New Site, Who Dis?

The leaves are falling and we're getting solidly into the cool nights where it's perfect sleeping weather but not cold enough to turn on the furnace (God forbid). The football playoffs are in full swing and Marcus Smart is back on our TVs, which means it's almost high school basketball season.

And after a year off, let me just say...

[taps mic]

Back with the Power Rankings and the daily projections and the tournament odds and the random fact-checking of the media outlets cursed with a crippling case of arithmophobia.

And, of course, back with criticisms of the MPA and jokes about Peter Webb.

Ok, those never left.

You'll notice you're on a new website. A much faster website. Gone is the old clunky Wordpress site and in place is this new ghost site that doesn't have as many features, but it's a LOT faster. Ghost is kind of a more fleshed out version of Substack, so it works on the subscription model, which is essential because I have a fraction of the free time I had when I started this whole thing 8 seasons ago.

Most of the old content is gone, but I'm slowing chipping away at importing some of it over.

Anyway, there's a strong newsletter vibe to this. You can register for free and you'll get access to the Power Rankings, the public posts, the Live Tournament Stats, and part of the daily updates (including a write-up of the Game of the Day).

Beyond that there's the paid subscription, which will get you the daily projections part of the Game of the Day write up, Tournament Odds, the daily updated Gold Ball odds during the tournament, the Every Game database, the Media Guide, and more!

Oh, and because the MPA has apparently decided they can't be bothered to calculate Heal Points correctly again this year, you'll get that too.

It's a right wicked good deal.

It's also a ton of work. Also my kid took over the iPad I use to do live stats and I'll probably need to buy a new one, because there's no way he'll give that up for a day, much less a week.

I hate paywalls as much as anyone. The goal here is to have an ad-free experience where the bulk of the "journalism" is free and the rankings are always free, but the deeper stuff, the content that requires the harder math, is behind the paywall. Is this where I mention that the Model out-performed Nate Silver's NBA model during the bubble playoffs (and by a lot)?

That's mostly it for now. There's some other stuff in the works that I can't talk about yet, but for now, I'm dusting off the spreadsheets and downloading new versions of the data visualization programs.

Basketball is almost here!