Maddy's First Data Dump!

Hi everyone! Thanks so much for subscribing to my newsletter/blog/whatever this is before I even made my first post.

This post will serve mainly as a test as I figure out how this works, and the official format and schedule I’ll use is still tbd. I’m not really a writer, but hopefully writing extensions of my videos will feel natural enough 🙂 Maybe I can bring in more data visualizations and tangents from my research that didn’t end up fitting in my videos super well.

Feel free to let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see from these posts! Let’s get into what I’ve been doing the past week as the school quarter was winding down:

This week I ended up starting a series with my WNBA food/giveaway “conspiracies.” My original goal was to just make another video about the Aces’ “Miss Twice, Get a Slice” promo (which I have made a TikTok and YouTube video on in the past), but I decided to take the concept to other teams’ promos as well!

At Las Vegas Aces home games, if an opposing player misses both their free throws in one trip to the line, the home crowd can go get free pizza from the Slice of Vegas. I’m told that the slices are really small and the lines are really long, but who doesn’t like free pizza?

I realized something was fishy when I looked into the play-by-play data and realized that fans only got their free pizza four times this year, including when AT famously missed two free throws at the end of finals Game 1. In previous years, fans had at least 9 games where free pizza was awarded, so I had to wonder if Slice of Vegas was conspiring with the refs to keep the pizza all to themselves 🤔

Similar to the Aces, the Liberty promo relies upon opponent missed free throws, but the catch is that it only counts if it happens in the fourth quarter??? That means Liberty fans only got a free burger from Shake Shack twice this past year. Supposedly you needed to have a game ticket with you to get the deal the following day, but some people on reddit said the employees didn’t check and just gave them a code to use. (I’ve never been to Shake Shack so idk if this is a good deal or a ripoff)

Would it really have been that hard to let this deal count for every quarter of the game, so fans could get 8 free burgers instead of 2? (again idk if they are good burgers or not)

This is probably the best promo of them all tbh. If the Indiana Fever outscore their opponent in the third quarter of any home game, fans can get free cheese curds from Culver’s the next day (with a code). It sounds like they don’t even require you to have been at the game. Pretty good!

The Fever were good enough in their third quarters to earn their fans 13 days of free curds. That’s a lot! Then I found out that the Fever actually won each of their other three quarters at a higher rate 😕 So I was sad for the midwest version of myself missing out on the cheese curds I deserve.

This is also when I started to realize that the Lynx are pretty good at meeting the promo criteria for all the other teams. Specifically, the Lynx won their third quarter at home 17 times, which is tied with the Aces for best in the league. Where are the Lynx’s promos??

This one isn’t too much of a conspiracy, but given that only five (or six) people can win per game, it is a little less exciting. The prizes seem cool though! If the opposing team travelled at a Storm home game, five people would win a drawing for some kind of voucher from Intrepid. If they travelled again, one person would get a dream vacation or something. The promotion ran through the season and the drawing took place in mid-September, so I have no idea if anyone actually claimed these prizes. (that’s not an actual conspiracy though)

Trip vouchers and dream vacations are pretty exciting, and probably worth a lot of money. But with only 65 out of the over 260,000 fans that attended Storm games this year winning any of these prizes, your chances were pretty slim. You even had to scan a QR code to enter after the travel occurred, which means my mom’s chance of winning was even lower. (no offense)

I have some more Fever promos on my radar, but I’m really curious to hear what other promos there are (like the ones above) in the WNBA. If you know of any, please tell me!

That’s all, thanks for reading!