fivethirtyeight - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Steph Curry is the black swanThe black swan theory was an idea developed by former Stock trader Nassim Taleb in 2007. As explained by Taleb, the theoretical black swan can be summarized as an event or outlier outside the realm of realistic expectations that has an extreme impact on history and makes experts invent explanations,...

ESPN changed and whitewashed the name of its Black site — The Undefeated — on the last day of Black History MonthOn the last day of the shortest month of the year, (that’s supposed to be dedicated to the contributions that Black people have made to this country), America’s largest entertainment and sports programming network decided that it would announce that they were changing the name of the highest-profile...

Maybe You Just Like Watching Baseball GamesFiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s math blog, published an article by Travis Sawchik yesterday under the headline “Do We Even Need Minor League Baseball?” In the piece, Sawchik argues that advancements in technology and data analysis have made both the discernment of genuine major-league baseball talent...

I Think Nate Silver Is Broken, Maybe?

Here are a couple tweets from politics polling seer Nate Silver, founder of ESPN math website FiveThirtyEight....

Here's A Thingy Tracking NBA Teams' Nerd Ratings Through History

FiveThirtyEight has a cool interactive up today by Nate Silver and frenemy of the program Reuben Fischer-Baum, calculating the Elo ratings throughout history for every team in the NBA. I’m a sucker for Elo ratings, so I love this. I’m also a sucker for the shitbag Knicks, so I pulled up their chart ...

Nate Silver says Tim Duncan is the closest thing to Kareem since Kareem. Does he even watch South Park?...

ThinkProgress and others take issue with Roger Pielke, Jr., a new contributing science writer at FiveThirtyEight, who was last seen on the receiving end of a six-page thumper of a White House response about his positions on the California drought. Give this some time, but it hasn't gone great out of...

The ESPN relaunch of FiveThirtyEight is (mostly) live. Go read some good data journalism about March Madness, NHL save percentages, or toilet seat covers. [FiveThirtyEight]...