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Friday, March 24, 2023
As the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments roll into their second week, starting with tonight’s slate of Sweet 16 men’s games, it’s time to take stock of just who the best and most exciting performers have been in March Madness so far. To that end, let’s look at a ranking of every active player, according to a per-game average of Game Score — a simple metric that adds up the weighted sum of a player’s good (and bad) box score stats — in each tournament to date.
Several years ago, a team of sociologists flew from California to an East Coast school to observe the kindergarteners’ recess for their research. The team waited on the playground, but the children never showed up. When they later asked the principal why, he told them that the lunch staff had held the students back as punishment for misbehavior.
2022 brought baseball fans a handful of gifts, headlined by Aaron Judge’s all-around excellence and Shohei Ohtani continuing to be Shohei Ohtani. But a few months of Albert Pujols’s farewell season were just as historic. Serving as designated hitter for his old team, the St. Louis Cardinals, Pujols put up one of the great old-guy campaigns ever in an unprecedented comeback from a yearslong slump. There have been few hitters of Pujols’s caliber in MLB history, period; the list of them who have languished around replacement level for years before reclaiming something like their elite form is, well, just Pujols.
Despite a near-constant swirl of legal problems, former President Donald Trump has managed to avoid indictment so far. But one prosecutor seems poised to take the plunge and become the first to criminally indict a former president. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, is reportedly close to filing charges for Trump’s role in paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.
In the modern NBA, there is no resource more valuable than time on the shot clock. In fact, it’s the only thing that teams can’t score without. While it’s tough to put the ball in the basket if you don’t have a high-level ball handler or marksmen to knock down shots and space the floor, it’s not impossible. But once that timer above the backboard hits zero, your opportunity to produce points is over. And in what is once again the most efficient scoring season in league history, every single second has value — perhaps more now than ever before.
We thought we were safe. The flu season was tapering off. Spring was in the air (sort of, some places). As flu cases flatlined through January and February, Americans breathed a sigh of relief, kicked up our collective feet … and immediately realized we’d accidentally ingested norovirus and made a break for the restroom.
The 2023 men’s NCAA Tournament started with a bang. Within six hours of the round of 64 tipping off, we’d seen an experienced No. 4 seed Virginia collapse in dramatic fashion to No. 13 Furman and the much taller No. 2 Arizona get schooled by No. 15 Princeton down the stretch. By Friday night, we’d lost a No. 1 seed, as Fairleigh Dickinson vanquished Purdue in just the second-ever 16-over-1 result, and by the time the dust settled on Sunday, the teams that began with the fourth-, fifth- and seventh-best odds in our model to start the tournament had all fallen — while the school more famous for producing Nobel Laureates than Naismith Award winners had advanced to the Sweet 16.
If you had envisioned a 2023 women’s NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 without Grace Berger of Indiana, Haley Jones of Stanford and Celeste Taylor of Duke, well, congratulations: You predicted the future better than almost anyone.
Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
For the past two weeks, the passion of the World Baseball Classic has been on full display. There was the indefatigable cheer squad for Chinese Taipei; Joey Meneses’s epic bat toss after homering for Mexico; Italy pitcher Joe LaSorsa’s ear-splitting paroxysm after getting a clutch out; and dueling Nicaraguan and Puerto Rican street bands in the stands of Miami’s LoanDepot Park.
