Numlock Sunday: Neil Paine on the best return on your time in sports

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Neil Paine, my former colleague from FiveThirtyEight who writes the great

Neil’s Substack

diving into sports and sports analytics.

I wanted to talk to Neil for a couple reasons, one being that the Four Nations just pushed hockey to the forefront of the national attention in ways that would have been completely unexpected, and another being that I’m a huge fan of his writing and his newsletter and he’s been on a real tear lately.

Neil can be found at Neil’s Substack, and at his podcast Podracing.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Neil, how's it going dude?

It's going great, Walt. Thanks for having me on. It is always a pleasure, man.

Again, I am just such a fan of your work from FiveThirtyEight days all through the Neil’s Substack era. So it is good to have you on.

You gotta have the eponymous Substack. That's what I always say.

I think that you've pulled it off. It was an audacious thing to try to supplant all other Neils in terms of Substack branding. But nevertheless, I really do think you have pulled it off.

Well, I was a little worried about Neil Armstrong. Did he pass away, I can't actually remember.

I don't think he's with us anymore. And realistically, knowing the Substack crowd, I think that Buzz Aldrin's a little bit of a better fit.

Oh, yeah. Where's Buzz's Substack? You gotta find that.

I just wanted to have you on because you cover the sports world, but you also really cover a level of depth throughout the sports world that is very fun, which means that I think you cover things that other folks don't always cover. I think that a lot of people can get very distracted by the big, big stories of NFL and NBA, you have some extremely good hockey stuff. We should talk about Four Nations and the current situation in the NHL right now. But also, I definitely want to talk a little bit more about some fun stuff that you had lately, whether it was sports ROI or your NASCAR stuff.

I guess we'll start off at the beginning. Do you want to talk a little bit about this extremely riveting moment in hockey that got this sport on the map of a lot of people who hadn't really been following it?

Yeah, I gotta admit, I was a little surprised. So for the listeners that maybe don't know, instead of the All-Star Game for the NHL, this year they decided to do a four-country international tournament that was called the Four Nations Faceoff. It's weird because it's not sanctioned in the same way that the Olympics are or like you see in other sports, the World Cup, that type of thing. It was like there's been a World Cup of hockey, but it's not regarded the same way that the World Cup in soccer is. This was organized by the NHL. It was specifically done to happen during this period of time in which the league was off for what would have been the All-Star Game.

There were even questions about which teams were the Four Nations in the Four Nations tournament. It ended up being Canada and the U.S. and Sweden and Finland. So no Russia. They're banned from international hockey tournaments because of the whole Ukraine situation. The Czech Republic, or I guess Czechia if you want to call it that now, was also excluded. That one was the controversial one, but they didn't have as many NHL players as Finland. There was talk that, “Hey, what if we did a combined Czechia and Slovakian team like the old Czechoslovakia?”

No!

That was actually a thing.

Really?

Yeah, David Pasternak of the Bruins, who is from Czechia, suggested that. It was like, We love the Slovaks. Let's get together and do it again. But that didn't end up happening. So it was those Four Nations.Predictably, the cream that rose to the top were Canada and the U.S., and they played a game in the round robin, or the earlier stages of the tournament, the U.S. won. It was most notable because there were three fights in the first nine seconds of this game. It was just an encapsulation of this rivalry between the U.S. and Canada that, of course, has been magnified by geopolitics and various other factors coming in. It sort of hit at the right time.

Once a Mismatch, the U.S. and Canada Finally Meet as Hockey Equals

The championship game has those same teams waiting for each other. It's a close game throughout: goes into overtime. The Canadians get their revenge on the U.S. when Conor McDavid, who's like the best player in the world, scores the game-winning goal.

It wasn't surprising that the U.S. and Canada made it to the final. They're kind of the two best countries in hockey. That itself is kind of a story where the U.S., for pretty much all of history up until recently, has lagged way behind Canada. Canada, of course, invented hockey, or at least is the home of hockey, and the U.S. was not good at it. When the miracle on ice happened, the reason it was a miracle was because no one thought that they could win, especially that group of players against the Soviets. But the U.S. has improved a lot, and it was this collision course. But Canada was like, “We're still the king. We're still the best country at hockey.”

The most surprising thing was the ratings for this tournament, which yielded the best-watched NHL game in decades. I guess you could debate whether it is actually an official NHL game or not, but more people watched this than watched Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final and various other official NHL games. And it really spoke to the way that a bunch of circumstances came together to capture people's attention. It's great for hockey because it had so many eyes on the game, and you get to know these stars that maybe us hockey fans know, but the wider sports world didn't know.

Via Neil’s Substack

I've had people come up and talk to me just randomly, like, “Hey, did you watch that game, what did you think of the Four Nations” in a way that has never happened before with hockey. People don't come up and talk about that typically. It was a little bit like “Hey, what did you think of the Super Bowl” type of thing. It wasn't anywhere near as many eyeballs, but it was that type of cultural event.

The downside for the NHL is it's not really something that you can plan or predict. Going into this, people weren't necessarily sold on whether it would be a huge success or whether people would be interested in it. I don't know how replicable it is, but it did stand in really stark contrast against the NBA All-Star Game, which was a couple weekends ago, as well. It had its lowest rating in a long time and was a disaster for the league.

That's not to say that hockey is more popular than basketball. The NBA is more popular than the NHL overall. But something about this format, the conditions that the championship game was played under and the drama both on and off the ice captured people in a way that a lot of All-Star Games in every sport have failed to do for a long time. There's a big debate over whether All-Star Games have outlived their usefulness, and whether we should just get rid of them. Some leagues are getting rid of them, like the NFL.

It's interesting to see that they really bottled lightning on this one, and it would be fun to kind of see how you would apply that even to other sports. I just kind of want to talk a little bit about this: the U.S. versus Canada showdown is not necessarily over in hockey. You obviously have a really, really good forecasting system and ELO system for the NHL, and the Winnipeg Jets are (somewhat inexplicably, given where they were at the beginning of the season) at the very tippy-top of it, no?

🏒 2024-25 NHL Team Elo Power Rankings & Goals Above Replacement Player Ratings 📉

Yeah, and I don't know necessarily how much I fully buy that. Several teams have traded off and fluctuated, but the Jets have established themselves as the favorites. I think the betting favorites are the Edmonton Oilers, with Connor McDavid's team, another Canadian team. I think the upshot was (when I looked at this a few weeks ago) there was a 32% or 33% chance that a Canadian team would win the Stanley Cup. You might think it would happen all the time, but it, in fact, has not happened since 1993. That has been a recurring talking point or narrative in the game of hockey: why can't these teams from the place that basically owns hockey win the Stanley Cup?

They've come close on a number of occasions. Almost every time they've gone to the Final (the Canadian team) the series has gone seven games. That was including last year as well. Maybe the ultimate example of, “OK, Canada, we're going to dangle this carrot in front of you.” The Edmonton Oilers are almost going to win the Stanley Cup with this player that's seen as the Wayne Gretzky heir and Connor McDavid. And we’re going to snatch it away. The Florida Panthers, the most southern hockey team, geographically at least, won. And that matchup, I believe, was the most distance between any two teams. Certainly in the history of the Stanley Cup, but maybe in the history of any major professional championship series ever, in terms of the travel distance that they had to go between the two teams. The Sunbelt team between those two wins and the Canadian team falls short in Game 7, again.

They're going to be right back at it, whether it's Winnipeg, whether it's Edmonton. It could be even the Toronto Maple Leafs.That's a little silly coming out of my mouth. But at the same time, they certainly could, on paper, at least make a run. The Ottawa Senators might make the playoffs. The Calgary Flames as well. There’s some options in teams that might make some noise and maybe make Canada proud again.

Certainly the U.S. can't beat Canada head-to-head in these important games for the most part. Famously in 2010, they lost the gold medal game in overtime. It’s kind of similar to what happened in the Four Nations. Crosby scored the gold goal in that one. And then it happens again, in a little bit of a different setting because I think the Olympics mean more to these guys than the Four Nations. But it was kind of an Olympic-like setting. And it happened again.

The U.S. can't catch a break on that stage, but then they dominate (especially the southern U.S. teams, the Sun Belt teams) dominate the Stanley Cup. You debate which is more valuable or important.

It is funny how the Deep South has been a real hockey powerhouse for quite some time. I want to back out a little bit. You had a really fun post (that I loved) that was about basically the ROI of an individual sports viewing.

You can maybe talk a little bit on some of the consternations in the NBA right now about how much time people have to sink into watching a sport. You actually had a really interesting deep dive into a question that has been on a lot of minds, whether it's the Major League Baseball reigning in their time, of how much it requires to be a fan of different sports.

The origin of this was Adam Silver, who's the commissioner of the NBA. He recently floated the idea, probably not very seriously, about reducing the length of NBA games from 48 minutes (four 12-minute quarters) to 40 minutes (four 10-minute quarters). And the backlash against that was pretty strong. There were a lot of people that were unhappy that he was even entertaining that.

Which Sports Provide the Best Return on Your Time Investment?

My take at first was: with basketball being the sport that it is, there's a lot of possessions. That means the better team wins a lot more in an NBA game than they do in other sports. The NBA has long had this competitive balance problem, basically the best teams can decide how much they want to try and how much they want to win. There’s load management, that policy of resting key players in certain games during the regular season so they don't get tired out for the playoffs, which would be bad for the fan experience. If they're buying tickets to see LeBron and then he's load-managing that game. But they can do that because they can flip the switch on whenever they want to, try hard, win and get to where they want to be in the playoff picture. There's all kinds of things like that. If you shorten the game, that introduces more randomness, which may help some of the problems of the NBA.

I'm sympathetic to the idea. I'm also sympathetic to the fact that they can't reduce (they could, but they would lose money, at least in the short term) the number of home games per team per season, which I think is a hack to try to get around. They could just reduce the number of games to 60, 70. There's been shortened seasons where they played 50, 60 games in a season, and people are like “This is actually pretty good.” But there's fewer games for the owners to make ticket revenue off of. So they don't want to do that.

Via Neil’s Substack

Okay, what if we compress the games? But then I was thinking, are NBA games too long as it is? If you put aside the sheer number of them in the season (and 82 is a lot) is the experience of viewing an NBA game relative to other sports more dragged out or not? So I looked at this a few different ways, and some of it was a trading ground that others had done as well, so I looped in some research there.

We know how long a game is supposed to be. A football game is 60 minutes. A basketball game, an NBA game is 48 minutes. College basketball, 40. This is like how much you're telling me this game is going to last, but how much does it really last, and who has the biggest differential between that? For every minute of a hockey game that is on the scoreboard or the clock, you have to actually spend 2.5 minutes of real time in real life. That's the best ratio, at least among the non-soccer, meaning North American major pro-sports. The NBA, 2.8 minutes for every minute of the game clock. The worst, though, is the NFL and college football. Those are around 3.2, 3.3 minutes spent consuming the game for every minute that the game actually takes place with the clock running. So that's one way of looking into it.

But there are other approaches. I like this one. There's a guy named Stefan Teodescu on Substack where he broke down how much time was spent, the ratio of non-action (commercials, breaks, intermissions) versus action, and it's kind of the same thing. You can only slice up the amount of time that you're watching games so much. In this case, basketball — among the non-soccer sports — was the best with 69% of the total time spent watching a basketball broadcast devoted to actual live action versus not. Again, football was the worst in terms of the ratio, but not that much worse, only about 68% in both college and pro. But that adds up because the total amount of time you're watching football is so much longer that in the average broadcast, you end up spending 60-plus minutes watching just ads and breaks in a game.

You can break it down even further, which is what Kurt Goldsberry and Catherine Rowe did back in the day at FiveThirtyEight where they actually tracked the amount of time when the ball or puck or whatever was actually in play. If you look at it that way, the NFL only has 18 minutes of action in a game, and these games are taking place over, like you said, three-plus hours.

I think that approach is a little misleading because baseball was also in that group of 22 minutes of actual action. The point of those sports is also the tension between plays. I think that especially in baseball, so much of the pressure and the entertainment value of the postseason is what happens between pitches. You know that the guys are thinking about the implications and, what's this guy going to throw, what's the situation.The tension kind of rises and ratchets up. For some sports it works, for other sports it works less well, but it's another way to look at the problem.

There's also some arguments that when a football game gets kind of boring, it can get pretty bad. But when it gets really boring and Chris Collinsworth just has to vamp for like an hour because there's nothing else on, that is actually a form of art. As a Giants fan I've seen it many times. But it's just magnificent.

Yeah, Al Michaels used to be kind of the best at that because he would (Bob Costas as well in baseball, if there's like a bad blowout) have bouts of just weird knowledge so they can kind of rip on things or whatever. And then Al Michaels would also sort of subtly hint at, “Oh, this might be a really important score for this team that's down 21 points.” The unspoken part being because the line is 18 and they might pick a field goal to cover. That was back before they were bombarding us with gambling ads 24-7 throughout these games.

But just to bring it back to basketball because that's sort of the origin of all of this. Basketball rates really well. It’s right behind hockey. You can split off soccer; it doesn't lend itself fully to these same analyses because it does really well at the ratio of time spent to purported time that you would spend. The clock is always running for the most part. They'll add on time and there's break for halftime or whatever. But overall, what you see is what you get, which I think is a nice thing about it.

It’s just a totally different animal in terms of the continuous clock versus the stop clock. Among the stop clock sports, though, the NBA is right there with hockey. It’s better than football, better than basketball in terms of the economy of your time spent being able to get action, get things moving and not have to spend so much time watching commercials. The real flaw with basketball is the end game, with the fouls and the free throws and the timeouts and the replays and the absurdity of all of that, which is in college and pro. I was watching a game with Texas A&M and Vanderbilt the other day in college and the last minute of that game lasted, like, 13 minutes or something. It was crazy how much they dragged it out with replays and the officials have to review things.

There's a guy named Mike Bowie of Inpredictable (that's his site). He had a thing where he looked at how long the clock time in the final few minutes of basketball games takes in real time and what the multiple was on that. And it is crazy. I would encourage people to look at this. For instance, the last two minutes of a close NBA game takes about 12 minutes of real-life time, so it's like a six-time multiplier in terms of real time compared with clock time. The last one minute takes nine minutes of real-life time in a close game, so a 9x multiplier. And it gets even crazier. The last 15 seconds of a close NBA game have a 16-time multiplier on how much time it actually takes.

It's a miracle we even finish these.

Yeah, it's sort of like those lines that are asymptotically approaching a line but they never actually get to it. Can we actually finish this game ever? No, we're just going to slowly, gradually get close to zero but never actually get there.

Zeno's stop clock.

Oh, 1,000%, yeah. So that is the big flaw. They have ways, and they've adopted these unofficially in different settings, there are ideas to try to fix that. There's a thing called the Elim Ending. Basically, at the end of a game, instead of having it be timed, you just tack on a certain number of points onto the leading team's score. And you say, “First team to this threshold wins no matter what.” And it's always going to end on a made shot. It could end on a made free throw, which is a little anticlimactic, but it could end on an incredible three-pointer or whatever. Team's foul because they want to drag out time and make the other team have to make these shots in order to kind of preserve the lead. And if they mess up and miss the shots, you can get more possessions and try to kind of make up for the end. It's smart coaching, but it's a terrible product. There's ways to kind of get around that.

Another thing that came up in my story was that overtime in these games (which doesn't come up that often, but about 6% of games go to overtime in the NBA) these overtime lengths, which are mandatory, by the way, it's not sudden death. In basketball, you have to play all five minutes of an NBA overtime or a college overtime. These add on another 10% to 13% of a new game at the end of a regulation game. And it's just not necessary. You probably could cut it down to three minutes, give each team about six possessions each. That would totally be enough to decide fairly who wins a game. Again, hockey is the best at this. They're the only one with a single-digit percentage in terms of the length of overtime relative to the normal game length.

To me, the big things about basketball are fix the end game (whether it's with the Elam ending or something like that) and then fix overtime. Reduce the length of it, and you would just, I mean why are we even talking about 10-minute quarters or anything like that? From a pure watchability and product standpoint, you can do targeted things to try to alleviate the actual biggest complaints that people have about the game or the biggest choke point in slowing down the action. So that was my piece. Basically, the thrust of it was, “Is there anything wrong with the NBA?” There’s some highly specific things wrong with just basketball games in general, but they do seem fixable without having to radically change the length of a game.

We’ve got March Madness coming up. There are many reasons why I never really got into college basketball, the main one being I went to William & Mary. But the fact that they all end diabolically, ending with constant interference and knocking each other. It gets tedious. And hockey, which you introduced me to, has the best ending of all of them.

Speaking of sports that end on their own terms, you are a very big NASCAR guy and also have had some pretty significant success lately with a fun show that you now do with NASCAR. Do you want to talk a little bit about this season and what's coming up on Podracing?

Yeah, absolutely. So your friend and mine, Tyler Lauletta, a former colleague of yours as well. He and I got into NASCAR together a couple of years ago with a show where the conceit is that I'm sort of a lifelong fan, he was new to it but really wanted to learn about it. We went on this journey together. Very similar to the show that you and I used to have, maybe we still periodically have, called A Couple of Goons in hockey, where it's kind of the same idea. I'm the lifelong hockey fan, you're the novice. We go through it together. But in the NASCAR one, it's called Podracing. We are being carried on NASCAR.com, in addition to Apple and Spotify and all the places that you can find podcasts.

You're talking about the way that the events end, not a game but a race. That is a constant source of controversy and officiating crises in NASCAR. I'm sympathetic to them because, essentially, they have rules about when a race goes into overtime. Up to the last lap of the race, if there's a yellow flag for caution, an accident or something in the race, then they go into what's called overtime. They have a restart, and then you do what's called a green-white checker, which is green flag to go on the restart, white flag for the last lap.

You go one way all the way around, then you get to the white flag for the final lap, then you go all the way around again and there's a checkered flag. If there's another wreck after that, then the race just ends and whoever was ahead at the time wins. They did that because they didn't want races to end under caution, which is how they used to do it, which is very boring. I understand, you don't want to see after that watching these guys go 499 miles. All of a sudden at the very end, you have to watch a very slow lap with a pace car, and it's like “Yay, there's your winner.” That's really anticlimactic.

However, this rule around overtime and green-white checker finishes has created an insane amount of controversy. We've had it in each of the first two races of the season this year, but it also constantly was a topic of conversation last year as well. But NASCAR has to make a split-second decision when there is a wreck (and the wreck is often behind the leaders, so it's not actually really involving them) whether or not to throw the caution flag and essentially end the race artificially or early versus letting them race back around. But if it's a really bad wreck or cars are sitting out in the middle of the track, you're having guys going full speed trying to get back to the finish line. Then they'll go through the finish line and potentially hit some of those cars that are wrecked out in the middle of the track.

It’s safety versus entertainment, and they absolutely seesaw on a week-to-week basis. Sometimes even because there's three races in each race weekend at this high level. One is the Truck Series, which is the lowest level of the top tier. Then there's the Xfinity Series, which is the minor league, right below the main series, which is the Cup Series. They have had situations where they'll throw the flag for the Truck Series, they won't throw the flag in exactly the same situation for the Xfinity Series and then they will throw the flag for the Cup Series race on Sunday.

Within the span of like three days, they'll treat the same situation in three completely incompatible and inconsistent ways. That has happened so far to start this season, and I don't know if they have a great fix for it because there's other ways that you could end races. You’re always going to have to come down to either a human decision about “Is it safe, should we let them keep racing” or “Should we throw the flag, err on the side of caution?” Do we want to race to finish under caution or do we want to try to get exciting finishes through this overtime mechanism?

I don't pretend to have the answers, but we do unpack that controversy, on a weekly basis on Podracing. So if you like listening to people complaining about NASCAR officiating, but also commiserating with the problems that they have, and a bunch of other things. We talk about DraftKings lineups that you can fill out, who we think is going to do well in the race and sometimes we talk about extremely hyped prospects, which is going to happen this weekend. There’s a lot to unpack in there for anybody that wants to learn more about NASCAR racing in general.

Amazing, alright. Well I guess on that note, where can folks find you?

They can find me writing weekly at Nascar.com and the podcast comes out around mid-week. I'd say Wednesday or Thursday. I also write the Bubble Watch column for ESPN. Up until Selection Sunday, I have a little running live blog for each team. We're not sure whether they're going to make the NCAA tournament or not, on the men's side at least, so we’ll write about what they've done, what kind of progress they've made, are they rising up, are they falling off? And of course, Neil's Substack. You can go to neilpaine.substack.com and you can find all my writings about various other things, like hockey. I also have prediction models. We didn't even talk about the fact that Alex Ovechkin is about to break Wayne Gretskey’s record; I have a little tracker there. If you want to know what the odds are of him breaking the record or tying it before the end of the season, and what day he might do it on, I have a little simulation set up with updates set up the day after every Washington Capitals game. That’s the type of stuff you can find at Neils Substack.

Amazing. Definitely feels like keeping the fires of what you’ve accomplished at FiveThirtyEight running in your own shop. It’s really fun to watch.

Yeah, well thank you so much, appreciate that

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Edited by Crystal Wang.

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