excellent blogs today at defector. good time to subscribe! defector.com/products

really savoring "murdered out gagne"

-- tristan da silva: has made tough shots and looked more than rotation-worthy.

-- goga bitadze: new hair, looks beefy, has played well.

-- jonathan isaac: new hair, looks clumsy, has not played well.

-- noah penda: not a similar player, but an exciting debut on the "moves like sengun" spectrum.

-- jase richardson (house style: ja$e), who, like the author, is ~6'1 175 and can't really dribble right-handed. he could stand to make better floater vs. layup decisions on drives, but his shot is real enough to demand a hard closeout, which means he is constantly getting into the paint.

-- a couple weeks ago, suggs gave a quote to the effect of “i’m recovering on god’s time” which is not what you want to hear. i think tyus jones will start in his absence, but i might prefer black for the sake of size and defense. or as a wildcard option...

-- anthony black still looks like a lost thompson triplet: same frame, some ballhandling chops, a tick or two less athleticism, but actually takes and makes open shots. still drives without a plan (or with a bad plan) too often, but jalen suggs started to figure this out in his third year.

orlando magic preseason notes:

-- paolo, franz, and bane have not shot it well (combined 2/15 on 3s).

-- OTOH, wendell carter looks comfortable taking shots in the flow of the offense, including the elbow jumpers that drop defenses give him. getting back to 36-37% from 3 would be so, so valuable.

hello! not as far as i know--would you mind trying to delete your browser's defector.com cookies? happy to keep troubleshooting over at info(at)defector.com if that doesn't do the trick.

that's the greatest player ever man defector.com/who-can-stop...

Remember those court records that Miami Dophins receiver Tyreek Hill wanted sealed? They are now unsealed and up at @defector.com.

The paywall is also down:

the phrase "jaguars junction" is one of the last remaining reliable sources of reward neurotransmitters

Kelsey wrote about what I think is the single most evil blog I've ever read. Her post is good, The Free Press one is not. defector.com/the-free-pre...

years ago you described this look as "idm jacket," a phrase i now think about each time i put on my idm jacket

this is what porter ricks's "biokinetics 2" would sound like if you were to retrieve it from the seafloor: kynantrecords.bandcamp.com/track/d2-pau...

Ever since reading this @albertburneko.bsky.social paragraph a while back, I find myself thinking about it, encountering unwelcome exemplars of it, far more often than I wish.

a person at Treasury gave Defector a rundown of how this process—which appears to be against the law—was expedited in order to avoid public scrutiny

defector.com/treasury-dep...

wonderful, thank you! i was nearly certain i'd seen this somewhere; should've remembered that it was in the context of that kaggle comp.

people are already calling this "the most read blogpost of all time"

(i would obviously love this; i haven't yet found anything public that is remotely as accessible as what you two publish.)

to (re-)learn `brms` i'm trying to extend BP's work on skew-normal EV distributions to simultaneously model EV, LA, and SA, and i'm not totally sure how to bake those correlations into the fit.

x-mov and z-mov seem similarly correlated--more z-mov --> less x-mov--and easier to work with.

forgive me if this is either already public or a state secret, but: for the expected movement contours, are you guys fitting (normal?) distributions for x-mov and z-mov as a function of arm angle, pitch type, and pitcher handedness?

can't get enough of this sound

albert burneko named and nailed this a couple months ago (🎁)

defector.com/toward-a-the...

In this story I unpack some complicated feelings on the Buffalo Bills Hallmark movie, and Hallmark movies in general. Also yes that's Joe Pantoliano. He's in the Bills Hallmark movie. defector.com/the-hallmark...