Visiting Jacob Bernoulli’s tomb in Basel. He loved the logarithmic spiral because of its self similarity property. No matter how much you zoom out it looks the same. The epitaph reads “EADEM MUTATA RESURGO”, meaning “Although changed, I will rise again the same”.

New post on Substack. Largely just an announcement that the new version of Excitement Index is now live for both NBA and WNBA win probability charts. Link: inpredictable.substack.com/p/the-new-ex...

Your opponent getting an offensive rebound when you're trying to make a late comeback is so demoralizing.

The 4th and 5th most improbable comebacks of the NBA playoffs took place almost exactly a year apart and at the same venue.

By the current definition of excitement index, Spurs-Thunder last night was the most exciting game of the playoffs.

Absurd

I really struggle to articulate the disdain I have for the "insider" model that does no investigative reporting or independent analysis and serves only to beat the press release by five minutes. I understand a lot of work goes into it but a lot of work would go into digging a big hole in your yard

Can the jump shot be hacked? Inside basketball's next arms race: Deconstructing the game's most important repetitive motion. For @defector.com: defector.com/can-the-jump...

I’m in charge of the NYT crossword puzzle. I’m obsessed with the website Etsy, the acronym ETA, the volcano Etna, and the first name of actress Ayo Edebiri.

New post: (belated) March Madness Forecasting Thunderdome results. open.substack.com/pub/inpredic...

it's fun when your ggplots go off the rails in aesthetically interesting ways

The Sixers were 360 basis points from elimination early in the 3rd quarter.

🔥🔥

Charlotte-Miami win probability chart:

I think most would agree this is a legitimate clutch assist from Jokic (double teamed and finding an open Hardaway on the opposite end of the court): www.nba.com/stats/events... But....

Here are the final player clutch rankings for the 2025-26 NBA season. Shai and Jokic finished neck and neck.

Inspired by Zak Kram's article on pace in ESPN, here is an updated chart that shows team correlation by season between offensive pace versus efficiency. An downward sloping line indicates a positive correlation between fast pace and offensive efficiency.

You can set your watch to the reliability of the rubber band effect in the NBA. Red = Team overperforms Blue = Team underperforms Teams play better from behind. It's pretty much the opposite of momentum.

You can check a box on the inpredictable win probability graphs to display real time, rather than game time, on the horizontal axis. That can be helpful for a game like LAC-IND where a game's worth of insanity was packed into the final second.

I watched #Kansas nearly blow a 26-point lead last week. The bigger opponent for CBU wasn't Kansas, it was the clock. With help from @inpredict.bsky.social, here's what the numbers say about when teams should stop hunting quick 2's & start hunting 3's: open.substack.com/pub/edwithsp...

Update after last night's games:

New Substack post: March Madness Forecasting Thunderdome I apply my Kelly-based forecast evaluation method to models predicting the NCAA Men's Basketball national champion. Link: open.substack.com/pub/inpredic...

Just an absurd win probability chart

A lot of conseqeuntial games in the NHL today. Here's how playoff chances for each team are impacted based on the outcomes today: win: 2 points overtime loss: 1 point regulation loss: 0 points

Meta-bracketology for the NCAA Women's Tournament. Of the 3,511 brackets analyzed, there were 2,817 unique brackets (80%). The most common number of seed upsets picked was 0. Next most common was 8.

Some meta-bracketology, using 20,000+ brackets submitted to the NCAA's bracket challenge. Of the 20,751 brackets analyzed, there were 18,724 unique brackets (90%). The most common number of upsets picked: 12

Last year, the perfect bracket odds were about 10 billion to 1. When I looked at this way back in 2010-2014, the odds averaged around 50 billion to 1.

2.6 billion to 1 That's the odds of a perfect mens tournament bracket this year, if you picked based on @kenpom.com ratings and assume that those ratings represent the true probabilities. That's better odds than last year, where I estimated a 10 billion to 1 chance.

Beeswarm plot to illustrate the hilarity of Bam's 83 points.

Tonight's Spurs comeback is a good example for why KL-divergence is a better measure of game quality. Current Excitement Index (total change in win prob): MIA @ CHA: 8.6 ✅ LAC @ SAS: 8.2 KL-Divergence: MIA @ CHA: 2.2 LAC @ SAS: 4.4 ✅

New (and first) post up on Substack. Creating a better way of ranking games with the help of Claude.......Shannon. inpredictable.substack.com/p/quantifyin...

NBA season leaders in Clutch Win Probability Added. The market favorite is Ant, but by this metric Desmond Bane deserves to be in the conversation for the Jerry West Clutch Player of the Year Award.

THE FINAL SPORTS! NEWSLETTER OF THE OLYMPICS Team USA had its best Winter Olympics ever. I wrote about why we can never let the worst things about America keep us from celebrating the best things about America. Also, bobsled and cross-country skiing results!

Favorite random science-related point of interest in Pasadena: There’s a mural dedicated to Richard Feynman on the back wall of a Ross Dress for Less.

I'm sure this has been pointed out before, but it's nifty that the NBA draft lottery uses 4 draws from a pool of 14 numbered ping pong balls because the binomial coefficient C(14,4) is *almost* 1,000 - it's 1,001. Makes a nice round number for an easy mapping of combos to team.

I finally got around to formalizing my Kelly betting-based method of evaluating time-updating probabilistic forecasts (e.g. in-game win probability, election models, etc.) in a paper. It is now up on arXiv. 1/

Bondi must have heard there are a lot of people in jeopardy in Culver City.

Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl champions

It was a long 1, but absolute coaching malpractice to not go for it there given the game situation.

I'm sorry the guy changing the rules on the fly is named what

After dark Wednesday minutiae: The average time elapsed between a missed shot and a rebound* in the NBA is holding steady at around 2.5 seconds. *as recorded in the play by play logs

Celebrating the power, progress, and possibility of girls and women in sports today and always 🧡 Happy National Girls and Women in Sports Day! #NGWSD

PSA for any Marx Brothers fans: Animal Crackers is now in the public domain. You can find a very nicely restored cut on YouTube. It restores several jokes/gags that were removed from the official released version. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IuN...

I wrote about my childhood friend Alexi Pretti. Please read it and share it and remember him as a human being. @theverge.com

That differentiation (finding a tangent line) and integration (calculating area under a curve) turned out to be inverses of each other is one of the cooler plot twists in the history of mathematics.

That was….not a good time for a false start.

Tell me more about “taking the points” after that Mendoza draw.

Dungy in shambles

Every Caleb Williams play