Personnel News

thank you and goodbye

Howdy folks,

I’m happy to announce that I am joining the Denver Nuggets as a Senior Basketball Analyst.

So it’s high time to shut this newsletter down. The archive will remain intact and available to browse from now and until forever at thef5.substack.com.

If you’re a paid subscriber — especially an annual subscriber — make sure you read to the end for details regarding your subscription.

I want to thank anyone that read, commented, or interacted with The F5. I’ve had a blast working on this newsletter and it’s been rewarding in so many ways. The F5 has been mentioned in places like ESPN, The Athletic, The Ringer, Yahoo, Bleacher Report, and on podcasts aplenty. Mainstream recognition is great, but receiving a personal message from a subscriber never failed to make my day.

I would also like to thank my girlfriend, Steph, for editing many of these posts and listening to me yap about the NBA week in and week out. Our first date came a few days after the NBA Finals some years back. She wasn’t aware of the full extent of my basketball fanaticism until a few months later when the mask came off and I revealed my true identity as a Regular Season Enthusiast¹. Steph doesn’t give a lick about basketball, but has supported me all the same.

Since I have parlayed this newsletter into two different NBA jobs I’m qualified to give advice on how to Post your way into a job in sports. You can read what I wrote about this topic in 2021 when I first pulled the plug on this newsletter to work for the New York Knicks. Not much has changed since then from my perspective. I think there’s an appetite for this kind of writing and if you do it consistently enough you’ll stand out.

I find it telling that the two times I’ve been hired for an NBA job I was not actively looking for an NBA job. In both cases the job fell out of the sky and into my lap. The takeaway is that if you’re regularly putting stuff out there then you’ll be at the front of people’s minds when they’re making hiring decisions.

Max Read, who writes a newsletter about tech and culture, had a piece a while back titled, Matt Yglesias and the secret of blogging. Read wrote that, above everything else, regularity is the key to success online:

But the key lesson, the thing I would impart to any aspiring bloggers, content creators, or newsletter proprietors, is that the cornerstone of internet success is not intelligence or novelty or outrageousness or even speed, but regularity.1 There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain an audience -- break news, loudly talk about your own independence, make your Twitter avatar a photo of a cute girl -- but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop.

I find this advice useful regardless of subject matter. Whether you’re posting about politics or plus-minus, the only thing that matters is that you post and post often. You don’t have to be right all the time, but you do have to write all the time.

I’ll end by thanking the Nuggets organization for hiring me despite my unusual situation. I relocated to Sydney, Australia last year and the Nuggets have agreed to let me work remotely from the land down under. I couldn’t be more excited to get started.

F5 Forever

- Owen

---

About Your Paid Subscription

The tl;dr is you are not going to be charged for anything going forward and you’ll retain access to all the tutorials I’ve written.

• If you’re a monthly subscriber, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Billing will stop automatically.

• If you’re an annual subscriber, please read on because you may want to get in touch.

• If you’re reading this in the future and would like access to the archive, Buy Me A Coffee and I’ll set you up ASAP.

---

For reasons that aren’t clear to me, Substack only has two options for dealing with paid subscribers when you stop publishing a newsletter: I can either pause billing or I can turn off paid subscriptions entirely.

Both options kind of suck.

If I pause billing, no one gets charged anything going forward and everyone retains access to the full archive of tutorials. However, anyone that paid for an annual subscription would not be getting their money’s worth since they paid for a year’s worth of tutorials in addition to the archive of tutorials.

The other option is to turn off paid subscriptions entirely and disconnect Stripe, the payment platform. If I do this, no one gets charged anything going forward and yearly subscribers receive an automatic prorated refund. However, if I go this route everyone (both monthly and yearly subscribers) would lose access to the archive of tutorials. According to a customer representative at Substack, “if you turn off paid subscriptions and disconnect Stripe, subscribers are no longer considered ‘paid’ and will no longer have access to paid posts.”

This is less than ideal.

After some careful thought I’ve decided to pause billing instead of turning off paid subscriptions. Just to reiterate, this means you will not be charged for anything going forward and you will retain access to the full archive of tutorials. That’s simple if you were on the monthly plan, but not so simple if you paid for a yearly subscription.

There is a hacky workaround, though.

I can manually issue prorated refunds to individual subscribers, but I have to process them one at a time. If you would like a prorated refund, please get in touch, but note that once you’re issued a refund, you will lose access to the archives.

If wish to receive a prorated refund you can reply to this email or contact me directly at owenlhjphillips@gmail.com.

I’m offering a no questions asked prorated refund. I promise to work with you to find a resolution that you feel is fair. Just please bear with me as it might take some time to get to each individual email/refund.

Thanks so much for subscribing to The F5. You guys have been great.

1. h/t: The Ringer’s Rob Mahoney