of making it back to the playoffs. 

So naturally, all the Chiefs did was fix many of the issues that were plaguing them, and post their best regular season in years.

In fact, according to our classic Elo ratings, Kansas City finished the regular season with a rating of 1729 — not only its highest season-ending rating of the Mahomes era, but also the best mark in franchise history.

Unlike last season, when K.C. hit its midseason lull, the 2022 Chiefs never once had a losing streak — their losses were such isolated incidents that they all came in separate months. Along the way, K.C. improved its offense relative to league average, ranking No. 1 in points per game (29.2) for the first time since 2018, Mahomes’s first season as starter. Mahomes himself bounced back from a “down” 2021, going from fifth in Total QBR³⁸ to leading the league once again. Even more importantly, he dramatically improved his relative standing in QBR in multiple areas where he had ranked surprisingly midpack last season when defenses forced him to adjust:

It wasn’t just Mahomes, of course. Tight end Travis Kelce became more of a focal point for the K.C. offense, ranking second in the league in receiving TDs (12), third in catches (110) and eighth in receiving yardage (1,338). He was by far the most productive tight end in the league this year, and finished with the second-most fantasy points by a TE ever in a single season (behind Rob Gronkowski’s 2011 campaign). And led by center Creed Humphrey, guard Joe Thuney and tackle Orlando Brown Jr., the Chiefs’ offensive line easily led the league in ESPN’s pass block win rate statistic, prevailing in 74.7 percent of their battles in the trenches. Mahomes, Kelce, Humphrey, Thuney and Brown were among the seven Chiefs named to the Pro Bowl, tying the Dallas Cowboys for the second-most all-star nods of any team in the league this season. 

This Chiefs team isn’t perfect. It was in the middle of the league in points per game allowed (21.7, 16th-fewest), which was its lowest ranking on defense since placing 24th in 2018. Its special teams this season was the worst of the Mahomes era, finishing 30th in expected points added per game. But the depth of Kansas City’s core, along with the coaching of Reid and the brilliance of Mahomes to counter the adjustments of opposing defenses, has allowed the Chiefs to keep rolling without missing a beat. And by virtue of having the AFC’s top seed, they will get the most lopsided matchup of the divisional round against Jacksonville, setting them up well to advance to yet another AFC title game — or beyond. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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NFL

Saquon Barkley And Daniel Jones Are Finally Making The Giants Look Good

Once derided as questionable draft picks, the duo has New York up and running in the playoffs.

By Alex Kirshner

Jan. 18, 2023, at 10:21 AM

The New York Giants were built to run. Their problem in recent seasons — or, more accurately, one of their many problems — was that their rushing ability never matched the roster-construction dreams of their former general manager, Dave Gettleman. The executive arrived fresh off a tenure leading the Carolina Panthers from 2013 to 2017, a time when the Panthers had a stronger running identity than any team in the league.³⁹ Gettleman wanted the Giants to bang around in a similar fashion, and he showed it in how he drafted. In his first draft, he spent the No. 2 overall pick on Penn State running back Saquon Barkley, cutting against an anti-tailback conventional wisdom. In the second round, Gettleman took UTEP guard Will Hernandez, whom Gettleman saw as the ideal road grader to open lanes for Barkley. The next year, Gettleman used the No. 6 overall pick on Duke quarterback Daniel Jones. Jones was not strictly speaking a running QB, but with sack yardage filtered out, he had carried for a 5.7-yard average on 321 attempts in three seasons. And in 2020, to both protect Jones and run-block for him and Barkley, the Giants spent two of their first three picks on offensive tackles. 

Barkley had produced big numbers as a rookie and solid ones the next season before an injured, ineffective few years sidetracked him. Jones developed slowly enough that, before this season, the Giants declined the fifth-year option on his contract. In their first three seasons with Jones and Barkley together in the backfield, the Giants got nothing special from their rushing attack: From 2019 through 2021, they averaged 0.01 expected points added per rush, 20th in the NFL. Their 4.4 yards per carry placed them 15th, their 42.7 percent success rate 25th. Jones didn’t put up gaudy passing totals, either, and so the Giants ran out of avenues to a good offense. In those three seasons, the Giants ranked 31st in the NFL in EPA per play (-0.05) and 27th in yards per play (4.98). Gettleman’s Giants never won more than six games. He retired shortly after the 2021 season, and a day later, the franchise fired Joe Judge, one of his two failed head-coach hires. 

But it’s funny how life works, and the 2022 Giants — under a new GM (Joe Schoen) and new head coach (Brian Daboll) — have gone a long way toward realizing Gettleman’s vision. Barkley played in 16 games after injuries limited him to 15 the previous two years combined, and while he didn’t get back to his rookie numbers (5.8 yards per touch and over 2,000 scrimmage yards), he gave the Giants much more than he did in 2020 or ‘21. Meanwhile, Jones basically doubled his rushing attempts over any of his previous seasons, while also ranking among the league’s most efficient quarterbacks overall. The Giants jumped to fifth in the league at 4.8 yards per carry, helping them get to ninth in EPA per play (0.05) and improve their scoring output from 18.0 points per game in Jones’s first three seasons to 21.5, the difference between being 30th in the NFL and 15th. And on Sunday, they beat the Minnesota Vikings in the wild-card round of the playoffs 31-24, in 2022 Giants-y fashion. Barkley and Jones carried 22 times for 134 yards, excluding kneel-downs. Jones also threw for 8.6 yards per attempt, his seventh-best figure as a pro. When Jones clears 8.0 yards per throw in his career, the Giants are 9-0.

The running game has finally come full circle to resemble something like what the Giants’ old leadership dreamed up nearly five years ago. And it’s all happened because Barkley and Jones have made such strides, and fit each other so well. 

For starters, Barkley finally appears healthy. The only game he missed this season was in Week 18, when the Giants had already secured a playoff spot. Anyone watching him can tell he has more pep in his step than he did during his limited appearances in 2020 and 2021. According to NFL Next Gen Stats, Barkley reached a maximum speed of 21.3 mph in play, after getting as high as 21.9 as a rookie but never higher than 20.7 in the two prior seasons.

It isn’t just modern medicine, though. Barkley has adjusted his running style too. In each of his first four seasons, Barkley spent between 2.9 and 3.1 seconds behind the line of scrimmage on his average carry, according to ESPN’s Stats & Information Group. That made him one of the league’s more patient backs as he searched for holes. (The league average for running backs during Barkley’s career is 2.8 seconds spent behind the line.) Out of 57 qualifying tailbacks from 2018 to 2021, Barkley spent the seventh-most time per carry in the backfield. But he was much less deliberate this year. Out of 41 qualifying backs in 2022, Barkley spent the sixth-least time in the backfield, at 2.7 seconds. 

He doesn’t reach the same speeds he once did, but in this way, a decisive Barkley now moves more quickly on his way downfield. Barkley averaged 2.72 yards before contact this season, a night-and-day difference from 1.96 in 2021 and more in line with his numbers from his strong years in 2018 and 2019. His own explosiveness and aggression may have made the difference, because the Giants offensive line has not been much help. Pro Football Focus ranked the unit 30th in the league, noting that it is essentially comprised of star left tackle Andrew Thomas and, uh, everyone else. In 2021, the Giants were 14th in ESPN’s run block win rate, but this year, as Barkley improved, the line tumbled to 26th. 

Part of that contradiction — Barkley returning to form as his offensive line falters — comes down to his quarterback. Jones has always had ball-carrying chops, but the Giants did not lean fully into that part of his game in his first three years, when he never exceeded 65 carries. This year, he ran 120 times. About half (53, according to ESPN) were scrambles, with the rest being designed runs. Jones has averaged 7.6 yards on the scrambles and 5.9 yards overall. But it’s his utility as a designed runner that might do the most for Barkley. The Giants ran 81 option carries, seventh-most in the NFL, and it’s easy to see how that schematic decision benefited both quarterback and tailback. The Giants’ offensive line may be crummy, but math is math — and on a read concept, the Giants can leave an unblocked defender who might choose to worry about Jones. That gives Barkley a blocking advantage when Jones gives him the ball: 

Conversely, the threat of a Barkley run often gives Jones free rein to carry the ball off-tackle for chunk gains. Option runs of this variety are a college football staple, but most NFL teams do not like using their quarterbacks as ball carriers to the same extent as college programs. Jones is an exception, and the Giants now have him running the ball roughly as often as he did at Duke. And when Jones does take off, rather than handing the ball to Barkley or another back, he gives defenses a good reminder of why they need to account for him in the first place: 

The Giants remain a work in progress. Jones, for all his recent improvement, still has never reached 7.0 yards per throw over a full season and looked on the way out of New York as recently as a few months ago. Everything positive that one could say about the Giants rushing offense could be countered with something negative about the team’s rush defense, which finished 31st in yards allowed per attempt. Meanwhile, against the pass, New York’s defense intercepted just six throws all year, tying for last place. The lack of picks has contributed to the offense having the 25th-best starting field position in the league, at its own 27-yard line. (At least Jones and Barkley have had plenty of grass in front of them as they’ve honed their rushing repertoires.)

The team’s still-serious flaws are why it is a 7.5-point underdog against the Philadelphia Eagles in Saturday’s divisional-round meeting. But the Giants moving on again wouldn’t require magic, nor would the franchise remaining relevant in the NFC East over the next few years. A team doesn’t need supernatural intervention when it has a solid foundation. The Giants finally do — just a few years later than their old management planned.

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NHL

Are The Defending Stanley Cup Champs Going To Drift Out Of The Playoffs?

By Neil Paine

Jan. 18, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Last year, the Colorado Avalanche made history as one of the most dominant Stanley Cup champions to ever take the ice. This year’s Avs are threatening to make history, too — but not the good kind.

Since 1971, only three defending Cup champs have failed to follow their title run with a return trip to the playoffs the next season: the 1995-96 New Jersey Devils, the 2006-07 Carolina Hurricanes and the 2014-15 Los Angeles Kings. If the 2022-23 regular season ended today, Colorado would join that group, despite back-to-back impressive wins over the Ottawa Senators and Detroit Red Wings over the weekend. With 40 games to go, the Avalanche currently sit fourth in the Central division and third in the West’s wild-card race, with four points still separating them from the conference’s final playoff spot.

So things don’t exactly look great for the Avs’ championship defense at the moment. But we probably shouldn’t count Colorado out quite yet. The Avalanche still rank third in our NHL Elo ratings, and there are a few reasons why this team may be able to turn its season around, even though the clock is ticking.

Better health ahead?

For one thing, the Avalanche have been among the most banged-up teams in the league, ranking third in standings points lost to injury earlier this season, according to ManGamesLost.com. Among the players Colorado has placed on injured reserve this season were three of the team’s top eight performers last season according to goals above replacement⁴⁰ — Nathan MacKinnon, Gabriel Landeskog and Valeri Nichushkin — plus numerous other important role players. As a result, no NHL team has employed a greater number of different players this year than Colorado, who has seen a league-high 38 total players don its sweater.

But the Avs should spend the next month or so piecing back together at least some of their broken roster, which got a big boost Monday when Nichushkin returned to game action for the first time since Dec. 23. And any amount of extra production from healthy bodies in the lineup would help a team that has only four skaters — Mikko Rantanen, Cale Makar, MacKinnon and Devon Toews — tracking for 10.0 or more adjusted GAR this season, down from eight (which was tied for third-best in the NHL) last year.

Goaltending and defense can keep them in the hunt

Sometimes when a hockey team collapses, it can be because the pucks just won’t stay out of the net. (Just ask the Vancouver Canucks, who went from allowing the seventh-fewest goals per game in the NHL last season to suddenly tying for the 11th-most goals allowed per game of any NHL team in a season in the past 30 years.)⁴¹ But the Avalanche have stayed roughly steady when it comes to preventing goals — they’re No. 11 this year after ranking ninth a year ago — despite replacing Stanley Cup-winning goalie Darcy Kuemper with former New York Rangers backup Alexandar Georgiev, who has turned into one of the league’s more dependable netminders.

Instead, Colorado’s huge problem in the first half has been on the other side of the puck, where an offense that we called the “Greatest Show On Ice” last season has regressed badly. The Avs went from fourth in goals scored per game in 2021-22 to a shocking 22nd so far this season, with 13 of the top 20 current roster members (by 2021-22 adjusted points) tracking for a lower total this season.⁴² Some of that goes back to the aforementioned laundry list of injuries, which have slowed MacKinnon (the team’s most talented forward), robbed Nichushkin of a potential career-best season, generally hollowed out a forward group that has gone from fifth in points to 27th, and even taken a bite out of the NHL’s highest-scoring blueline corps from a year ago. (Makar coming back down to earth a teensy bit hasn’t helped there, either.)

But when a team is struggling to put the puck in the net, it’s nice to be able to fall back on puck possession and good, old-fashioned defensive hockey. By multiple measures — whether you look at Corsi percentage (seventh), Fenwick percentage (12th) or the share of expected goals (14th) and scoring chances (seventh) generated by a team in its games — the Avalanche have remained among the top half of the league at controlling the flow of play, even if hasn’t led to the same rate of goals as in the past. That should bode well for Colorado going forward, if not for its flagging offense then at least in terms of its ability to limit opponents at the other end. And with the big caveat that Georgiev still doesn’t have a huge sample of elite play (he’s already three starts away from setting a new single-season career high), a team’s goal-prevention tends to be “stickier” between halves of a season than its scoring anyway.⁴³

The schedule is friendly

When all else fails, some weak competition might be the best medicine for a slumping team. And the Avalanche will certainly get a chance to feast on the league’s weakest squads during the second half of the season: According to the average Elo rating of its future opponents (adjusted for home-ice advantage), Colorado has the eighth-easiest remaining schedule in the NHL, trailing only the Arizona Coyotes, Canucks, Calgary Flames, Dallas Stars, St. Louis Blues, Seattle Kraken and Edmonton Oilers. This is part of a gift from the scheduling gods that has seen the defending champs already face the seventh-easiest slate in the league to date; an easy set of opponents stays roughly as easy from here.

The Avalanche must do a better job of capitalizing on the soft schedule, of course. After cleaning up against opponents whose Elo ratings fell beneath the league average last year — winning 75.0 percent of the time, good for fifth-best in the league — Colorado has beaten below-average teams only 57.9 percent of the time this season, which ranks just 13th. (They’re also winning just 50 percent of the time as favorites, which places an abysmal 24th in the league.) We saw an example of those letdowns last Thursday night, when the Avs went into Chicago as a 66 percent favorite against the dreadful Blackhawks, only to lose 3-2 after never holding a lead all game. But in theory, this team ought to be taking care of business more often against weaker foes — like it did over the weekend against Ottawa and Detroit — and Colorado will get plenty of chances against those kinds of opponents down the stretch.

All of these factors help explain why, despite the hole they’ve dug for themselves in the standings, the Avalanche still have a 75 percent chance of getting back to the playoffs according to our forecast model. (And why their Stanley Cup odds conditional on making the playoffs are roughly the same as those of the Tampa Bay Lightning and Carolina Hurricanes, two teams with much better records.) The NHL season is long, and a lot of things can happen in even a relatively short stretch of games.⁴⁴ On paper, the Avalanche should be better than they have been, particularly once they cobble together a healthier version of themselves. But defending Stanley Cup champions shouldn’t miss the playoffs, either. With a half-season left to reverse course, it’s now up to Colorado to avoid adding themselves to that ignoble list.

Check out our latest NHL predictions.