Ottobasket
The 2025 NBA season is over, and with it the Ottoneu basketball season, too. My Ottobasket app remained much the same for users over the course of the season, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t busy as there were some improvements behind the scenes and using the Discourse API to post some weekly updates to the forums. During the offseason it’s likely to be more of the same, as I plan to repeat the analyses of years past and try to get more process improvements under the hood. In terms of new analysis I hope to finalize a model for predicting year 3 production based on rookie year and other stats to help get at keep / cut decisions for rookies and perhaps up the data viz game on the app.
The primary backend improvement to the app was making it more robust to errors in the daily updates so that instead of crashing the app, it would continue displaying the previous day’s data and notify the user of the situation. Previously the “updated at” timestamp simply reflected the time that a user logged on, but when I switched to daily updates that stored the data in a Google Sheet, that no longer felt representative of the process.
The other improvement revolved around the way players are added to my database, which was previously a very ad hoc process that resulted in players like Vince Willams not being added for weeks in the 2023-24 season despite contributing for the Grizzlies and considerably upping his roster percentage, and a similar issue with Justin Edwards this season. I now have a script that runs twice monthly and checks which NBA players are in the Ottoneu player universe, but are missing IDs for my other data sources. Sometimes these include false positives like Nikola Topic, who was out for the year, but overall it helps me catch missing players much quicker than before. I would still like to add some tests to more proactively catch any errors, such as inadvertently adding the same ID from one source for both Cam and Max Christie, and improving my test suite is an offseason priority.
The other big in-season project was posting the weekly top performers to the Discourse forum. Ottoneu’s player leaderboard is great, but it can be hard to track general trends when you can only see your league. My inspiration for the project was the Ottoneu Hot / Cold Right Now posts on Fangraphs for the baseball leagues, but due to differences in the add / drop environments and no Fangraphs equivalent, I couldn’t directly replicate it. I landed on posting to the forums as the best way to reach the most users and doing it programmatically to save myself time since writing up analysis each week hasn’t been feasible for me thus far. I opted for three tables of the top performers - overall in the past week, biggest improvements in the past week compared to the rest of the season, and the highest scorers of players rostered in less than half of the leagues.
The technical side of this had it’s fair share of difficulties, due mainly to the Discourse API not being very well-documented and the maintenance level for the Python packages for it being unclear. Through digging around their own forums for API examples as well as help from Niv, Ottoneu’s creator, I was finally able to get my script working. Honestly, the biggest “gotcha” was the fact that the forum URL needed to be *https* while I had coded it as *http*. I was able to get some experience using Python’s tempfiles because the file size was too big when inserting the tables as images directly into the Discourse message. Instead, I needed to upload the images to Discourse, save the short URL where it was uploaded, and then paste that URL in the message.
Half-baked 2026 NBA Draft Takes
I watched the McDonald’s All-American Game (and scrimmage), Nike Hoop Summit, and Jordan Brand Classic recently to get a feel for some of the incoming freshmen, including the potential top picks in 2026. The JBC was easily the least serious game, but there were still things to be gleaned from each one. I’m not out there grinding AAU tape and it’s been years since I regularly watched NCAA games, especially since my access to recorded games was cut off, so that’s why these are half-baked. One thing I’ll call out is that passing ability and defensive awareness are particularly difficult to pick out in these settings.
- AJ Dybantsa is very talented and could be a monster on both ends. That said, I don’t think it’s a question about Cooper Flagg vs Dybantsa right now. Cooper just had _that_ season in college and is only a month older than AJD. Cooper’s USA team comfortably beat the World team - which had AJD! - in last year’s Hoop Summit, and the US needed overtime to win this year. Dybantsa is still a great prospect and maybe in the same tier as Flagg, but I’m taking Flagg at this point.
- Darryn Peterson seems pretty good, but he only played in the McDAAG. Could also be a two way force as he ramped it up on that end in the second half of the McDonald’s game. I’m curious what his shot diet ends up being at Kansas.
- Cameron Boozer’s accolades speak for themselves, but I’m a bit hesitant. He’s easily the youngest of this top three, but his jump shot is kinda weird with tons of arc and it seems like he’ll be best on defense playing next to a center. He still projects as a very solid player, though.
- Caleb Wilson has some awesome defensive tools, but gambles and gets himself off balance. His offense is a major work in progress, too. It’ll be curious how UNC fits him in given their struggles this past season with Drake Powell and Ian Jackson both leaving after one season, presumably due to being unhappy about their roles.
- Nate Ament, who picked Tennessee, is a wildcard for me. Rick Barnes plays slow and isn’t afraid to sit players on the bench for extended periods. Though fortunately for Ament, there should be plenty of minutes available. Shot is there, but strength and handle on drives, passing, and where he slots on defense are questions.
- Chris Cenac is another wildcard as a big who showed some good skills on offense but may be a touch small for a true 5 and, as a big, the defense will be particularly important. He had some nice blocks and I trust Kelvin Sampson as a defensive coach, but how will he fare as a pick and roll defender? Can he pass at all or is he purely a play finisher?
- Cenac’s future teammate Isaiah Harwell looks like a promising 3 and D and maybe more prospect.
- Darius Acuff is athletic and strong. Game seems built from the outside in - took a lot of floaters.
- Mikel Brown had some beautiful pocket passes. Clearly a confident shooter even if results weren’t always there. Pretty skinny so we’ll see how he holds up on defense.
- Tounde Yessoufou is a hooper. Strong and relentless, though how his shot looks will determine a lot.
Mini-reviews
I’m borrowing this idea from Monica Byrne as a way to give very brief thoughts on media I have watched or read recently.
| Title | Medium | Review |
| The Pitt | TV | Intense and well done. Not sure how a second season will work. |
| When No One Sees Us | TV | Spanish True Detective vibes. Would recommend. |
| Wheel of Time (S3) | TV | Pushed the story forward well. Character dev remains strong. Very bummed it was canceled. |
| White Lotus (S3) | TV | I’m done with this show. Great production, music, sets, etc but what is there to care about? |
| Hacks (S4) | TV | One of my favorite shows of the last few years. So funny. Amazing chemistry between all of the actors. Love that Jimmy and Kayla were a more prominent storyline this season. |
| A Memory Called Empire | Novel | Political sci-fi playing with memory and identity. |
| Ninefox Gambit | Novel | Military space opera playing with memory and identity. |
| Curse of Chalion | Novel | Borderline romantasy playing with identity and religion. |
| Crossings | Nonfiction book | Super informative on how roads impact animals movement patterns. |
| A Spear Cuts Through Water | Novel | Unique and ambitious storytelling structure that works well. |
| How Basketball Can Save the World | Nonfiction book | As always, ball is life. |
| Serviceberry | Nonfiction book | A little bit of hope in book form. Be a kind neighbor. |
| Olga Dies Dreaming | Novel | Odd reading it now with all that has happened but still get the feeling of hope that it ends on. |
| Noontime in Yenisehir | Novel | Day in the life in a space and time foreign to me. Soysal is an excellent writer. |
| Condomnauts | Novel | Hilarious space shenanigans with interspecies introductions requiring attempts at sexual intercourse. |
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