#drew that first one while watching the season finale of The Fall with Colin !!

[kr-yoongi]

Draw Merlin looking up challenge: FAILED

#drew that first one while watching the season finale of The Fall with Colin !! #watched that entire show just for him im crazy #loved the relationship between him and Gillian’s character though wish there was more of that because I do love a good cop romance ! #can’t believe they gave me another older woman detective with the charming younger man detective again (mare of Easttown) #I didn’t realise I needed to see that again !! #anyway my bad #back to business #Merlin #Merlin Fanart #Colin Morgan #Colin Morgan Fanart #Digital Art #kr_yoongi #also forgive me I work full time and can’t draw when I like anymore so I’m rusty </3

[pucksnsticksnhockeyboys]

homesick

summary: when you’re homesick near the holidays, Quinn does his best to make you feel at home with him and a cup of cocoa. 

word count: 2.4k

note from the writer: day two! gotta say, this one was very self indulgent / masterposts of the Christmas fics

tagging: @bqstqnbruin @broadstbroskis @laurenairay​ @calgarycanuck​ @sorryjustafangirl​ @slapshot-to-the-heart​ @cthoodsthetic @tayella13​ @wastedheartcth​ @kiedhara​ / add yourself to my Christmas fic taglist

Moving far away from your hometown had always been the plan. It was a fresh start, with new people, sights, and opportunities.

But, no matter how much you loved living away from home, you really missed it sometimes.

The Christmas season had long arrived in full force, decorations in every window and holiday songs on repeat in every department store. And usually you loved it, you were the first person to put up the lights and the last one to take them down in the new year. But it was your first Christmas away from home; work keeping you in Vancouver when all you wanted was the nostalgic familiarity of the holidays in your hometown.

As a result, you turned into a bit of a grump. Declining invites to go out with friends and opting to stay inside and mope by yourself. Really, it was doing nothing to help the feeling of homesickness, but you’d never admit that to yourself.

Quinn caught onto this; he was always sperceptive of your changing moods even before you started dating. So once you sent your message telling Jake and the rest of the group to go bar hopping without you, it only took Quinn half an hour to show up unannounced on your doorstep.

A knock drew your attention from the corny Hallmark movie you had been watching, and you hit pause on the dramatic confession of love. The woman who never had time for romance after moving to the big city to pursue her dreams could wait to tell the hardworking man from her hometown how she felt. On your doorstep was the man who managed to capture your own heart, even if you hadn’t quite told him in so many words yet.

“Hey, I didn’t realize we had plans tonight?” You told Quinn, nonetheless opening the door wider and letting him in. He ducked down to give you a kiss before replying, and it was only after he had shuffled all the way into your apartment did you notice the takeout bag in his hand.

“We didn’t, but I wanted to see you.” He shrugged a shoulder, making his way into your kitchen while you shut and locked the front door behind him. When you finally caught up to him, he was pulling containers of food out of the bag, and when you recognized the company’s logo, you looked at your boyfriend suspiciously.

“You ordered from Kimmy’s; you never order from Kimmy’s.” You confronted him, his answering laugh echoing throughout the otherwise quiet apartment. It was the old argument between the two of you; you loved Kimmy’s, Quinn loved Lucy’s. They had the same food and were in theory the same place, but you swore Kimmy’s way better. Even when you told Quinn to order from Kimmy’s, he always, without fail, came back with Lucy’s instead.  

Except for tonight, apparently.

Quinn gave you a sheepish look and stopped pulling food out the bag, and instead opened his arms for a hug. Confused but not wanting to pass up the opportunity to be held by your favorite guy, you complied, and his arms came around you to hold you tight.

“I know you’ve been sad about not being able to go home lately.” He started, rocking you back and forth. You didn’t protest his statement, because there was nothing to object to. Instead, you waited for him to finish. “So I figured that we could have your favorite takeout, and then watch some Christmas movies. I also have a surprise for later.”

“This isn’t the surprise?” You questioned with a grin, tilting your head up to look at him whilst staying in his arms. A swell of emotions took over you, but the one that hit you squarely in the chest was the overwhelming desire to tell Quinn you loved him.

And you did love him. You loved that he knew when you were upset and when you needed a pick-me-up movie night. You loved the way he smiled and the way he laughed. The way he made you go to all of his home games when you were free and called you his good luck charm, win or lose. You loved him with your very being, and you had known for a while that you loved him, but you had been waiting for the perfect moment to tell him.

“No, this isn’t the surprise.” He chuckled, dropping a kiss to your forehead before turning to finish getting the food out of the bag. You slipped away to grab two plates, along with silverware, moving seamlessly with Quinn until you were sitting on your couch with him.

“What movie did you want to watch?” You asked, reaching for the remote to turn off the cheesy Hallmark movie you had all but forgotten about.

“This is your cheer up movie, you pick.” Quinn told you with a shrug, already digging into his plate. You rolled your eyes at his smile, biting back the joke about how he shouldn’t talk with his mouth full. Wasting little time, you pulled up a classic—Love, Actually.

“It’s a sappy romance movie kind of night.” You told Quinn decidedly, and he didn’t put up an argument. Settling back into your seat, you felt yourself start to feel a little bit better about not being able to spend Christmas back home. After all, you couldn’t worry about much with Quinn by your side.

By the time Colin Firth was jumping into the lake to save his novel, Quinn got up from the couch and whispered a quiet ‘I’ll be right back’ before slipping into the kitchen. You tried your very best, but you couldn’t focus on the movie any longer and instead you found yourself listening to your boyfriend doing something in your kitchen. Ratting dishes, running water, and the sound of your microwave—for the life of you, you couldn’t figure out what he was up to.

“Do you need any help?” You called after a moment, a smile toying on your lips as you heard Quinn let out a quiet curse. Part of you wondered if you should be a little more concerned, knowing his lack of domestic skills could very well lead to something disastrous, but you trusted him enough to tell you if something went awry.

“No, I got it.” He replied, and just then he was reemerging with two mugs of hot cocoa, decked out with marshmallows and candy canes that he must have snuck in with the takeout.

“You’re really pulling out all the stops, huh, Huggy?” You teased, watching with mirth as he rolled his eyes playfully at the nickname. You spent too much time with his teammates, but you had to admit they were onto something with the teasing name. There was just something entirely too adorable about calling your boyfriend Huggy, especially when all he typically did in response was blush.

“Anything for you.” The comment was delivered in a light tone, but you and Quinn both heard the honesty that rang through the three simple words. Another set of three simple words made its way to the forefront of your mind, begging to be said. But instead, you chuckled quietly, most of your attention on the mug he was setting on the coffee table in front of you.

“Cheesy.”

“Hey, you said it was a sappy romance night.” He defended, settling back into his seat by your side. You didn’t respond right away, too busy taking a sip of the cocoa Quinn made. You could tell he was waiting for your reaction expectantly, and you gave him a proud smile when you realized it tasted perfectly fine.

“I love it.” You assured him, and with that final bit of convincing both of your attentions returned to the movie. You had to admit, as much as you felt like a grinch before, Quinn’s efforts to make you feel more at home thousands of miles away from your family were warming your heart.

Though, you wanted to say something a little bit different than ‘I love it.’

The movie continued and by the time credits were rolling, Quinn was on his feet and ushering you to the door with a grin. You complied, only after pouting your lips for a few short kisses that he readily supplied.

“So what’s the surprise?” You questioned, following Quinn’s actions by tugging on your coat. He chuckled, not taking the bait and revealing what he had planned just yet.

“I’m not telling you, but I got the idea from Brock.” He confessed, opening your front door for you. You shot him a teasing look, meeting his lopsided grin and feeling your heart swell in your chest. Following him out of your apartment, you couldn’t help the next comment that slipped past your lips.

“You’re taking romance advice from Brock now? Was Jake not available?” You joked, referencing his teammates’ mess of love lives. Jake was in a friends with benefits situation with someone he was falling for fast and you were pretty sure Brock was still in love with his ex from his hometown. Quinn shook his head in mirth at the chirp directed at your mutual friends, and instead of answering, he slipped his hand into yours.

“Well, it was my idea. Brock just told me where to go.” Was all he said on the topic, watching you lock your apartment door behind you. He filled you in on the latest jokes from his practice earlier in the day as you made your way out to his car. He was in the middle of a story about Petey’s sports car and not handling Vancouver’s winters by the time he opened your door for you and it was only after ten minutes of driving did you think to question him about where you were going once more.

“Huggy, where are we going?” You sighed dramatically. Even in the dark, you could tell he rolled his eyes playfully at the nickname.

“Why do you have to call me that?” He teasingly groaned, reaching over the center console to thread his fingers through yours. Giving his hand a squeeze, you chuckled at his mock annoyance.

“That’s not an answer.” You said in a sing-song to get your point across. It was Quinn’s turn to chuckle, the sound bringing a grin to your face and causing your heart to pick up in pace.

“You know how you said you wanted to go look at lights?” Quinn started, immediately piquing your attention and earning an excited gasp from you. He was smiling, clearly proud of himself and you felt your eagerness grow.

“You’re taking me to drive around and look at Christmas lights?” You sat up in your seat, turning to face your boyfriend with a hopeful look. He chuckled at your reaction, lifting your hand to his lips to press a kiss to the back of it as a form of answer. You could have sworn you felt your heart grow two sizes at the action, the three words you had yet to say to him begging to roll off your tongue.

“I remember you said that you always drive around your hometown with your family to look at the lights, so I figured we could do the same thing.” Quinn said as if it was something nonchalant like the weather, and not one of the sweetest things you had ever heard.

That was the tipping point.

“I love you.” You blurted before you could stop yourself. You felt the car swerve slightly as Quinn worked through his initial shock at your confession. He glanced at you, then, a broad smile on his face that helped calm your nerves slightly.

“Yeah?” He questioned with unrestrained glee in his tone. You nodded, watching as he pulled over onto the side of the road. As soon as he had the car in park, he was leaning over to your side and grabbing your face with both of his hands to connect your lips in a kiss that settled you completely.

He didn’t need to say the words back immediately, you felt them in the way he was kissing you, the way he was taking you to drive around and look at lights. You felt it in the way he bought your favorite takeout and let you watch your sappy romance movies. The way he knew you needed a night with him to help get over your homesickness.

You loved him and he loved you just the same.

“I love you, too.” He told you just that the moment he broke the kiss, the words mumbled against your lips with a sureness and honesty that you felt to your core. You were in love with Quinn and he loved you back, and with that knowledge you felt all your previous sadness about missing home disappear, because as long as you were with him you could make any place feel like home.

“Thank you.” You told him as he pulled back out onto the road and continued towards the neighborhood full of houses decorated to the nines with lights and other Christmas ornaments. Quinn gave you a confused look, though he was still wearing his same dopey smile he had since the moment you confessed your feelings to him. “For doing all of this, I mean.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” He said simply, and now that you had already said it once, your second I love you fell past your lips with much more ease and a lot less nerves. He repeated his earlier action of pressing a kiss to the back of your hand, and you couldn’t help but admire his profile that was currently bathed in white, red, and green lights from the decorations outside on the houses. His smile turned a little mischievous, but you barely noticed, too caught up in your love for him. “You’re supposed to be looking at the lights, you know. Not me.”

“I can’t help it.” You replied with a chuckle, finally dragging attention from him and out the window. The sights were truly beautiful, but you were looking at everything with rose tinted glasses now that you had finally confessed and knew he felt the same.

It was funny, you thought, that you moved so far away from home and yet the lights on the decorated houses could have been the ones in your hometown and you wouldn’t have known the difference. You still missed your family, of course, but with one glance to the man driving you around, it all felt a little bit more like home.

Being in love made it all a bit easier.

#Quinn hughes #Quinn hughes imagine #quinnn hughes x reader #vancouver canucks #vancouver canucks imagine #vancouver canucks x reader #nhl imagine #hockey imagine #12 days fics

[irishseeeker]

Prompt: Day 1, Jealousy and all its cousins @katexanthonyweek​

Kate Bridgerton  was definitely not jealous.

(She was.)

rating: mature!

---

Kate tried really not to dislike people.

That did not mean she was always successful but she truly did try to give people the benefit of the doubt.

It became an exceedingly hard task when certain people made it incredibly difficult for Kate to like them. Especially before she knew them.

For example, the woman across the room who was standing far too close to her husband, openly flirting with him.

That was hard to like.

Kate was not a fool, she noticed how women behaved around Anthony. She could accept women would always be attracted to Anthony. He had been a notorious rake for a reason, after all. It made no difference to their marriage, Anthony was hers. Whenever he was in a room, the female gaze naturally drew to him.

She could not blame them. Her charming husband, who would kill her if he ever heard her say this, was beautiful.

He was incredibly handsome but there was so much more. There was no better feeling than being wrapped up in his broad shoulders and muscular arms. He had long, dark eyelashes every woman dreamed of. He had a strong jawline that she loved to kiss and trace with her fingertips when they lay in bed. He had a head full of dark hair that she loved to run her fingers through, unlike some men his age who were already bald.

Kate herself could barely keep her eyes off of him and she got to see him everyday, especially when no one else did. She got to see him when he first woke up in the morning, completely content with his tousled hair and half awake eyes. She had the privilege of seeing him with his shirt slightly unbuttoned, his cravat loose and best of all-with nothing on at all.

It was a challenge sometimes in public not to touch him, especially at balls and parties when he was dressed so well. She usually kept her hands occupied with a drink or an appetizer.

Anthony usually subtly touched her anyway, always improperly, to tease her or just because he wanted to.

(Even when she blushes and scolds him for it, they both know she loves it.)

However, she could not accept women who stepped a bit too far. From across the room, a woman was talking to Anthony. She was leaning towards him, taking subtle steps towards him and creating an improper distance between them. The woman was petite, blonde and her skin glowed in the dimmed lighting of the ballroom. She was beautiful.

She also had her hand on Anthony’s forearm.

Kate did not like this feeling. This bitter, bubbling anger in the pit of her chest as she watched Anthony across the room.

She was not jealous.

(She was.)

Technically, that was also Kate’s forearm. She had married that forearm just under a year ago.

They would be celebrating their one year anniversary, hosting their first ball as Viscount and Viscountess Bridgerton in Aubrey Hall next week. The ball would mark the end of the season, and Anthony and Kate were staying in Aubrey Hall for the rest of the summer before returning to London.

Kate was incredibly nervous.

She still felt at odds with her role as Viscountess. Her broken leg had put a stop to her social calendar after only a month of marriage, and she had not been able to carry out many of her roles as Viscountess.

It had taken a few months for her leg to heal. Kate could finally walk again, without the need for her stick or Anthony’s arm. Anthony had objected to their vigorous social calendar since the season had started but Kate was determined to attend as many balls as they could. Anthony, of course, was always by her side.

She was trying to do exactly as Violet Bridgerton would. Her days were now filled with parties, balls and social calls. Her first ball as Viscountess would be perfect.

It had to be.

She could not bear to think of the possibility of disappointing Violet and Anthony. There was a nagging feeling deep inside her, that society had been right to question why Anthony Bridgerton had chosen Kate Sharma to be his viscountess. The whispers that she was not fit for the role.

She was determined for those whispers not to be right.

Kate knew how lucky she was to have Anthony. Her marriage was wonderful, something she never would have dreamed of for herself. They loved each other to the point it was almost nauseating, as Eloise and Colin enjoyed to remind them, but they were also friends.

Anthony was her best friend.

Oh, she truly was nauseating.

The woman currently talking to her husband was making it exceedingly hard for Kate to concentrate on anything but them. Anthony had been talking to this mystery woman for just over three dances, when Kate had left him to dance with Benedict. This woman was now laughing at something Anthony said, her blonde curls bouncing in the air as her head tilted back.

What was so funny?

Kate loved her husband to death but he was not that funny.

“You cannot keep dancing with me to avoid dancing with other eligible ladies,” Kate teased Benedict, deciding to focus on her brother in law who was waltzing with her for the third time that evening.

“Can I not enjoy the company of my sister and not have any ulterior motives?” Benedict’s grin was wide across his face as he spun Kate around, narrowly avoiding her clumsy feet. She was a challenged dancer on her best days but when she was distracted by her husband across the room, it was every dancer for themself.

She glanced across the room again and now Anthony was laughing. Why was he laughing? She hoped it was a pitiful laugh.

“I thought I was doing you a favor by asking you to dance for a second and third time,” Benedict said, “I was distracting you from glancing over at my dear brother every few seconds.”

“I was not glancing. I was simply observing the room,” Kate said, but even Kate did not believe herself. She was blatantly staring at her husband. “Besides, we both know you are dancing with me to avoid dancing with one of the eligible ladies your mother is trying to marry you off to.”

“I believe three dances is all we have, so in a few moments I will have to venture back into the wild and attempt to avoid my mother for the rest of the evening,” He said, “However, I have been waiting for you to ask me who he is conversing with since the last dance. I thought you would give in five minutes ago”

“The thought had not crossed my mind.” Anthony had told her previously what a terrible liar she was. She previously thought it was because he knew her so well that she was incapable of lying to him, but she really was quite dreadful at it.

“Your face says otherwise.” Benedict glanced down at their feet before his teasing gaze returned to Kate’s face. “You have stepped on my feet at least four times while staring over there.”

A pang of guilt hit her. She was being rather rude. It was Benedict, so she knew he was not actually offended. Kate had gotten to know him quite well since her marriage. He joined them for dinner quite often, and spent a lot of time with Anthony at Whites or at their home. “You know, this is precisely why Gregory and Colin are my favourite brothers. They would never point out my flaws.”

Benedict chuckled. “Oh, how you wound me.”

Kate could not help herself. She had to know. “Who is that woman?”

Thankfully, Benedict chose not to tease and indulged her curiosity. “Her name is Eleanor Trent, previously Falmouth. My father and her, the Earl of Falmouth, attended Oxford together. They were friends until his death.”

Kate’s face fell. “She was a family friend?”

“Yes. She has brothers around the same age as Colin, Anthony and I. I know there were discussions of a betrothal, between Anthony and Eleanor. Nothing came of it, father died and Anthony would not discuss it further. He focused on the family and Oxford.” Benedict was not shy with the details, which Kate was equally grateful and upset about.

Kate’s stomach suddenly felt nauseous. Had something happened between them when they were young? Had Anthony courted her before his father’s death? Eleanor was the perfect candidate for a Viscountess. The daughter of an Earl, a family friend, a regular part of London society. “I imagine your mother was displeased.”

Kate loved her mother in law. Violet Bridgerton had been nothing but kind to Kate from the moment they met. She had been even kinder before their wedding, despite the circumstances that caused their nuptials.

They shared a lot in common, their love for gardening for one and met for tea multiple times a week, but Kate had always feared she was not the wife she had envisioned for her son. The same fear that had made itself known to Kate before her wedding remained inside of her: she feared Violet believed Kate had trapped her son.

The woman had witnessed her son’s face in Kate’s bosom, for heaven’s sake.

Benedict did not deny it. “Mother was furious when Anthony still refused three years later after he finished his studies. Eleanor later got married that season to a Baron and that was that. It took our mother a long time to learn that Anthony only does what Anthony wants to do.”

The music ceased and the dance ended, all the participants clapping before departing the dance floor. Benedict and Kate moved to the edge of the dancefloor, weaving through the crowds towards the refreshments table. Kate had been dancing for quite some time and she was quite thirsty. She wanted to find Anthony, but when she turned to look for him he had disappeared.

So had the woman.

Her heart sank in her chest.

“Brother, I believe that is enough dancing with my wife for one evening.”

Kate turned around to see her husband standing in front of her. She had regained her ability to breathe and realized how silly she was being. He smiled at her and she felt her insides melt.

It was ridiculous really, how this man’s smile always made her giddy.

She wanted to fall against his chest and bury her face in his neck, but instead she moved to his side and wrapped her arm around his. That was as affectionate as society would allow. Anthony covered his hand with hers, squeezing it briefly. It was a promise for later.

“Thank you,” She said, smiling as she took the glass in his hand and took a long sip, the dryness of her mouth disappearing. Her husband had developed a sense of always knowing what Kate needed. He had rarely left her side during her bed ridden months with her broken leg and they had spent a lot of time together.

Kate wondered if they could leave soon. She wanted the privacy to ask Anthony about that woman earlier, she could not remember him ever mentioning an Eleanor when recounting his childhood tales.

“Jealous, brother?” Benedict teased, grinning at Anthony as he took a sip of his wine. “I was always the better dancer. Kate simply wanted a better partner.”

Kate let out a long sigh, her eyes flicking between the two brothers. “Now, boys-”

“Kate took pity on you and indulged your attempts at hiding from our mother’s matchmaking endeavours.” Anthony narrowed his eyes at his brother, his competitive edge seeping out. Her dear husband did enjoy being the best at everything and disputed anyone who thought otherwise. “My waltz trounces your waltz any day.”

At the mention of his mother, Benedict scanned the room around them before visibly relaxing, his shoulders dropping. “It is a nuisance. Mother had cornered me at every ball so far this season, introducing me to potential marriage candidates. Colin had his wits about him to travel as far as Greece to get away from her.”

“You should consider looking for a wife,” Anthony said, scanning the crowded room for their mother. “I presume mother is hassling Eloise.”

“Not you too,” Benedict replied, glaring at his brother. “I am perfectly capable of finding my own wife, thank you. She simply is not here.”

Anthony, now bored of his brother, turned to his wife with a teasing smile. “How many times did you step on his toes?”

It was Kate’s turn to glare at her husband. “None, thank you very much.”

Benedict decided to join in on his brother’s teasing, glad for the change in topic. “Lying is a sin, Kate.”

“Oh, Violet!” Kate said, looking over Benedict’s shoulder.

Benedict jumped and darted to the side, causing Anthony and Kate to burst out laughing, muffling their laughter into their sleeves once other party goers began to stare.

Benedict glared at the pair of them once he realized his mother was nowhere to be seen. “Very funny. Your ball at Aubrey Hall is only next week. Maybe I shall take a page out of your book and compromise some young lady in the garden?”

That wiped the smug smirk right off Anthony’s face.

Kate had to disguise her snort with a cough into her glove.

Before he could retort, Anthony’s eyes froze at something across the room. “Who is that man Eloise is speaking to? Alone?”

Kate and Benedict’s heads turned in the direction Anthony was glaring in. The man’s head was all they could see, Eloise hands waving in the air as she spoke passionately about something.

“I will be right back,” Anthony squeezed her hand before he charged in the direction of his young sister.

“Benedict!” The distinct voice of Violet Bridgerton came from an unknown direction, but it was enough for Benedict to say a quick apology to Kate before disappearing into the crowd.

Kate found herself alone at the refreshment’s table.

“Lady Bridgerton?”

Kate finished swallowing the biscuit she had put in her mouth, trying not to choke before she turned around to see who had addressed her. Kate held in her gasp, eyes widening as she looked at the woman in front of her.

It was her.

She bowed, and Kate did the same. “It is such a pleasure to meet you, I hoped we would be introduced sooner. I have heard so much about you.”

Kate felt herself blush. This woman was assuming she knew who she was. “Apologies, I do not believe we have met.”

“Oh! Forgive me,” She said, shaking her head and laughing to herself. “I would have thought Anthony would have mentioned me. I have known Anthony and the Bridgertons my entire life. I am Lady Eleanor Trent. It is such a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Apparently, she was on a first name basis with her husband.

Kate smiled pleasantly, feeling slightly uncomfortable. “How lovely to meet you, Lady Trent.”

“I am very much looking forward to your ball in Aubrey Hall.”

Kate did not know she was invited. Violet had handled the guest list. “I am very happy to hear that.”

“I have not been there in quite some time. We used to visit Aubrey Hall a few times a year throughout my childhood. It was like a second home. I adore it. Have you been yet?”

Kate blinked slowly at her odd question. “Have I been to my home? Yes.

For some reason, Lady Trent was not phased by Kate’s blunt response whatsoever. “I have been more times than I could count. I have known the Bridgertons my entire life, as I am sure you know. That is quite funny, I have known your husband longer than you.”

Kate tried to unclench her jaw, breathing steadily through her nose. “I did not, actually.”

“Oh, how odd.” Her laugh was almost a shriek. “I was practically a Bridgerton until my marriage.”

Kate was not being dramatic, that was a peculiar thing to say. Benedict had not conveyed it that way at all.

Lady Trent continued to speak. Kate wished she wouldn't. “Was your father an Earl? A Duke? A Viscount?”

What did that have to do with anything? Kate's heart sped up at the mention of her father. “No. My father was a gentlemen. What does that have to do with anything?"

“Oh.” Lady Trent was not subtle with her disdain. “How interesting. Forgive my curiosity. One would think that must have made the transition quite difficult.”

Kate blinked. “Pardon?”

Lady Eleanor took a small sip of her wine, nodding sympathetically. “It must be difficult coming into such an important role as a Viscountess at such a young age. Especially when one is marrying a man like Anthony.”

This woman had no clue what type of man her husband was.

“I know this from experience, of course. I would be terrified if I came into the role of Viscountess with no experience,” Eleanor smiled sweetly at Kate, her voice dripping with everything but kindness. Her not so subtle dig made Kate’s blood boil.

“Oh!” She let out a cheerful laugh. “I am sure you are doing a fine job, Lady Bridgerton.”

Kate was nearly positive she had been insulted at least twice in this bizarre conversation.

If one thing was certain, it was that Kate did not like this woman at all.

She particularly did not like how she had been looking at her husband but her personality was just as unpleasant.

Kate was debating how significant the consequences would be if she launched her wine at Eleanor’s pink evening dress. She could stumble, blame it on her healed leg. It would be worth the earful she would get from Anthony, who still believed her leg had not fully healed and Kate should still be bedridden.

Kate didn’t cause scenes intentionally, she had been in the background for most of her life.

It definitely was not something a Viscountess would do, to cause such a scene, so she resisted.

Instead, she finished her glass in a few gulps. Kate replaced it with a glass from one of the server’s trays quite quickly as she composed herself.

“Thank you so much for your concern.” Kate matched the falseness of her tone, her smile stretched far too wide across her face to be genuine. “It has been a splendid year. I suppose, experience or not, some people are just born for certain roles.”

Eleanor appeared as if she was at a loss for words. She simply nodded, her smile wrinkling the skin on her forehead. “I could not agree more, Lady Bridgerton.”

“I must go find my husband. It was such a pleasure to meet you, Lady Trent. I look forward to seeing you at our ball next week.” Kate certainly was not. “Good evening, Lady Trent.”

Kate found Anthony in the crowd, he had also been searching for her. He took her arm in his, squeezing it softly. That was their signal it was time to go home. They kissed and bid their family goodnight, making their way towards the front of the house to get their carriage.

Anthony nodded at the valet and opened their carriage door, making way for Kate to step in before closing it behind them.

“I am exhausted,” She said, pulling a few pins out of her hair that had been digging into her scalp all evening. Relief flooded her head as she gently massaged her sensitive scalp. She couldn’t wait to take off her corset and go to bed.

Kate knew she would not be able to sleep until she spoke to Anthony about both of their conversations with Lady Trent. Her interaction with Lady Trent had left Kate feeling uneasy.

“Come here.” Anthony pulled her on top of him, her back resting on the carriage wall and her feet resting on the cushioned seat.

“There is a seat right beside you.” Kate laughed, wrapping her arms around his neck and lightly running her fingers through his hair.

“I prefer you on top of me.” Anthony moved his hands down to lightly squeeze her buttocks.

“I thought you liked being on top?” If he wanted to tease, Kate could tease him right back.

Anthony laughed, nuzzling her neck and leaving a trail of kisses from her collarbone all the way to her lips. “Right as always, Lady Bridgerton.”

“Did you have a good evening? I did not see you much,” She murmured against his lips. She could tell, with his fingers already creeping up her thigh, that talking was the last thing on her husband’s mind.

She would have to be quick if she wished to find out anything. The carriage ride home to Bridgeton House was less than fifteen minutes and he would not waste one of them before they had to stop.

They would not get caught in a carriage.

Again.

Once they arrived home, they wouldn’t do any talking once they got to their bed chamber.

She had enough willpower to focus on the task at hand and not let her husband completely distract her.

Right?

She needed to find out about his conversation with Eleanor.

His lips brushed hers before he spoke. “It was fine. A ball is a ball. I would have much preferred to stay home with you or at least sneak off to the gardens. Why did we not do that?”

Kate let out a laugh, her fingers tightening around his strands of hair as his lips moved down across her jaw. “How many gardens do you wish to compromise me in?”

“All of them,” Anthony said, his lips tickling the skin of her jaw as his laughter vibrated against her.

“Did you speak to anyone interesting?”

“Mm?” His teeth tugged at the top of her bodice, his tongue dipping behind the satin fabric.

“Anthony.” Her voice shook slightly as she spoke, his tongue was eliciting tingles throughout her chest and between her legs. “I said, did you speak to anyone interesting? Anyone you have not seen in a while?”

She would power through. “I met someone new, actually. Lady Eleanor.”

Anthony hummed in agreement against her skin, “Oh. Yes.”

“Benedict mentioned you have known her since you were children.”

“Indeed.” His face remained expressionless. He wasn’t listening to her. He was far too interested in pulling her dress down, which he did promptly.

Kate had lost the battle, and Anthony had won the war. He palmed her breasts in his hands, squeezing them softly as he pulled her in for a deep kiss. She could feel him hard against her thigh, and she reached down to palm him through the fabric of his breeches. His groan filled her ears and made her limbs weak.

“Oh,” She whispered, her lips parting as Anthony began to kiss his way down her neck, down her chest until his tongue grazed her nipple. He teased her momentarily before taking her fully in his mouth.

The carriage came to a halt and Kate hastily pulled up her dress, smoothening her dress and hair to fix her disheveled appearance. This was not their first indecent carriage ride. Anthony helped Kate out of the carriage, not letting go of her hand as they raced up the steps and entered the foyer, wasting no time running up the stairs.

If she did not keep up with Anthony, he would carry her up the flights of stairs to their bedroom.

Anthony dismissed her maid, fully intending on undressing his wife himself.

There wasn’t any talking for the rest of the night.

Kate’s morning had started off pleasant.

The following morning, Kate and Newton had joined Eloise and Penelope for a walk in the park. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining and the cool breeze was refreshing. They joined Kate at Bridgerton House afterwards for some lemonade, before leaving to return home.

She had called on Daphne for the remainder of the afternoon and on her way home, her carriage had stopped at Madame Delacroix’s modiste for one last fitting before the ball.

“Lady Bridgerton!”

Kate had finished her fittings and was waiting on one of her gown’s to be packaged. The last person she had wanted to see had walked into the modiste. “Lady Trent. How lovely to see you.”

She smiled widely at Kate, it was unnerving. “How are the ball preparations going?”

“Very well, thank you.” Kate had always found small talk with strangers quite uncomfortable. Kate could not find the words to describe how she was feeling in this current situation. She had not found the opportunity to discuss the evening with Anthony last night and he had left early this morning for Parliament. She would not see him until she arrived home.

“How nice,” She replied, nodding her head slowly. It reminded Kate of one of Hyacinth’s frightening dolls. “I always found the menu planning quite tedious.”

Kate nodded. “Indeed. A pleasant task, nonetheless.”

“Have you finalized your menu?” Lady Trent asked, examining the different materials in the display case.

Kate nodded. “For the ballroom, yes. We will have traditional English pastries, desserts. I would not want anyone to go hungry.”

Lady Trent continued to nod slowly, her lips in a flat line. “It is always a good idea to keep things simple. However, I do remember Anthony having a more adventurous palate.”

Kate would hardly call pastries, sandwiches, desserts and food displays she had planned simple. Kate had known this woman for a day and she had already had enough. “Why would my husband’s palate be any concern of yours, Lady Trent?”

That shut her up.

Kate squeezed the ribbons between her fingers, trying to stop her shaking hand. This woman was a beast.

“Have you ever been outside of England, Lady Bridgerton?” She asked, circling the ribbon’s display with disinterest.

“I have not,” Kate said through gritted teeth.

“What a pity.” She tutted, her curls bouncing in the air as she shook her head. “I suppose my traveling has given me a new outlook on life. It has opened me to a whole new world of cuisine and flavour. Traveling really exemplifies how dull the English customs and cuisine we are all accustomed to are.”

“I am sure it will be lovely. I must be on my way. Good day, Lady Bridgerton.” She bowed her head before turning around, swiftly exiting the modiste.

Kate was furious.

She sat incredibly still, not uttering a word during the carriage ride home until she reached Bridgerton House. She made her way towards the drawing room, not checking to see if Anthony was home in his office.

She stood in the middle of their drawing room, pacing in the same spot before she screamed.

There’s the slamming of a door and Anthony appears, Newton barking at his feet, looking incredibly alarmed. “Kate! Kate. Are you alright?”

Anthony charges towards her, holds her shoulders, scanning her entire body to assess any damage. “

“No. Yes, but no. It...it is that….that woman,” Kate spat out her words.

“What woman?” Anthony asked, frantically looking around the room.

“That woman. That, that-what was that word you taught me the other night?” Kate’s

“Bitch?” Anthony supplied, looking incredibly concerned for his wife.

“Yes!” Kate waved her arm in victory. “That bitch.”

Kate had sobbed in front of her husband before, from their declarations of love to the agony of her broken leg, but she had never expressed such fury before.

Anthony had not the slightest clue what was going on. “Kate, what the bloody hell are you talking about?”

Kate was pacing the room again. “Lady Eleanor Trent, of course. Firstly, she was standing far too close to you. Then she touched your forearm. That is highly improper-

“At the ball?” Anthony furrowed his eyebrows as he thought about it. “Wait.”

Anthony stared at her as if she had grown another head. “Kate Bridgerton. Is this all because you are jealous?”

Her husband looked positively gleeful.

“Anthony!” Kate nearly threw a pillow at him.

“I am sorry, I am sorry,” He pleaded, biting his lower lip to restrain his smile as he walked towards her with open arms. “Tell me what else happened.”

“She introduced herself and the conversation was strange. She was incredibly rude last night and this morning. She insulted me, my father, my

Anthony’s face darkened. “She insulted you? She insulted your father? That is unacceptable. I will make sure she is not welcome in London again. I will call on her and tell her exactly what I think of her-

Kate shook her head rapidly. “The last thing I want is you going near her. She has some strange infatuation with you. She referred to herself as practically a Bridgerton until she was married. Did you court her?”

“I barely knew her, Kate,” He said, looking bewildered at Kate’s words. “I had not seen her for nine years until last night. Our parents were mainly friends. Her family usually visited when I was at Eton. I most certainly did not court her, no.”

Kate did not reply, although she was relieved to hear Lady Trent’s words had been based on delusion. Kate felt incredibly overwhelmed, as if every emotion and fear she had been bottling up was crashing into her at once.

“Kate,” He stepped towards her cautiously, wary of the readily available pillows within her grasp. He sat on the couch, extending his hand towards her. “Come here, darling.”

She broke, practically falling into her husband’s arms who wrapped himself around her, pulling her onto his lap. Their foreheads and noses were touching as he spoke to her.

His lips brushed her cheek as he spoke softly. “Can you tell me what else is wrong? Is there something else going on?”

She can’t meet his eyes, instead she stares down at her hands in her lap. “I am terrified I am letting you down.”

“Kate, you could never let me down,” He says, affection flooding his voice as he tilts her chin up softly with his index finger to look at her face.

Kate took a deep breath. “You have had so much on your shoulders for so long. Since your father died. Between your family and your duties, you have always worked so hard. I want to do whatever I can to help you. I want to do this right. I want to make your life easier however I can and I want to be a good Viscountess. I am really trying. I just feel like I am failing. What if she was right? What if my lack of experience means I am not right for this role? I-I want you to be proud of me.”

He leans down to kiss her firmly and it’s the type of kiss that makes her toes curl. “Kate,” He murmured, drawing back but staying as close as possible. “You are the perfect Viscountess because you are my Viscountess. Everyone adores you. I was merely existing before I met you. After you, I began to live. You brought this light into my life that I didn’t think was possible. Everything I do is for you and everything I am is because of you. I am so proud of you. I am in awe of you. You are everything, Kate. Everything.”

“I love you,” She says, because that is all there is to say. She loved him, and he loved her, even when she acted slightly insane in their drawing room. That was all she needed. Anthony was all she needed.

She could do anything with Anthony by her side.

“I love you,” She whispered,

“Anthony,” She whispered a few minutes later, feeling a lot calmer. “I was jealous, you know.”

Anthony tried his best to not look too pleased, but he was slightly smug. “Jealousy is a difficult emotion to deal with.”

“Not all of us can shove people out of the way, you know.” If Anthony saw a man try to speak to Kate, he simply shoved them out of his way to his wife.

Anthony shrugged. “It is quite an effective method.”

“I did not like how she behaves around you,” Kate said, nibbling on her bottom lip. “When I saw her touching you and standing so close to you-I did not like how it made me feel.”

A panic stricken look flashes across his face.“Kate, I would never encourage it-”

“Sweetheart, I know,” She murmurs, cupping his cheeks in her hands as she kissed him softly. The thought had never crossed her mind and she immediately went to comfort him. “I know. I know you would never stray.”

She felt his sigh of relief. “You would kill me.”

“No I would not,” She lightly teased, pecking his lips. “That would be merciful. I would physically and mentally destroy you.”

“That will never happen,” Anthony murmured, brushing some loose strands of hair out of her eyes. “There will be no more joking about infidelity.”

Kate took a deep breath before she spoke again. “So you have noticed Eleanor flirting with you?”

Anthony cleared his throat, frowning slightly as his uncomfortableness set in. “I have noticed. She is not exactly subtle.”

“I would never have married her. She was a young girl with a crush, which I cannot fault her for. I am incredibly handsome.” Kate rolled her eyes at her husband’s cheeky smile. “However, she was never kind. These recent events have only re-confirmed that. I remember when I was seventeen, I had come home for Christmas. Her family had come to stay for a week. She was incredibly rude to our servants. She cared more about parties and appearances than family. She was so disinterested in my younger siblings to the point of being cruel. She was not the type of person I could marry.”

“Why would your mother want you to marry her?” Kate asked, resting her forehead against his.

“My mother was grieving.” Anthony shrugged his shoulders, running one of his hands soothingly down her back. “She thought she knew what was best for me. She has always chosen to see the parts of people she wanted to see. Not all the parts that were in front of her.”

“Well, I for one am very glad you did not marry her.” Teasing was always an effective way to snap Anthony out of one of his serious thoughts, and she was successful when he snorted.

“As am I.” His thumb was making small circles on her cheek.

“She insulted my choice of food for the ball.”

Anthony raised an eyebrow at his wife and stared at her. “What?”

“She called it simple English cuisine,” Kate said, still incredibly bitter. “Who in their right mind does not like scones and cucumber and chicken sandwiches?”

“Colin will be there and he will wolf them down, so there is no fear they will not be eaten.” Her brother in law was returning to England the day before their ball, conveniently missing most of the season much to his mother’s dismay.

“As someone who lives in your household, your menu choices have always been exceptional. I have also eaten many of those food choices, including off of you, and they were delicious.”

“Anthony!” She smacked his chest, laughing against his lips as he stole a kiss. He always knew how to make her feel better.

Anthony had always made her feel safe, she had trusted him even when she did not particularly like him. That stormy night in his library had changed everything. It was his nature that made people admire him and trust him. He took care of people. He had been misjudged by society, made out to be a cold hearted rake incapable of true affection.

It angered Kate beyond belief. Anthony had suffered more than most, losing his father and becoming the head of the family at such a young age. He had become a father to his siblings and a Viscount to his tenants and society. In a way, his life had begun and ended when his father died.

He was the first person she opened up to about her fear of storms and the reason she had been brave enough to face her fear.

He had become her anchor, and her his.

“Our ball is going to be wonderful, do you know why?” Anthony asked, grinning at his wife.

“Why?” She responded, smiling right back at him.

“Because it is ours,” He said simply. “It is celebrating one incredible year of marriage and many more to go.”

“Until forever.” Kate rested her forehead against his, feeling completely content.

Anthony nodded in agreement. “Forever it is.”

A week later, the Viscount and Viscountess' ball was a complete success.

The food was devoured.

Laugher could be heard all around the ballroom.

The Viscountess was praised for her efforts throughout the evening.

Lady Trent's absence was not missed.

Anthony had surprised Kate at the end of the evening with a show of fireworks.

It was perfect.

Kate and Anthony had their own private celebration that very night.

Edmund Bridgerton was born nine months later.

#katexanthonyweek #kateandanthonyweek21 #bridgerton #anthony bridgerton #kate sharma #kate sheffield #kateandanthonyweek #fanfiction #my fic #thank you this was fun! #kate x anthony

[your-dietician]

You're probably wrong about what they say

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/nba/youre-probably-wrong-about-what-they-say/

You're probably wrong about what they say

Chances are, if you care about the NBA’s television ratings, you care about what you think those ratings say, and what you think those ratings say is probably wrong, so the entire exercise is a waste of your time.

The NBA is a multi-billion-dollar corporation doing just fine, no matter how much hand-wringing you want to do about social commentary from its players or the absence of big media markets in the conference finals.

It used to be that every so often the subject of ratings would arise when two smaller-market teams met late in the NBA playoffs. Think the San Antonio Spurs facing the Detroit Pistons and Cleveland Cavaliers in 2003 and 2007, respectively, the two lowest Finals ratings ever recorded before last year’s bubble experiment.

A Twitter search of “Adam Silver” and “worst nightmare” provides countless examples of people presenting this year’s four conference finalists — the Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Clippers, Milwaukee Bucks and Atlanta Hawks — as bad for the business of basketball, absent any discussion of the quality of basketball, as if somehow fans should be more concerned with the winner of a popularity contest than the sport itself.

More recently, ratings have become a political conversation piece. Former President Donald Trump repeatedly drew a line between the NBA’s embrace of social justice movements and its ratings decline in 2020, without providing context created by the coronavirus. Games were often played midday, midsummer and eventually opposite the return of every other major sport in September and October, all while viewers were much more attuned to news of the pandemic and a presidential election that could further impact it.

“People are tired of watching the highly political NBA. Basketball ratings are WAY down, and they won’t be coming back,” Trump tweeted on Sept. 1, around the same time he suggested three days of player-led protests of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, were “going to destroy basketball.”

Story continues

Donald Trump was an NBA consumer long before he publicly turned on the league. (Nick Laham/Getty Images)

The politicization of the NBA’s TV ratings

Trump is not unlike so many who draw grand conclusions from their own personal experiences. A month earlier, he claimed to have turned his television off once teams knelt together during the national anthem, so everyone else who was not watching the NBA this past August must have done so for similar reasons.

It is a narrative ripe with controversy that agenda-driven media outlets can leverage to their own advantage. They had plenty of experience with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose protest against social injustice elicited a response that birthed the politicization of television ratings. Instead of Kaepernick’s quest for equality being one possible reason viewers turned off the NFL in 2016 and 2017, it was painted without context as the reason, only for ratings to recover and fall again during the pandemic.

Naturally, Outkick the Coverage founder Clay Travis hosted Trump on his Fox Sports Radio Show in August 2020, giving the former president a wide berth to conclude without question that “very nasty” and “very dumb” players protesting injustice, along with the NBA’s business relationship with China — a pair of topics Travis’ Outkick website have regularly mined for readership — primarily caused a ratings decline.

Just last month, Outkick’s Bobby Burack wrote, “Each year that LeBron James waves a middle finger at half the country, viewers respond by turning the channel at a rate higher than the previous year,” citing the NBA’s 25% ratings decrease over the past two years for regular-season games across ABC, ESPN and TNT, and singling out the 2021 Preakness as evidence that “other sports have not suffered nearly as much.”

Only, none of this has proven true. In fact, just the opposite. James and his Los Angeles Lakers’ play-in win over the Golden State Warriors drew the league’s highest rating since 2019. The NBA’s national TV ratings for the first round of the playoffs were up nearly 50% from last year’s equivalent and in line with 2019 data.

People came back, and basketball was not destroyed. Far from it.

“If there was any question whether last year’s decline was primarily due to the bubble, the fan-less environment, the months-long delay, if there was any question as to whether or not that was true, it’s been answered by the fact that the ratings for a postseason where Steph Curry didn’t make it to the playoffs and LeBron didn’t make it out of the first round are up dramatically from last year, just by default,” Sports Media Watch’s Jon Lewis, an expert on the subject, told Yahoo Sports. “It’s obvious that 99% of why the ratings were so bad was because of the circumstances. Now, were there also people who tuned out because of seeing ‘Black Lives Matter’ on the court? Maybe, but I can tell you it’s painfully obvious that last year’s results were primarily because of being in the circumstances that the league found itself late last summer.”

Consequences of a watered-down regular season

There are equally obvious answers for why the NBA’s ratings suffered another decline in the regular season. A shortened offseason and condensed schedule led to increases in blowouts and either injuries or rest to prevent injuries, not to mention COVID-related interruptions. A watered-down product in empty arenas was inevitable, and still the NBA recovered through two rounds of a playoffs plagued by superstar absences.

The return of fans alone has improved the viewing experience, and two Game 7s in the Eastern Conference semifinals helped counterbalance mitigating factors. Six of the 10 NBA All-Star starters did not make it to the end of the second round, a seventh was swept, and Joel Embiid played on a partially torn meniscus.

Only Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kevin Durant were still healthy and playing, and their Bucks and Brooklyn Nets treated the NBA to a 6.9 rating that matched the percentage of TV homes tuned into Kawhi Leonard’s iconic buzzer-beater for the Toronto Raptors in Game 7 of the 2019 conference semis. Sunday’s Game 7 between the Hawks and Philadelphia 76ers was the NBA’s second-highest-rated contest of these playoffs.

Giannis Antetokounmpo, Deandre Ayton and Devin Booker are among a generation of bright young NBA stars. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Early investment in a post-LeBron future

The NBA is not naive to the fact that Lakers-Nets would have been a huge ratings draw, but the rise of a new generation of stars, including Devin Booker and Trae Young, while initially a potential ratings hit, could also serve as a considerable investment in the future of the league. Young’s Hawks, in particular, open the door to the league’s seventh-largest media market, one that has been largely dormant for its existence. The Golden State Warriors were not the ratings darling they became until Curry built equity with the audience.

Lewis cites the Houston Rockets, who eventually became enough of a draw after two consecutive title runs that they bounced Michael Jordan’s eventual 72-win Chicago Bulls from the 1995 Christmas Day slate. The NBA could theoretically leverage a handful of stars into driving ratings that two uber-popular stars once did.

Outside of the most unconventional seasons in the league’s history, the ebbs of NBA ratings much more closely followed a decline in overall TV viewership, and that does not account for the unconventionality of this season. Millions did not cut cords because “Love Us” was stitched onto the backs of players’ jerseys.

Quality basketball draws an audience, especially if you get seven games of it. The Suns and Bucks — favorites to meet in the Finals — might be the NBA’s 11th- and 24th-largest media markets, but a competitive series from Booker and Antetokounmpo would still generate momentum, for various reasons, entering next season’s presumed return to normal, laying the groundwork for the future of the business.

The NBA’s TV market share just hit an all-time high

Even if you want to skew your read of declining ratings in the most negative light possible for the NBA, do we have bad news for you. Think of linear TV consumption as a pie chart, and while the overall size of the pie has been shrinking, the NBA’s share of that pie will only continue to grow. Live coverage is increasingly becoming the primary reason to retain traditional TV, so sports and news are keeping cable networks afloat.

The viewership share for this year’s playoffs — the percentage of people with TVs in use that are watching the NBA — is at its highest since the the league first began logging that data during the 2002-03 season. The NBA also happens to feature the youngest audience across major sports, one advertisers covet. Even as ratings declined during the pandemic, the NBA secured business partnerships with at least nine major brands, including Hotels.com, CarMax, Clorox, Michelob Ultra, Oculus from Facebook and Microsoft.

“The NBA, as far as the demographics, that’s where everything matters,” said Lewis. “Phil Mickelson won the PGA Championship and comfortably beat Lakers-Suns Game 1 in total viewership, but guess what? That was only in 50+. That was Phil’s demo. In every other demographic, including the ones advertisers care about most, [ages] 18-49 and 18-34, the NBA game won. The demographics are the story here. If demographics didn’t matter, then Harry’s Law would still be on with Kathy Bates. The fact is, people in advertising are looking for a specific demo, and the NBA does well in demos that advertisers care about.”

Expectations are the NBA’s next media rights deal will increase

Not only are networks increasingly desperate to retain their share of this pie, tech companies want a piece of it. Take the NHL, for example, which doubled its annual TV revenue from The Walt Disney Company with a first-of-its-kind deal signed in March that included 75 games broadcast solely on its ESPN+ over-the-top service. For perspective, the NBA’s TNT crew broadcast only 64 games during this year’s regular season.

That is why you have seen sourced reporting that anticipates a massive increase when the NBA’s current media rights deal expires in 2025, like the one from CNBC’s Jabari Young in March that set expectations at $75 billion — more than triple the existing package — even amid another regular-season ratings decline.

“The value is always rising. You have to think about what that means. What the ratings decline means isn’t, ‘Oh, my goodness, they’re all going to go broke.’ That’s absurd,” added Lewis. “What the ratings decline means is you’re going to have to make some sacrifices to get as much money as you want to get. Those sacrifices aren’t going to be paying players less. They’re probably going to have to put some games on Peacock or ESPN+ or one of these platforms that networks are willing to overpay to get programming for.”

Ratings are only a fraction of the NBA’s audience

Armchair TV ratings experts often cast aside the nuances of an inherently flawed metric that is increasingly under fire (i.e., the exclusion of regional network simulcasts, and Nielsen only began including out-of-home viewership — an expected double-digit numbers increase — in October, when sports bars were mired in a pandemic), they also ignore the fact that TV ratings account for a fraction of the NBA’s media consumption. 

The NBA reaches a billion people in more than 215 countries across the world, and roughly three quarters of its viewers are outside the U.S., boosted by the popularity of Antetokounmpo, Embiid, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, four of the top six vote-getters in the MVP race. Global viewers on League Pass for the playoffs are up 18% from last year and 24% from 2019, per the NBA. None of them are included in Nielsen ratings.

Neither is the majority of the NBA’s 56 million Instagram followers, an audience that generated 6.55 billion views and counts about twice the following of the NFL, NHL and MLB combined. The league is approaching 9 billion lifetime views on YouTube — again, almost as many as the three other major American sports leagues combined. Nearly 70% of the NBA’s social media followers are outside the U.S.

Nielsen is expected to unveil a metric that better accounts for viewership across platforms in the coming years. Until then and before you consider caring about TV ratings, remember the NBA is garnering a greater share of the audience advertisers covet, and that does not include its massive global fan base — another demographic that tends to consume content in non-traditional ways. The NBA’s brand is beyond healthy.

– – – – – – –

Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach

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[qveenpoppy]

batb tag game

tagged by the lovely @daysinthesuns :)

Rules: If you get tagged, answer the following questions. You don’t even have to be tagged to participate! As long as you’re part of the BATB/Disney fandom and want to do this, go ahead. You may choose to add a few questions of your own.· After you have answered all of the questions, tag 5 of your favorite blogs who have not done the Questions Tag yet. (Remember to include the rules and questions in case they don’t know how to do this.)· That’s literally all that there is to it! Have fun! 

1) First Disney movie? i think it was piglet’s big movie, lol. i believe that’s the first movie i ever watched (at home, of course - i was, like, three and terrified of movie theaters).

2) Favorite Disney movie (besides BATB or its remake)? i literally cannot say just one so i’m gonna make a short list:

mulan

tangled

tarzan

cinderella (2015)

saving mr. banks

the incredibles

meet the robinsons

freaky friday (2003)

the parent trap (1998)

3) Favorite Disney princess (besides Princess Belle)? rapunzel! she’s adorable and basically human sunshine and i love her. (live-action!cinderella is a favorite of mine too, if i’m being honest - lily james is so underrated)

4) Favorite non-princess Disney movie? for animation, probably the incredibles. i can’t tell you the amount of times i’ve watched it, i’ve lost count at this point. but live-action wise, saving mr. banks did blow me a way - and i’m not including it in this post bc i’m starting to crush on colin farrell. it really was an excellent movie, taught me quite a lot about the making of mary poppins, and all of the acting performances were superb - everyone deserves an oscar for that film, honestly. (especially emma thompson! that movie introduced me to her and made me love her as both an actress and person :) )

5) Non-Disney related fandom? tbh so many things i enjoy have god awful fandoms, so the one i’ll go with is jersey boys. the fandom’s quite small, but we’re all good friends so it’s fun. if you like the musical/film, talk to me @richardhblakes ;)

6) Favorite Disney song? again, so so many to choose from. therefore, another list!

“belle” from beauty and the beast

“i’ll make a man out of you” from mulan

“life is a highway” from cars (does that count? lol)

“supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from mary poppins

“i won’t say i’m in love” from hercules

“mother knows best (reprise)” from tangled

“part of your world” from the little mermaid

if disney on broadway songs count...

“if i can’t love her” from beauty and the beast

“different” from tarzan

“carrying the banner”/“santa fe”/“the world will know” from newsies

i’m probably forgetting a bunch...

7) Favorite BATB song. Remake or original. original: “belle”, “beauty and the beast”. remake: “evermore”, “gaston”, “the mob song”, and “days in the sun”. (“days in the sun” grew on me a lot more the second time i watched the film, it’s so beautiful and underrated.)

(also “gaston” and “the mob song” are givens bc luke evan’s singing voice simultaneously blows me away and makes me melt, god, it’s not fair.)

8) Favorite non-Disney movie? how to train your dragon, probably. frequency, minority report, and jersey boys are all close seconds.

9) One random fact about you: oh god i always think of better facts when no one asks for them, um... 

okay, so, story time: my parents have wanted to see jersey boys on broadway since 2010 for my dad’s birthday, but i was 10 and we couldn’t go bc of all the language. finally, last spring my mom got tickets for the four of us to go, and while i willingly went, i was not interested at all. i was familiar with some four seasons songs like “december 1963″ but i had no interest in the show bc i’ve never really been a fan of music that came out before the 80s/90s (with the beatles as an exception). fast forward to me actually seeing the show, and i fell in love. i grew obsessed with the whole show, the music, and even the cast. then, come the fall, we got the news that the show would be closing in january of 2017. my mom knew how much i loved the show so she got tickets for the two of us to go back and see the show again. and it just so happened that, at the time, the cast now included drew seeley and mark ballas. seeing the show again made me love it even more, and i got to meet the cast afterwards - including drew and mark! and, as you hopefully know, i’ve loved mark for years now, watching him on dwts, so meeting him meant a lot to me.

aaaand that’s also how i fell in love with broadway in general. now i’m hoping to see a bunch of different musicals, but don’t have the money to see them all, so. *sighs*

10) what’s your favorite moment from the BATB 2017 live-action and why? the transformation scene was the best scene, if i have to be honest. (with the objects too!!! plumette’s transformation had me gasping, she is so stunning.) but i did adore “gaston” as a performance, and since i’m being honest, garderobe dressing stanley up in a pink dress with his face all done up while he smiles and she tells him to be free? iconic.

11) which character in BATB 2017 do you relate to the most? probably belle, but mostly because of her love of reading. i don’t read as often as i used to, but when i do pick up a good book, it’s hard for me to put it down. (or forget about it, for that matter. i can still reiterate lines from the giver and unwind, which i read 3/4 years ago - so yeah, you can say i have quite a love for books.)

otherwise, i guess i can kind of relate to lefou? not bc of the gay thing, i’m not pining for anyone of the same sex in real life, but bc he’s never, you know, a leader. he follows gaston around bc he doesn’t have the courage to take control of any situation (and bc he’s intimidated by gaston, but that’s not relevant here). in my life, i’m way more a follower than a leader too. i’m never one to be bossy and tell others what to do, i just follow instructions. (though i’m not as blind to situations as the villagers are - if someone were doing something wrong and wanted me to follow, i may not outright protest, but i’d definitely question it.)

12) and finally who are you tagging? if you haven’t already done it - @clingylefou, @gafou, @fanboyofallthingsfandom, @fonduelefou, @taylorklaine

#tag game

[michaelfallcon]

The Very Best Espresso Tech From HOST 2019

HOST, perhaps the world’s leading trade fair for catering and hospitality, has come to and gone again for another season. The festival—roughly the coffee industry’s equivalent to E3 Expo or ComplexCon—occurs every two years on the outskirts of Milan, drawing 200,000 attendees from 171 countries across a five day event. Coffee and tea exhibitors at Host occupy four of the 17,000-square-meter pavilions (nearly 1/3 of the whole show), and while the majority of them are large brands operating only in Europe, the speciality coffee niche is definitely growing.

International roasters, baristas, importers, and coffee lovers: they all want to be there. If you are a global coffee technology company with new products to launch, HOST is the place to be and be seen.

I reported on HOST 2019 for Sprudge live from showfloor, and I’m still buzzing from all the caffeine I consumed, the people I met, and all the cool new machines I saw. Here’s some of the best new gear from the show; expect to see this tech heading to market over the next year, and coming soon to a coffee expo near you, but for now the first look is always at HOST.

DALLA CORTE

Cole Torode of Rosso Coffee Roasters.

My journey at Host Milan 2019 started with Dalla Corte, one of Italy’s leading brands of espresso machines, whose factory is situated just outside Milan.

Over the last two years since I met them at Host 2017, Dalla Corte has invested heavily in research, innovation, and technology with a focus on the speciality coffee market. The result is ZERO, a coffee machine equipped with what the brand calls their best technology yet.

Dalla Corte Zero will exist in different versions: the Classic (a basic model without flow profiling), the Barista (manual flow control and digitally fixed flow), and the Plus (manual and digital flow profiling). The machine features thermic stability of the brewing units, an independent multi boiler system (now with 0.7l group), integrated weighing system, cool touch steam wand, and optional 58mm filter.

The design was curated by Italian studio EMO after more than 1,000 hours of research and development. The result is Dalla Corte’s most beautiful machine yet. Production of the Zero will start in September 2020.

Learn more via the official Dalla Corte Instagram. 

LA MARZOCCO

La Marzocco, founded in Florence in 1927, is one of the world’s leaders in espresso machine innovation. There’s always a lot expectation about what they will present at Host. In 2017 it was all about one machine—the LEVA—but at this edition La Marzocco took it up a notch with multiple machine drops and a whole range of forthcoming products showcased in their Innovation Gallery.

First, LM is getting big into the grinder game. The SWIFT MINI (already in production) is a new grinder designed for home and compatible with all La Marzocco Home machines.  It’s a simple-to-use, accurate and efficient on-demand grinder that measures, grinds, and tamps with the push of a single button, and it looks really attractive paired with the Linea Mini. On the other end of the scale is the SWAN: a prototype for a professional grinder with design inspired by Italian wedge sports cars of the 1970s. SWAN is designed and constructed at the LM Factory in Scarperia, just like the rest of the product line, and it has undeniable swagger. It’s not quite out yet but will hit markets at the end of 2020—look for more in-depth coverage on Sprudge later this year.

Honestly these two grinders would have made for a solid HOST line-up, but La Marzocco went above and beyond this season by presenting early version of two new espresso machines: the next generation “GB5”, updated similarly to the 2015 Linea PB update; and the newly rethought and updated STRADA, a model that helped push the boundaries of espresso technology when it was first released at the start of the decade.

The brand also debuted the AMS, which stands for “Automatic Milk Steamer” but is being affectionately referred to as “Wally” by LM staff. It sparked curiosity among baristas on the show floor—some folks really loved it, others wondered “what is the point of it?” To me, the AMS falls into the “something we don’t really need it but it’s cool” category for most professional baristas, though for high end restaurants or other settings looking to up their foam game, the application is obvious.

Last but not least, La Marzocco presented the one-group versions of the LEVA and the MODBAR, both already available to order, and debuted La Marzocco Home IoT, a new app for Linea Mini users that “enhances communication, coffee culture, guidance, and preventive maintenance” as per the company.

Truly it was an impressive display at HOST 2019 from La Marzocco. Expect more reporting across this range of projects in the coming months.

CARIMALI

Carimali sure know how to get everyone’s attention. The 100-year-old company from Bergamo drew big time buzz at this year’s HOST by presenting an innovative “boilerless” espresso machine—though they insist it’s not a machine yet, but rather a “technology”. What you see is a small module with a simple display showing: automated group flushing, temperature, and start and stop for brewing.

How does it work? The technology is based on the induction heating system, as per the manufacturer. The “black box” (or “Steve” as it’s called internally in the Carimali team) heats the water in a small pipe using an electro magnetic field. It heats only the right amount of water you need, and does so very quickly: within a matter of a seconds it’s already brewing at the temperature you set. It runs on a battery, so it’s portable and uses “90% less energy to produce an espresso than a traditional machine”, as per the Carimali team’s statements.

2018 World Barista Champion Agnieszka Rojewska.

“You don’t get to disrupt coffee very often” says the influential mechanical designer Gregory Scace, and Carimali are hoping to do just that. The next challenge is to integrate this technology with usability, for which Agnieszka Rojewska (2018 World Barista Champion) has officially joined the Carimali team, and Colin Harmon (founder of Dublin’s 3FE) is consulting to help develop a new barista interface.

It all sounds and looks great so far—this was one of the most talked about pieces of tech at the show—but some big questions still remain, including launch date and price. Carimali estimates a launch of one or more boilerless products sometime in the next 18 months; watch Sprudge for continuing coverage.

SANREMO

Sanremo earned a lot of interest at HOST 2017 with their REVO grinder launch, setting high expectations for this year’s edition. They didn’t disappoint with their striking display of customized Café Racer machines and with their latest creation: BRAVE. The new spearhead of their range, the Brave coffee machine combines the best technological developments of the Opera and Café Racer. In the core of Brave is an innovative thermo-hydraulic and electronic technology system to enable the best possible extraction in all conditions of use, as per the company.  It can work on auto as well as manual setting, allowing baristas to control a wide range of possible extraction parameters.

There’s a brew selector with five extraction profiles (four in espresso, one in brewing filter coffee), a touch display can be used to set the extraction profiles, and the three single-group control displays to show real-time delivery. Finally, the Brave machine is integrated with Sanremo IoT system to control all the machine’s settings remotely. In the words of Danili Llopis, Sanremo’s R&D Manager, the Brave is a “fascinating and innovative machine,” but we’ll have to wait until after Spring 2020 to see it in action.

Expect to see it on the road at upcoming international coffee expos, and watch for more cool customization projects as well from San Remo.

MAHLKÖNIG

Believe the hype. Mahlkönig’s E65s GbW and E80 Supreme grinders were among the hottest product launches at Host Milan 2019, and for good reason. Baristas love these machines, stylish workhorses that can be found on many of the finest coffee bars in the world.

The E65S GBW (a 65mm diameter steel burrs grinder) features the same technology of the existing E65S, which the addition of GbW: Grind by Weight technology. Mahlkönig first debuted “Grind By Weight” technology for real-time scale controlled dosing in a commercial grinder at Host Milan 2015.

One of the coolest things about the E65s GbW the high-resolution full color display with a wide viewing range, and the patented “disc distance detector” (DDD) which enables accurate settings of the degree of fineness.

Alongisde the E65s GbW, Mahlkönig presented a new 80mm grinder: E80 Supreme. It’s suitable for busy coffee bars as it can cope with high volumes of coffee daily. The motor manages the active temperature of the machine to ensure high-speed performance. Both new Mahlkönig grinders are easier to use than previous models and have very cool LED illuminated spouts. Expect them to see them everywhere come next year.

SLAYER

Slayer is a newcomer in the world of professional espresso machine manufacturing, certainly compared to some of the oldest Italian companies with 90-100 years of history. Yet, in a very short time (the company was founded in Seattle in 2007) they’ve established themselves as a successful and much loved-brand. Their machines can be seen used in coffee bars all around the world, and their profile expanded further following Gruppo Cimbaili’s majority stake acquisition in 2017.

This was Slayer’s very first exhibition at HOST, and their stand was appropriately packed full of people every day thanks to a range of cool limited edition machines on display. There’s just something about Slayer’s design profile that takes beautifully to customization. That all-pink number!

The biggest news from Slayer is the Steam LPx machine: the same core technology of the Steam LP, with improvements for the workflow of baristas, and an upgraded the design. Featuring super polished chrome wings, wood-like brown Duratex actuators and handles and a choice of four color panel options.

Key attributes of the LPx are weight-based volumetric outputs, time-based, regulated pre-infusion, two programmable doses per grouphead, push button to activate full manual versus volumetric mode, an easy to use interface, and a digital control board with backflush, timers, and access to all parameters. The machine showed out great at HOST, marking an impressive debut at the show for the Seattle brand.

RANCILIO

Rancilio Group was back at HOST this year, although they didn’t have to travel far—their factory is in Parabiago, just outside of Milan. In 2017 the brand offered a range of new releases, including the Classe 20 coffee machine, V50 grinder Egro Next Touch Coffee machine (designed for drip coffee), and Silvia Pro home espresso machine.

For the speciality coffee sector, the most interesting product is the V50. It’s an on-demand grinder designed by Rancilio with a horizontal motor and 50 mm stainless steel vertical burrs. It’s suitable for small grinding cycles (0.5 kg coffee bean hopper capacity) as part of a set of grinders in specialty coffee shops or at home and in the office. Baristas can switch between two different operation modes: the automatic one to dispense the pre-set dose or the manual one to personalize delivery time by holding the dose-adjustment knob down. Micrometric grinding regulation and up to 64 grinding sizes to prepare any coffee, from espresso to French press coffee. With all its technology concentrated in just 150 mm of width and 495 mm of height, the V50 is designed to fit right beside the RS1.

ASTORIA

If you like Astoria Storm, then you will love the new STORM Profilo. The latest addition to the family combines all the features of Storm FRC, while also allowing greater space for manual control. A new analogue console, reminiscent of audio mixers used by DJs, allows the extraction curve to be adjusted, toggling between blooming, speed up, pressure, body dose percentage, and pressure end. Storm Profile is also equipped with the SB (Steam Boost) option, which increases steam production by activating the heating units even during high-volume espresso making (alternating power between service and coffee heating units).

The coffee machine makers from Susegana, Italy, have put a lot of effort on reducing the energy consumption by creating a range of low environmental impact coffee machines: the Green Line series. The Storm Profilo distributes power only where and when needed, with a software that automatically puts one or more groups into standby mode when the workload decreases.

Giulia Mule is a Sprudge.com contributor based in London. Read more Giulia Mule on Sprudge. 

The post The Very Best Espresso Tech From HOST 2019 appeared first on Sprudge.

The Very Best Espresso Tech From HOST 2019 published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

[shebreathesslowly]

The Very Best Espresso Tech From HOST 2019

HOST, perhaps the world’s leading trade fair for catering and hospitality, has come to and gone again for another season. The festival—roughly the coffee industry’s equivalent to E3 Expo or ComplexCon—occurs every two years on the outskirts of Milan, drawing 200,000 attendees from 171 countries across a five day event. Coffee and tea exhibitors at Host occupy four of the 17,000-square-meter pavilions (nearly 1/3 of the whole show), and while the majority of them are large brands operating only in Europe, the speciality coffee niche is definitely growing.

International roasters, baristas, importers, and coffee lovers: they all want to be there. If you are a global coffee technology company with new products to launch, HOST is the place to be and be seen.

I reported on HOST 2019 for Sprudge live from showfloor, and I’m still buzzing from all the caffeine I consumed, the people I met, and all the cool new machines I saw. Here’s some of the best new gear from the show; expect to see this tech heading to market over the next year, and coming soon to a coffee expo near you, but for now the first look is always at HOST.

DALLA CORTE

Cole Torode of Rosso Coffee Roasters.

My journey at Host Milan 2019 started with Dalla Corte, one of Italy’s leading brands of espresso machines, whose factory is situated just outside Milan.

Over the last two years since I met them at Host 2017, Dalla Corte has invested heavily in research, innovation, and technology with a focus on the speciality coffee market. The result is ZERO, a coffee machine equipped with what the brand calls their best technology yet.

Dalla Corte Zero will exist in different versions: the Classic (a basic model without flow profiling), the Barista (manual flow control and digitally fixed flow), and the Plus (manual and digital flow profiling). The machine features thermic stability of the brewing units, an independent multi boiler system (now with 0.7l group), integrated weighing system, cool touch steam wand, and optional 58mm filter.

The design was curated by Italian studio EMO after more than 1,000 hours of research and development. The result is Dalla Corte’s most beautiful machine yet. Production of the Zero will start in September 2020.

Learn more via the official Dalla Corte Instagram. 

LA MARZOCCO

La Marzocco, founded in Florence in 1927, is one of the world’s leaders in espresso machine innovation. There’s always a lot expectation about what they will present at Host. In 2017 it was all about one machine—the LEVA—but at this edition La Marzocco took it up a notch with multiple machine drops and a whole range of forthcoming products showcased in their Innovation Gallery.

First, LM is getting big into the grinder game. The SWIFT MINI (already in production) is a new grinder designed for home and compatible with all La Marzocco Home machines.  It’s a simple-to-use, accurate and efficient on-demand grinder that measures, grinds, and tamps with the push of a single button, and it looks really attractive paired with the Linea Mini. On the other end of the scale is the SWAN: a prototype for a professional grinder with design inspired by Italian wedge sports cars of the 1970s. SWAN is designed and constructed at the LM Factory in Scarperia, just like the rest of the product line, and it has undeniable swagger. It’s not quite out yet but will hit markets at the end of 2020—look for more in-depth coverage on Sprudge later this year.

Honestly these two grinders would have made for a solid HOST line-up, but La Marzocco went above and beyond this season by presenting early version of two new espresso machines: the next generation “GB5”, updated similarly to the 2015 Linea PB update; and the newly rethought and updated STRADA, a model that helped push the boundaries of espresso technology when it was first released at the start of the decade.

The brand also debuted the AMS, which stands for “Automatic Milk Steamer” but is being affectionately referred to as “Wally” by LM staff. It sparked curiosity among baristas on the show floor—some folks really loved it, others wondered “what is the point of it?” To me, the AMS falls into the “something we don’t really need it but it’s cool” category for most professional baristas, though for high end restaurants or other settings looking to up their foam game, the application is obvious.

Last but not least, La Marzocco presented the one-group versions of the LEVA and the MODBAR, both already available to order, and debuted La Marzocco Home IoT, a new app for Linea Mini users that “enhances communication, coffee culture, guidance, and preventive maintenance” as per the company.

Truly it was an impressive display at HOST 2019 from La Marzocco. Expect more reporting across this range of projects in the coming months.

CARIMALI

Carimali sure know how to get everyone’s attention. The 100-year-old company from Bergamo drew big time buzz at this year’s HOST by presenting an innovative “boilerless” espresso machine—though they insist it’s not a machine yet, but rather a “technology”. What you see is a small module with a simple display showing: automated group flushing, temperature, and start and stop for brewing.

How does it work? The technology is based on the induction heating system, as per the manufacturer. The “black box” (or “Steve” as it’s called internally in the Carimali team) heats the water in a small pipe using an electro magnetic field. It heats only the right amount of water you need, and does so very quickly: within a matter of a seconds it’s already brewing at the temperature you set. It runs on a battery, so it’s portable and uses “90% less energy to produce an espresso than a traditional machine”, as per the Carimali team’s statements.

2018 World Barista Champion Agnieszka Rojewska.

“You don’t get to disrupt coffee very often” says the influential mechanical designer Gregory Scace, and Carimali are hoping to do just that. The next challenge is to integrate this technology with usability, for which Agnieszka Rojewska (2018 World Barista Champion) has officially joined the Carimali team, and Colin Harmon (founder of Dublin’s 3FE) is consulting to help develop a new barista interface.

It all sounds and looks great so far—this was one of the most talked about pieces of tech at the show—but some big questions still remain, including launch date and price. Carimali estimates a launch of one or more boilerless products sometime in the next 18 months; watch Sprudge for continuing coverage.

SANREMO

Sanremo earned a lot of interest at HOST 2017 with their REVO grinder launch, setting high expectations for this year’s edition. They didn’t disappoint with their striking display of customized Café Racer machines and with their latest creation: BRAVE. The new spearhead of their range, the Brave coffee machine combines the best technological developments of the Opera and Café Racer. In the core of Brave is an innovative thermo-hydraulic and electronic technology system to enable the best possible extraction in all conditions of use, as per the company.  It can work on auto as well as manual setting, allowing baristas to control a wide range of possible extraction parameters.

There’s a brew selector with five extraction profiles (four in espresso, one in brewing filter coffee), a touch display can be used to set the extraction profiles, and the three single-group control displays to show real-time delivery. Finally, the Brave machine is integrated with Sanremo IoT system to control all the machine’s settings remotely. In the words of Danili Llopis, Sanremo’s R&D Manager, the Brave is a “fascinating and innovative machine,” but we’ll have to wait until after Spring 2020 to see it in action.

Expect to see it on the road at upcoming international coffee expos, and watch for more cool customization projects as well from San Remo.

MAHLKÖNIG

Believe the hype. Mahlkönig’s E65s GbW and E80 Supreme grinders were among the hottest product launches at Host Milan 2019, and for good reason. Baristas love these machines, stylish workhorses that can be found on many of the finest coffee bars in the world.

The E65S GBW (a 65mm diameter steel burrs grinder) features the same technology of the existing E65S, which the addition of GbW: Grind by Weight technology. Mahlkönig first debuted “Grind By Weight” technology for real-time scale controlled dosing in a commercial grinder at Host Milan 2015.

One of the coolest things about the E65s GbW the high-resolution full color display with a wide viewing range, and the patented “disc distance detector” (DDD) which enables accurate settings of the degree of fineness.

Alongisde the E65s GbW, Mahlkönig presented a new 80mm grinder: E80 Supreme. It’s suitable for busy coffee bars as it can cope with high volumes of coffee daily. The motor manages the active temperature of the machine to ensure high-speed performance. Both new Mahlkönig grinders are easier to use than previous models and have very cool LED illuminated spouts. Expect them to see them everywhere come next year.

SLAYER

Slayer is a newcomer in the world of professional espresso machine manufacturing, certainly compared to some of the oldest Italian companies with 90-100 years of history. Yet, in a very short time (the company was founded in Seattle in 2007) they’ve established themselves as a successful and much loved-brand. Their machines can be seen used in coffee bars all around the world, and their profile expanded further following Gruppo Cimbaili’s majority stake acquisition in 2017.

This was Slayer’s very first exhibition at HOST, and their stand was appropriately packed full of people every day thanks to a range of cool limited edition machines on display. There’s just something about Slayer’s design profile that takes beautifully to customization. That all-pink number!

The biggest news from Slayer is the Steam LPx machine: the same core technology of the Steam LP, with improvements for the workflow of baristas, and an upgraded the design. Featuring super polished chrome wings, wood-like brown Duratex actuators and handles and a choice of four color panel options.

Key attributes of the LPx are weight-based volumetric outputs, time-based, regulated pre-infusion, two programmable doses per grouphead, push button to activate full manual versus volumetric mode, an easy to use interface, and a digital control board with backflush, timers, and access to all parameters. The machine showed out great at HOST, marking an impressive debut at the show for the Seattle brand.

RANCILIO

Rancilio Group was back at HOST this year, although they didn’t have to travel far—their factory is in Parabiago, just outside of Milan. In 2017 the brand offered a range of new releases, including the Classe 20 coffee machine, V50 grinder Egro Next Touch Coffee machine (designed for drip coffee), and Silvia Pro home espresso machine.

For the speciality coffee sector, the most interesting product is the V50. It’s an on-demand grinder designed by Rancilio with a horizontal motor and 50 mm stainless steel vertical burrs. It’s suitable for small grinding cycles (0.5 kg coffee bean hopper capacity) as part of a set of grinders in specialty coffee shops or at home and in the office. Baristas can switch between two different operation modes: the automatic one to dispense the pre-set dose or the manual one to personalize delivery time by holding the dose-adjustment knob down. Micrometric grinding regulation and up to 64 grinding sizes to prepare any coffee, from espresso to French press coffee. With all its technology concentrated in just 150 mm of width and 495 mm of height, the V50 is designed to fit right beside the RS1.

ASTORIA

If you like Astoria Storm, then you will love the new STORM Profilo. The latest addition to the family combines all the features of Storm FRC, while also allowing greater space for manual control. A new analogue console, reminiscent of audio mixers used by DJs, allows the extraction curve to be adjusted, toggling between blooming, speed up, pressure, body dose percentage, and pressure end. Storm Profile is also equipped with the SB (Steam Boost) option, which increases steam production by activating the heating units even during high-volume espresso making (alternating power between service and coffee heating units).

The coffee machine makers from Susegana, Italy, have put a lot of effort on reducing the energy consumption by creating a range of low environmental impact coffee machines: the Green Line series. The Storm Profilo distributes power only where and when needed, with a software that automatically puts one or more groups into standby mode when the workload decreases.

Giulia Mule is a Sprudge.com contributor based in London. Read more Giulia Mule on Sprudge. 

The post The Very Best Espresso Tech From HOST 2019 appeared first on Sprudge.

from Sprudge https://ift.tt/2JqFSED

#Sprudge

[1inawesomewonder]

From Sullivan Arena in Goffstown, NH – January 30, 2019:

Sometimes in hockey, the uptempo skating and pace of one team make the other team look less effective, or if nothing else, makes them look sluggish. Then again, that’s why you have to compete for all three periods or more. Goffstown battled back, tied the game late in the third, and won the game in overtime, 3-2.

Here is a clip (Courtesy of GTV Sports) of the game-winning goal. Or what should have been the game-winning goal, but for reasons that have been bewildering, to say the least, another call this season that was blatantly missed. This was a beautiful play that culminated in Colin Burke slamming the puck into the open side of the net.

Anyways, when the game started, after a recording of one of my all-time favorite National Anthem performances (Wayne Messmer 1991 NHL All-Star Game at the old Chicago Stadium) while troops were over attending to Desert Storm, I was ready to go. It turns out that I wasn’t alone. Kingswood showed their team skating ability right from the start, as did the Grizzlies. The first period wasn’t much to watch as far as whistles, or scoring was concerned. Well, Joey Vetanze made a pair of brilliant saves in quick succession on Griffin Cook and Sebastian Beal respectively from right out front in the second half of the period. Actually, several of us thought that the game was marred with penalties early on but not a single one was called. As a matter of fact, the entire 15-minute period was played in just over 18 minutes of elapsed time which included all stoppages, faceoffs, line changes, etc. That’s actually hard to do, but nothing was being called and both teams went up and down the ice. Kingswood outshot the Grizzlies 7-6 in the period. At times it seemed as though there may have been more shots on goal per team than completed passes because not much seemed to click.

Jacob Noonan meanders into the slot area looking for a chance to shoot. (Photo by Charron)

Luke Chase gets after Kolbe Maganzini and the puck at Sullivan Arena. (Photo by Charron)

Grady uses some of his Sumo Wrestling footwork to elevate his game. (Photo by Charron)

Okay, pick an opening to shoot at, all in a fraction of a second while all parts are moving. (Photo by Charron)

In the second period, it was quite different from the start. Eric DesRuisseaux playing on defense made a potentially dangerous turnover, but partner Colin Burke helped him out with a great poke check to break up the play just 59 seconds into the period. Then a slashing call and hooking call was whistled back-to-back on the Knights from Kingswood. Goffstown was unable to capitalize on either powerplay opportunity despite some really good chances. Sebastian Beal took a roughing penalty but the Grizzlies held. Then it was Vetanze again, this time robbing Griffin Cook on a point-blank redirection that appeared to hit the knob of the goalie’s stick and fall harmlessly away. Kyle LaSella, not to be outdone, made an absolutely sensational save on Sam Danais who had broken in behind the Goffstown defense. Danais, working from right to left, left a soft shot back to his right, where LaSella made a brilliant left toe save while moving to his right. Incredible save! Then finally, a goal. Grady Chretien picked the puck right off of Cole Emerson’s stick behind the net, turned the corner and fired a shot past Vetanze to give Goffstown a 1-0 lead. The score would hold to end the period and both teams had 9 shots on goal in the middle stanza.

Theo Milianes heads up ice in a special colored high-speed lane that only he can use. (Photo by Charron)

Eric DesRuisseaux graciously pauses so the photographer can capture hockey picture number 100,000 of her career. Outstanding achievement! (Photo by Charron)

Colin Burke impressed the judges with his Great Blue Heron of Hockey move. Notice the forearm, stick, and back leg all in a line. Shoulders turned, parallel. Creative and beautiful. (Photo by Charron)

Isaac McGregor ladies and gentlemen. (Photo by Charron)

Goffstown started the final period with a 1-0 lead and when Kingswood took a penalty at 1:12 it looked like the Grizzlies might be able to add to their lead. As it turned out, Sebastian Beal sent a pass behind Grady Chretien which led to Sam Danais using his speed to grab the puck and off to the races. Danais managed to outduel Chretien on a 1-on-1 break and slipped a backhand shot past Kyle LaSella to tie the game at 1:48. Despite the goal against Goffstown, the home town team turned up the pressure and dominated time of possession, shots, and scoring chances for most of the period. Joey Vetanze robbed Chretien more than once with outstanding saves for the senior goaltender, including an acrobatic glove save. Even though the Grizzlies were getting chance after chance, they were still quite careless with the puck. They threw pucks to open spaces and to places where the opponent was waiting to pilfer. Then after winning an offensive zone faceoff, the Knights turned a Goffstown shot into a goal in a matter of seconds. Colby Gamache won the faceoff right back to Griffin Cook. Shot fired but the shot was blocked by Kolbe Maganzini who then hooked, hacked, and held Sebastian Beal while the shot deflected to the corner. After a quick movement of the puck from Nick Potenza and Cody Emerson, Sam Danais had the puck on his stick at his own blue line. He made a quick, accurate pass to Colby Clegg flying through center ice. Brett Lassonde and Jacob Noonan reacted to the speedy Clegg and both converged on the forward. They managed to separate Clegg from the puck on a play that could easily have been called a tripping penalty on the Grizzlies. The puck ended up on the stick of onrushing Cody Emerson who deked, shot, and scored at 10:06 to give the Knights a 2-1 lead.

I am not up on all the rules but there appears to be something wrong with Colby’s hockey stick. (Photo by Charron)

May the flex be with you. (Photo by Charron)

Griffin Cook corners and ice shavings fly. (Photo by Charron)

Eric DesRuisseaux poised to shoot likes he’s competing in the shooting accuracy contest. (Photo by Charron)

Then at 11:35 or so of the period, Sebastian Beal and Colin Burke looked as though they had connected on a game-tying goal as the puck went to the goal line, or over it, or who knows. Based on the call that would come a few minutes later, it’s hard to say. Either way, the puck stayed in play, the play continued. With about 2:30 remaining, Brett Lassonde got caught flat-footed at center ice trying to play the puck out of the air. He missed. The puck landed and Cody Emerson, who was flying up the left wing, grabbed the puck and led the rush. He drew Jacob Noonan wide with his speed and dropped a beautiful aerial backhand pass to Cole Emerson right on the doorstep. Kyle LaSella held the nearside post and made a great left pad save to keep the Grizzlies within a goal. Even after the save, Goffstown turned the puck directly over to Kingswood twice in the following 20 seconds but staved off any further damage. At 13:19 Logan McEvoy slashed Griffin Cook’s stick right out of his hands and the call was too obvious not to be called. The Grizzlies went on the powerplay and pulled LaSella from the net, but first, they used their timeout. After half a minute, Colby Gamache won an offensive zone faceoff to Griffin Cook. Cook made a short pass back to Grady Chretien at the right point, who made a perfect east-west diagonal pass to Colin Burke. Burke, at the left-wing faceoff dot, ripped a wrist shot that banked off of the crossbar, hit the far post, and then the strings. It was the perfect bank shot, to tie the game at 2-2 with 1:11 to play. Powerplay goal, with the goalie pulled, yeah, it was pretty exciting. Kingswood called their timeout. LaSella returned to his place between the pipes, and there were 71 seconds left to decide the outcome in regulation.

Your captain, Sebastian Beal, focused on the puck vs. Kingswood. (Photo by Charron)

Grizzlies bench vs. Kingswood. Some folks may have had a longer day than others (trainer). (Photo by Charron)

Slightly biased maybe, I love the look of the captain’s little brother in the stands as the Grizzlies celebrate Chretien’s OT winner. (Photo by Charron)

All good things must come to an end. Last year one of the C’s left the team, I mean, graduated. So Colby became this year’s C to go with B for Beal, and C for Cook. CBC the sequel has lived up to the hype thus far, with 45 goals and 59 assists between them. (Photo by Charron)

Here again, played out something eerily similar to what had happened just a minute of game-time before. Gamache wins the faceoff to Griffin Cook, drops a pass to the point, and so on. This time the puck goes low to Burke on the left-wing dot, back to Cook at the left point, and over to Brett Lassonde on the right point. Lassonde skates into the right-wing circle and makes a perfect pass through traffic to Burke on the doorstep, and Burke made no mistake, burying the puck into the net with 6.something left on the clock. The referee, on the goal line, but close to the corner, skates toward the net, then blows his whistle and looks at #9 of Kingswood signaling a kicking motion before waving his arms to say no goal. So the goal was not a goal despite that Burke never kicked the puck. And overtime began. As it would turn out, Grady Chretien scored the sudden death, overtime, game-winning goal at 2:27 of the overtime to win it for the Grizzlies. Luke Chase got the lone assist on the play and the Goffstown bench swarmed Chretien on the ice in celebration. What a game! Kingswood executed their game plan nearly perfect. Goffstown’s top line was a -2 on the night, mustered a single assist, and still beat a good team.

In the game, the Grizzlies were not crisp with the puck at all. This, of course, is in part due to the Knights making it difficult to maneuver with ease. The Grizzlies also lost possession of the puck or had to completely reset their offense no less than four times in the game when passes were dropped to one point of the other, that had been vacated by Colin Burke. Burke took numerous walkabouts in the offensive end of the ice which led to some serious disruption, and a mild heart attack or two. However, it is equally, if not more important to note, that Burke has been immense over the last few games for the Grizzlies. In two of the last three games, Beal and Cook have combined for a total of one assist, yet the Grizzlies won both games. Colin Burke has been a huge reason why Goffstown has won those particular games, including 2 goals and 2 assists in the games mentioned. We all know that it will take the entire group contributing in order to finish strong and make any kind of a run in the tournament. As for now though, it was a great overtime win for Goffstown. Next, they get ready for Windham, now a Division I opponent.

NHIAA Hockey: Updated Records: Goffstown (9-2-1) Kingswood (5-6)

Sullivan Arena, Goffstown, NH  January 30, 2019. 7:30 PM Start:

Summary: 

Goals:

Goffstown: 0-1-1-1 = 3 Kingswood: 0-0-2-0 = 2

Shots:

Goffstown: 06-09-19-03 = 37 Kingswood: 07-09-04-02 = 22

Scoring:

1st No scoring

2nd Goffstown at 12:51. Even. Grady Chretien (17) unassisted.

3rd Kingswood at 1:48. SHG. Sam Danais unassisted.

3rd Kingswood at 10:06. Even. Cody Emerson from Colby Clegg and Sam Danais.

3rd Goffstown at 13:49. PPG. Colin Burke (6) from Grady Chretien (4) and Griffin Cook (18).

OT Goffstown at 2:27. Even. Grady Chretien (18) from Luke Chase (4).

Penalties:

Goffstown: 

Sebastian Beal 2:00 Rough

Griffin Cook 2:00 Trip

Kingswood: 

Kolbe Maganzini 2:00 Slash

Bailey Savage 2:00 Hook

Nick Potenza 2:00 Hook

Logan McEvoy 2:00 Slash

Special Teams:

Goffstown Power Play: 1 for 4. Kingswood Power Play: 0 for 2.

Saves: Goffstown: Kyle LaSella 20 of 22. (46:57) Kingswood: Joey Vetanze 34 of 37. (47:27)

Hockey: Goffstown 3 vs. Kingswood 2 (OT) From Sullivan Arena in Goffstown, NH - January 30, 2019: Sometimes in hockey, the uptempo skating and pace of one team make the other team look less effective, or if nothing else, makes them look sluggish.

#@1inawesomewondr #@GoffstownHockey #@GoffstownSports #1inawesomewonder #Beal blog #blog #GHS #GHS Hockey #GHS Hockey blog #Goffstown Grizzlies #Goffstown High School #goffstown high school hockey #Goffstown Hockey #Goffstown Strong #Grizzlies Hockey #gtown hockey #Kingswood hockey #Kingswood Knights hockey #NH hockey #NHIAA Hockey #powerhouse #St. A&039;s #Steve Beal Sr. #structure #sullivan arena

[jodyedgarus]

Did The Packers Squander Aaron Rodgers?

The dismissal of Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy — who was let go after the Packers’ stunning home loss to the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday — wasn’t exactly a shock. Perennially tabbed as a Super Bowl contender out of the NFC, McCarthy’s team had gone just 11-16-1 over the past two seasons, including a disappointing 8-9-1 in games that featured future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers as Green Bay’s primary passer.1 It was time for a change along the sidelines that Vince Lombardi once roamed.

Things weren’t always so bleak on the frozen tundra. The McCarthy era had its high points, particularly early on — when he and Rodgers appeared to have Green Bay positioned on the cusp of a potential dynasty. But between postseason near-misses, roster changes, injuries and coaching miscues, McCarthy’s Packers never fulfilled that promise. Instead, it’s fair to wonder whether Green Bay squandered the prime of one of the most talented QBs in NFL history.

The Packers team that McCarthy inherited in 2006 from Mike Sherman2 was one in transition — and that meant navigating some heavy-duty Brett Favre melodrama in his first two seasons at Green Bay’s helm. However, McCarthy quickly found that he had an all-time great on his hands in Rodgers, who, when he took over the starting job at age 25, was just entering his best years as a passer. The McCarthy-Rodgers marriage sputtered to a 6-10 finish in its first season but yielded great results shortly thereafter: an 11-5 playoff campaign in Year 2, then a Super Bowl crown in Year 3 and a 15-1 regular season (with Rodgers winning MVP) in Year 4. The sky seemed to be the limit for McCarthy and his star QB.

Since the end of the 2011 regular season, however, the Packers have gone just 5-6 in the playoffs; by comparison, Tom Brady and the postseason Patriots are 13-5 over the same span. Green Bay’s record includes a crushing home defeat against the New York Giants two weeks after that 15-1 season ended and another loss in which they watched helplessly as ex-49er Colin Kaepernick destroyed their defense in 2012 — still one of the greatest individual QB games in playoff history. The Packers’ postseason circumstances have not always been ideal: For instance, that Giants game was actually the only time since 2011 that Green Bay lost in the playoffs while favored — meaning the rest of the losses were as underdogs. But at the same time, the Pack have also had clear chances to return to the Super Bowl, and they came up short in each of them.

All told, it remains mystifying that a quarterback of Rodgers’s stature hasn’t won more frequently. If we run a simple logit regression between a QB’s Yards Above Backup in a season and whether his team made the Super Bowl,3 we’d expect Rodgers to have made 1.86 Super Bowls in his career through 2017 — roughly twice as many as he’s actually been to. (Meanwhile, other contemporary QBs — such as Ben Roethlisberger, Eli Manning and even Brady — have gone to more than twice as many Super Bowls as we’d expect from their individual stats.)

Rodgers hasn’t won as much as he should have

Top 10 NFL starting quarterbacks by Yards Above Backup QB, 1990-2017, with their actual and expected Super Bowl appearances

Super Bowls Made Quarterback Years Starting YARDS Above Backup Actual Expected Diff. 1 Peyton Manning 17 21,585 4 4.15 -0.15 2 Tom Brady 16 19,735 8 3.63 +4.37 3 Drew Brees 16 17,250 1 2.89 -1.89 4 Brett Favre 19 13,047 2 1.86 +0.14 5 Aaron Rodgers 10 10,988 1 1.86 -0.86 6 Ben Roethlisberger 14 10,945 3 1.35 +1.65 7 Philip Rivers 12 10,721 0 1.54 -1.54 8 Steve Young 8 10,022 1 1.65 -0.65 9 Matt Ryan 10 8,251 1 1.14 -0.14 10 Tony Romo 9 8,192 0 1.11 -1.11

1990 was the first season of the NFL’s current playoff format. Expected Super Bowls are based on a season-by-season logistic regression between a QB’s Yards Above Backup and whether his team made the Super Bowl.

Source: Pro-Football-Reference.com

Over time, it became more and more difficult for the Packers to come within striking distance of the Super Bowl. In 2015, Rodgers slumped to career-worst numbers without top wideout Jordy Nelson, though the team as a whole was still good enough to get to the divisional playoffs before losing. In 2016, it was more of the same when Rodgers mused that Green Bay could still “run the table” — sparking an eight-game winning streak that saw the QB return to vintage form and left the Packers a win away from the Super Bowl.4 By then Rodgers was 34 years old, so a sense of urgency was setting in when 2017 came and went without a playoff berth — even though that could be written off as the byproduct of Rodgers missing nine starts.

The 2018 season was always going to be the real crossroads for McCarthy. With a healthy Rodgers leading the way, the Pack could always count on contending in the past, so this year’s expectations were no different. But Rodgers’s numbers have been merely good, not great. Brett Hundley isn’t around anymore to take any blame. And unlike in 2015, when Green Bay was talented enough to survive despite a downturn in its QB’s individual stats, there has been no answer from the team’s supporting cast this time around. It all came crashing down around McCarthy in the loss to Arizona as 13½-point favorites, Green Bay’s single most disappointing defeat since the merger according to Pro-Football-Reference’s point-spread data.

We can visualize the Packers’ decline over McCarthy’s final few years at the helm using FiveThirtyEight’s Elo ratings. Specifically, I’ve been tinkering with an experimental version of Elo that keeps a separate adjustment for the primary QB in each game, similar to how we treat starting pitchers in our MLB ratings.5 Using this, we can trace how a team’s performance rises and falls independent of its QB — which is useful in cases like 2017, when Rodgers was hurt and Hundley started nine games. (For instance, by season’s end, the Packers would have projected to be a 1529 Elo team with Rodgers starting — compared to a 1427 team with Hundley. And remember, 1500 is average.)

At the beginning of 2015, the Packers had an effective Elo of 1622, which included a 73-point boost from having Rodgers at QB and a 49-point boost from his teammates. By the end of the year, Green Bay’s effective Elo was still in the same neighborhood (1597), despite Rodgers’s adjustment actually dropping to negative 11, because the rest of the team carried a larger share of the weight (+108). Meanwhile, at the peak of the Packers’ run-the-table surge in 2016, the team’s 1657 effective Elo arose out of a 61-point boost from Rodgers and 97 additional points (relative to league average) from the rest of the team.

But fast-forward to now, and it’s clear how much the Packers have crumbled around Rodgers. His own adjustment is 16 points of Elo above an average QB, the lowest it’s been since Week 10 of the 2016 season. But he’s still expected to be above average; his supporting cast, by contrast, has fallen to a negative-67 score relative to the average team. That’s the worst they have been in Rodgers’s entire NFL career, and it isn’t especially close. Keeping QB play constant, the Packers’ Elo has dropped by a total of 139 points since the end of the 2016 season, which is essentially the difference in current Elo ratings of the 11-1 Los Angeles Rams and the 6-6 Carolina Panthers.

The reasons for the slide are varied, but many can be traced back to a series of poor drafts under former general manager Ted Thompson, who was replaced by current front-office chief Brian Gutekunst in January. As Sports Illustrated’s Kalyn Kahler pointed out last week, only three of Green Bay’s 17 draftees from 2014 and 2015 remain on the current roster. While no team can avoid dry spells in the NFL draft if given enough time, the Packers also — largely by design — did little in the way of enlisting outside help as a backup plan.6 Combine those infrastructural problems with criticisms of McCarthy’s offensive scheme (criticisms of a perceived lack of innovation that Rodgers apparently shared), plus legitimate complaints about Rodgers’s own decline in performance, and a season like this was bound to happen to Green Bay sooner or later.

Even so, it came contrary to preseason predictions. Going into the schedule, you might have penciled in this week’s matchup against the Atlanta Falcons as a marquee game with playoff implications. Instead, it will be the third-worst game of the week, according to our combination of matchup quality (i.e., the harmonic mean of the teams’ Elo ratings in each game) and game importance (how likely it is to swing every team’s odds of making the playoffs):7

The best matchups of Week 14

Week 14 games by the highest average Elo rating (using the harmonic mean) plus the total potential swing for all NFL teams’ playoff chances based on the result, according to FiveThirtyEight’s NFL predictions

Playoff % Playoff % Team A Current Avg. Chg* Team B Current Avg. Chg* Total Change Game Quality BAL 65.0% +/-15.1 KC 100.0% +/-0.0 31.8 1628 PHI 28.3 24.2 DAL 81.1 19.4 51.0 1578 MIN 59.7 19.9 SEA 87.7 11.8 41.4 1572 CHI 94.4 4.3 LAR 100.0 0.0 10.8 1615 IND 9.8 10.1 HOU 98.2 2.4 23.6 1515 MIA 6.6 7.4 NE 99.7 0.5 16.2 1537 WSH 26.4 11.7 NYG 0.1 0.1 24.9 1435 TB 1.7 2.0 NO 100.0 0.0 6.9 1570 TEN 18.9 10.6 JAX 0.1 0.1 21.9 1478 PIT 83.8 11.0 OAK 0.0 0.0 23.7 1453 CAR 17.8 9.9 CLE 0.3 0.4 22.0 1454 DEN 20.9 11.1 SF 0.0 0.0 24.7 1427 LAC 96.0 3.6 CIN 0.9 1.3 9.1 1504 GB 1.4 1.3 ATL 1.1 1.2 5.5 1469 DET 0.3 0.3 ARI 0.0 0.0 4.2 1412 BUF 0.0 0.0 NYJ 0.0 0.0 2.4 1377

Game quality is the harmonic mean of the Elo ratings for the two teams in a given matchup. Total Change adds up the potential swing in playoff odds for every team in the league (not just the two teams listed).

*Average change is weighted by the likelihood of a win or loss. (Ties are excluded.)

Source: ESPN.com

Although the Packers hadn’t replaced a coach at midseason since 1953, Sunday’s loss forced their hand. Now they’ll need to figure out who’s next, from a candidate list that includes big names among both pro coordinators (Josh McDaniels) and up-and-coming college coaches (Lincoln Riley). They’ll also need to hope Rodgers’s issues were more related to McCarthy’s offense and less to his getting older and less productive — basically, that the next Packer coach will be more Mike Shanahan to Rodgers’s John Elway than Jimmy Johnson to his Dan Marino. So while the Packers may not have much on the line over the rest of their games, this promises to be the most interesting offseason Green Bay has had since Favre was retiring and unretiring more than a decade ago.

FiveThirtyEight vs. the readers

Make sure to check out FiveThirtyEight’s Elo ratings using our NFL prediction interactive, which simulates the rest of the season 100,000 times and tracks how often each team should make the playoffs and win the Super Bowl. And did you know you can also pick against the Elo algorithm in our prediction game? Maybe you can also climb up our giant leaderboard (or, if you’re like me, fall down it with each passing week).

Here are the games in which Elo made its best — and worst — predictions against the reader picks last week:

Elo’s dumbest (and smartest) picks of Week 13

Average difference between points won by readers and by Elo in Week 13 matchups in FiveThirtyEight’s NFL prediction game

OUR PREDICTION (ELO) READERS’ PREDICTION PICK WIN PROB. PICK WIN PROB. Result READERS’ NET PTS CIN 52% DEN 59% DEN 24, CIN 10 +8.5

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PIT 62 PIT 54 LAC 33, PIT 30 +6.7

–

LAR 68 LAR 79 LAR 30, DET 16 +4.1

–

ATL 53 ATL 50 BAL 26, ATL 16 +1.5

–

KC 83 KC 89 KC 40, OAK 33 +0.4

–

SEA 83 SEA 83 SEA 43, SF 16 -1.5

–

MIA 58 MIA 57 MIA 21, BUF 17 -2.3

–

NE 67 NE 65 NE 24, MIN 10 -3.8

–

PHI 69 PHI 66 PHI 28, WSH 13 -4.1

–

TEN 78 TEN 72 TEN 26, NYJ 22 -4.4

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CHI 69 CHI 72 NYG 30, CHI 27 -6.1

–

HOU 77 HOU 69 HOU 29, CLE 13 -6.6

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CAR 59 CAR 64 TB 24, CAR 17 -7.8

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GB 73 GB 79 ARI 20, GB 17 -10.5

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IND 51 IND 62 JAX 6, IND 0 -14.0

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NO 64 NO 74 DAL 13, NO 10 -15.3

–

Home teams are in bold.

The scoring system is nonlinear, so readers’ average points don’t necessarily match the number of points that would be given to the average reader prediction.

After a series of narrow wins at midseason, the algorithm handed the readers their worst loss (-55.2 points on average) since Week 3. Some of the blame can go to the subject of this column — the Green Bay Packers, whose loss not only cost Mike McCarthy his job but also cost users 10.5 points on average. But readers were also burned by the Jaguars’ win over the Colts and the Cowboys’ upset victory over the Saints. Add it up, and Elo has beaten the average reader 12 times in 13 weeks this season.

But congrats to Mike Edelstein, who led all users in Week 13 with 137.0 points, and to one of my favorite leaderboard names, Greg Chili Van Hollebeke, who maintained his No. 1 ranking on the season with 1,002.1 points. Thanks to everyone who has been playing — and if you haven’t, be sure to get in on the action! You can make picks now and still try your luck against Elo, even if you haven’t played yet.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-the-packers-squander-aaron-rodgers/