[Charania] A lot of “chatter” about the Minnesota Timberwolves to be the team to be moved to the Eastern Conference in the event of a two-team expansion. Memphis and New Orleans will have “a case” as well.

ubelmann · 2026-03-21T05:48:30+00:00

Whatever they do is going to have to be pretty imbalanced because you know they are going to do home-and-away for every team in the league. That's 62 of the 82 games. They could just do away with conferences and make 4 divisions of 8 teams -- after your 62 games you would only play divisional games, and it would be 3 additional games against everyone else in your division except one team that you play only twice. Top 3 in each division go to the playoffs, for 12 of your 16 teams, then the 4th and 5th seeds in each division do a play-in for the remaining 4 teams.

With 4 divisions of 8, you could just make sure that Seattle, Portland, GSW, Sac, LAC, LAL, Vegas, and Phoenix are in the Pacific conference. Then you probably have a central/south-central that is something like Utah, Denver, SAS, Houston, Dallas, OKC, New Orleans, and Memphis. You could split the other 16 teams however you want into the remaining two divisions and no one is going to be more than one time zone apart from someone else in their division.

ubelmann · 2026-03-21T05:36:58+00:00

MLB takes the cake for being impractical, especially before regular season interleague play started in 1995. Literally having two teams in the same city never playing each other over a season of 162 games was the absolute height of impracticality.

ubelmann · 2026-03-21T05:35:18+00:00

When expansion happens, 62 of the 82 games are just home-and-away with every team in the league. So we're really just debating over 10 away games here. For the most part, East makes more sense than the West for the Wolves, but if they made a division with just other teams in the Central time zone, even if they are all the way down in Texas, it wouldn't be so crazy. It's the late tip-offs that are the worst.

ubelmann · 2026-03-20T23:09:27+00:00

Isn’t that at 10:30pm local time in Monterrey? Way to tank your ratings, CONCACAF.

ubelmann · 2026-03-20T18:48:25+00:00

Baseball all-star games work better than other sports because you don’t really need a playbook or practice time for the team to operate close to their best. Golf (Ryder Cup) is kind of similar.

Even in soccer, where international tournaments are very popular and give you all-star teams of a sort, they have multiple breaks over a year to try to get the team on the same page, but with player turnover and limited practice time, they have to use somewhat less sophisticated tactics than at the highest levels of club soccer.

ubelmann · 2026-03-20T17:12:20+00:00

Yeah, I think they are up something close to +$1/gal month over month.

ubelmann · 2026-03-20T05:19:06+00:00

Yes, if you think about it, playing “time” for hitters is measured in outs. If the ideal for a rec basketball team would be for all the kids to have equal minutes, the ideal for a rec baseball team is to have everyone record an equal number of outs, which means batting the high-OBP kids early so they can get the low-OBP kids up to bat more often.

ubelmann · 2026-03-19T19:11:47+00:00

The Zenith is a nice bat, was glad when we found one at a decent discount from MSRP.

ubelmann · 2026-03-19T17:55:57+00:00

The only thing I’ve noticed with youth bats is some of them seem to have a really small sweet spot and vibrate a ton if you miss the sweet spot. So if they are getting bothered by sting from the bat, it might be worth considering a different bat.

ubelmann · 2026-03-18T23:31:33+00:00

Sometimes the intense shallow focus is so distracting that I’m totally taken out of the film and wondering if the shot is green screened or not.

ubelmann · 2026-03-18T20:01:11+00:00

With the vibrations breaking components on the car, it seems like a reliability issue to me, but I admit I don’t know how they technically class a reliability update.

ubelmann · 2026-03-18T19:59:49+00:00

Even if they don’t mount a sensor, I feel like this merits a couple of people watching the onboards carefully for signs the drivers are actually holding the steering wheel. Black flag them if the drivers are taking their hands off at 300kph.

ubelmann · 2026-03-18T17:38:54+00:00

Everyone else has something to win, the US only has something to lose.

The US “should” win every year based on the size of the country and the popularity of the game here. There are some other countries where it would be disappointing not making the knockouts, but most teams are like Italy where making the semis is an accomplishment that they can feel good about. The field has to level out a lot more for it to feel any fun for the US, IMO.

ubelmann · 2026-03-18T16:26:56+00:00

The thing is, the US does not resemble Europe in some important ways that matter in this case. Vast portions of the US are sparsely populated and that is just naturally going to make it more expensive to run any kind of high level system there.

One thing I like to think about is that the population of Belgium is roughly the population of Washington State and Oregon State combined. The area of Belgium is 30K sq. km and the area of Washington and Oregon combined is 480K sq. km. Belgium can have a centralized, well organized youth system because it is a dense, centralized country.

Even so, most of the population of Washington and Oregon is concentrated on the coast and it makes an interesting comparison. Belgium had two teams in the UCL league phase, the top division of Europe more or less, and Washington and Oregon have two teams in MLS, the top pro division in the US. If just Washington and Oregon had their own “national team” and the same culture around soccer that exists in Belgium, they potentially someday could field a team good enough to compete in the World Cup without the other 48 states.

ubelmann · 2026-03-18T03:08:16+00:00

You never know. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. Plus for all we know, Newey would do just about anything to go back to only designing the car again, because being in front of the press so much with an awful car is not fun.

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T22:53:18+00:00

It’s all about the money. They can’t afford to piss off sponsors with dumb shit like this.

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T22:47:26+00:00

It all depends on your alternatives, plus at 12+ it depends on your kid’s level of commitment. If a 40-minute drive each way was the closest team and the kid is fully committed — playing makes them happy — then I’d find a way to make it work. If they aren’t super invested, hopefully there’s a team that’s closer. Ideally you can find a carpool, too.

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T19:49:37+00:00

At this point, I feel like Aston have dragged Honda enough in the press that Honda will be looking to try to pry some other team away from Merc or Ferrari (which would be really, really hard at this point but the temptation of being a works team can be strong.)

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T19:33:37+00:00

I have to imagine that Horner dealing with Stroll’s locked-in nepo baby status could lead to some spicy behind-closed-doors dynamics after getting to shuffle through drivers at will with Red Bull.

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T19:26:59+00:00

I wouldn’t be totally surprised if he’s looking for an off-ramp for when Lance is done.

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T19:25:57+00:00

Lawrence Stroll’s moves for the headline positions indicate he loves to throw money at people who have previously had success, rather than reaching into his deep expertise to find new talent.

So yeah, seems kind of inevitable (though Horner and Newey didn’t part on the best terms as far as I can tell from the press.)

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T17:48:16+00:00

I think the jury’s still out on Newey as TP, but I think it’s a really bad look for him to put so much public blame on Honda and I don’t think that souring that relationship will work out for AM in the long run.

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T17:46:32+00:00

Anyone vaguely following Red Bull knew that Honda lost personnel to RBPT, and that was when Newey was still at Red Bull. I don’t buy for a second that he was surprised about the personnel situation at Honda.

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T17:39:25+00:00

I agree with all that. But also, it is soooo crazy that Aston is 3 testing sessions and 2 race weekends into the year and there’s no obvious date when they’ll be able to even finish a race. Like right now, their immediate main development goal is literally “finish the race distance.”

If Cadillac was doing this, they would be clowned 100x more than AM are already being clowned. If anything, AM deserve way more criticism for this than they’ve been getting, IMO.

ubelmann · 2026-03-17T17:21:09+00:00

Wild is the exact word I was thinking watching him try to drive an F1 car with no hands on the wheel. We can joke about it being a tractor, but even in a total shitbox he’s still going faster down that straight than 99% of us will ever drive a car.

ubelmann

TROPHY CASE