Good morning SportsBallers, today’s newsletter has some interesting, questionable, and chuckle-worthy data visualizations to guide you through the week in sports.

🏒♏️🌗 Astrology x Hockey collab
💵🏈🏝️ Best severance package ever
🟢🏟️🎰 A team gets a new home

Don’t forget to find us on LinkedIn where we’re putting these analyses plus more every week. Here we go ⬇️

LEARNING MODULE 💡 

Fact-Checking Malcolm Gladwell 🧮

If anyone’s read Outliers, 📖 the first chapter describes how hockey players are more likely to make the NHL if they’re born in the first part of the year.

1. The older you are within your year, the bigger and stronger you are compared to your peers. 💪

2. The bigger and stronger you are compared to your peers, the more likely you are to be chosen for better teams. 👬

3. When you’re on better teams, you have better coaches and development. 🏒

4. Better coaches and development make players even better and more likely to move up to the next levels. 🔝

Gladwell implies this phenomenon compounds up to the professional level where NHL players are more likely to be born early in the year.

He also plainly states it’s not about astrology. 🌗 We have some questions there...

It looks like he was right, most current NHL players were born in the first half of the year. Good job Malcolm. 👏

But are the best players born at the beginning of the year?

We collected data on the point production of every NHL player and aggregated it to a zodiac level, mapping the percent of all points in the NHL by astrological sign. ♍️

We then compared it to the percentage of players in each zodiac to see where certain signs overperform or underperform their peers.

While the findings are intriguing, they leave room for interpretation. 🧑‍⚕️

These differences aren’t insignificant… Virgos account for 6.5% of the league's players but produce 8.4% of the league’s points. That’s a 30% increase from baseline expectation.

If you look at the beginning of the year, each sign except for Taurus has lower point production than birth representation. 🤔 We did some astrological readings to understand why.

Aquarius 🔴

With the NHL season starting in October, this Aquarius down period at the end of the year had the players in a bit of a lull. 😴 Look for a bounce-back to finish the season strong.

Pisces 🔴

It looks like Pisces aren’t too disciplined this month, not surprising with the data suggesting the same lack of point production accountability.

Scorpius 🟢

It was always meant to be a big season for our Scorpius’. An entire year in the spotlight ⭐️ is not something to be ignored and it’s showing on the ice.

Virgo 🟢

Virgos have had a great season, the highest performing of any sign, but their reign of good fortune may be ending soon. As the playoff push aligns with the risky health period in April, 🤕 Virgo NHL players need to stretch a little extra to avoid injury.

THIS PAST WEEK ⏮

Dreamy Severance Package 🏈🏝️

We never like to see someone get fired.

Even if they’re bad at their job, we feel for the life-altering situations people are abruptly thrust into. 😢 That said, we’re excluding Russell Wilson.

In 2022, the star quarterback signed a 5-year, $242 million contract extension with the Denver Broncos with $161 million of that in guaranteed money. 💵 That means no matter what happens, the team is required to pay him, even if he doesn’t play.

Since then, the Broncos have been… bad. Some say it’s not Russell’s fault, but regardless, they wanted to move on. That’s why the team released him this week in hopes of a fresh start.

The catch? They still are required to pay for his contract. We’ll skip the boring details but in short, the Broncos will pay $85 million over the next two years for a player who isn’t even on the team. 💸

Taking what we learned from last week’s salary cap discussion, that means 16.6% of the Broncos’ total budget will be heading down the drain.

Let’s just say it isn’t how we would be spending that cash. Here’s a list 📋 of things you could buy instead of severance for your quarterback.

The 40K Club 🏀

I don’t think I’ve done anything 40,000 times in my life. Heck, I’ve only eaten breakfast around 10,000 times, 🥞 let alone score that many points in the highest-level professional basketball league in the world.

Lebron James already had the record for most points in NBA history and he continues to push past the frontier of known success in basketball with his 40,000th point, the first to ever do it.

Spherical Armadillo ⚾️🏟️

For those who aren’t keeping up with local city votes in Oakland, the city’s baseball team, the A’s, are relocating to Las Vegas in the coming years. The catch? There’s no stadium for them yet.

After months of waiting, the team just released renderings of their proposed new stadium on the Vegas Strip for 2028 ⬇️

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? The Sydney Opera House meets a “spherical armadillo” is exactly what we expected for a new MLB stadium. 🏟️ I guess anything is better than the Oakland Coliseum.

Clip of the Week 🎬🏀

Not only are the Boston Celtics the best team on the court in the NBA, but their social media team is proving they’re the best off the court as well.

This highlight video from the week is the coolest clip you’ll see in basketball all year. ⬇️

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to share the newsletter. 👍 Have a great weekend.

— Riley and Claire

Keywords:

Data visualizations, SportsBallers, Newsletter, Data visualizations, Astrology, Hockey, Severance package, NHL, Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, Zodiac signs, Point production, Aquarius, Pisces, Scorpius, Virgo, Russell Wilson, Denver Broncos, Salary cap, Lebron James, NBA, A's relocation, MLB stadium, Vegas Strip, Spherical armadillo, Boston Celtics, Highlight video, Social media