Like brother Magary, I have been re-energized as a fan by this year’s NBA playoffs, although I do admit that watching Jayson Tatum take one of Paris’s arrows harshed my mellow considerably—classical allusion courtesy of the Society of Jesus, circa 1974. It  was partly un-harshed by the emergence of Luke Kornet, Force of Nature. But, otherwise, it has been a voyage of discovery. I knew Anthony Edwards because my friend Tom Crean had recruited him at Georgia, but Jaden McDaniels was a complete mystery to me. I couldn’t keep Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic straight for the longest time. Tyrese Haliburton might have been the lead singer for the Spinners for all I knew.

When did Shai Gilgeous-Alexander get this good?

Credit where credit is due: USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan has tried very hard to establish herself as the nation's foremost Caitlin Clark alarmist. Whenever something routine for a pro athlete happens to the Indiana Fever's star, Brennan's job is to turn it into a matter of existential concern for the WNBA, a league that has 12 other teams. This week's news provided another opportunity. Crisis alert: Caitlin Clark has strained her quad. Can women's basketball as a whole possibly soldier on?

The tone of Brennan's latest column might mislead the reader into thinking that Caitlin Clark has died. In reality, the Fever guard is only sidelined for at least a couple of weeks; after Tuesday's practice she was casually putting up three-pointers. In Brennan's reality, this is a recession-level event for the WNBA:

Stuart Skinner offers little in the way of championship onomatopoeia, which is to say his name does not suggest athletic greatness. It suggests the secretary-treasurer of the chess club, or an unprepared con artist trying to spontaneously impersonate Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg.

But Skinner owns, for now, the Stanley Cup fate of the Edmonton Oilers, and by extension the possibility that a Canadian team might win it all for the first time since 1993. As the Oilers' goaltender he has defined both the glories and horrors of being an Oil fan, because there is never a guarantee of what level of quality he will provide.

Donald Trump released yet another deranged statement on Tuesday, demanding that a transgender high school student be barred from participating in the California state track and field championships, which are scheduled to be held this weekend in Clovis, Calif. The inane thoug...

Junior high is tough for everyone. Shifting friendships! Being stuck somewhere between childhood and adolescence! All those hormones! If you’re lucky, you don’t also have to manage a parent who thinks they can backseat-drive you through all the challenges that come with being 13. 

This week, we’re off to a prestigious private school in the West Village, where our friend-of-a-friend Ellen will have to figure out how involved she wants to get in her daughter’s 8th-grade fundraising competition. Unfortunately, it seems like Ellen’s mom-nemesis, Hazel, has no intention of playing by the rules. Would it be moral to just let Hazel get away with that? 

The pattern was: The New York Knicks would scramble the length of the floor in desperation—frantic, wide-eyed, bolts rattling loose, spotting passing and dribbling lanes just as they snapped shut—in search of a bucket. When they got one it scanned most credibly as an acciden...

Let us approach Shohei Ohtani as naively as possible, while admitting that in the case of Ohtani this decision can hardly be anything but a ruse. For the span of time that he has been on the Los Angeles Dodgers, Ohtani has been a designated hitter, and a very good one: He wo...

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about method acting, fickle stovetops, the Colorado Rockies, and more.

Brendan:

The Florida Panthers, as terrifying a hockey team as they are, have made a bit of a habit out of elongating their playoff series. Take their slow start in Toronto last round, or the three they lost while up 3-0 to the Oilers last Stanley Cup Final. In all likelihood, their s...

The end of this clip is why Paul Maurice is the greatest coach of all time in any sport, in one specific category: lectern domination. The whole thing is worth a watch, as all his pressers are, pregame, postgame or even off-day, but the last 10 seconds are killer, especially if you keep in mind that his team just lost a chance to clinch a trip to the Stanley Cup Final by playing a game he admitted he "didn't like."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt87itZr_kc

I went into Overcompensating knowing very little except that it was a vehicle for comic Benito Skinner. I know Skinner, like most people know him, through his @bennnydrama7 Instagram account. He started it while still a high school student in Ohio—seven was the number on his...

Knockout-tournament soccer is the best soccer because of how it amplifies the sport's essence. The magic of the game lies in the tension between unpredictability and mastery. On one foot, the game is so difficult, so low-scoring, and played over such a relatively short times...

If Natasha Cloud has stopped smiling at all since mid-March, she has done so only in the privacy of her own home. She beamed when she met Ellie the Elephant at Liberty training camp last month. She and Breanna Stewart laughed it up on Cloud’s Instagram stories during a recen...

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Geoffrey Schorkopf and Brian Callahan, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Geoffrey is an Atlanta Hawks fan. Brian is a Chicago Bulls fan. In addition to making crosswords together, they’ve bonded over mediocre basketball.

Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.

At some point near the start of the fourth quarter of Game 4 of the Western Conference Final, in which the Oklahoma City Thunder defeated the Minnesota Timberwolves, 128-126, a thought occurred to me: These teams are playing too hard. It just didn't seem possible that an NBA...

As a general rule, you do not want to know what sportswriters are eating. Assume that it's happening at strange times and in strange ways. Some of this is due to the specific pressures of the job; some of it is just because sportswriters are strange. Sportswriters, on balanc...

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump sat down for a public meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa. Perched on an armchair in the Oval Office, with the White House's newly installed gold-tone decorations stuck to the mantlepiece behind him, Trump declared that Ramaphosa is "a man certainly in some circles really respected, other circles a little bit less respected, like all of us." 

The most embarrassing of athletic debates is over: As of midnight last night, camogie players are free to sport the bottoms of their choosing. 

At an emergency meeting of the Camogie Association held Thursday night in Dublin to quell increasingly loud protests, delegates repealed an antiquated rule that prohibited players of the ancient Gaelic game from wearing shorts, as their male counterparts always could. The vote was one-sided: The Camogie Association said after the meeting that 98 percent of the delegates at its hastily called Croke Park summit voted to do away with the misogynistic mandate immediately.

There is a pleasing symmetry to the Mission: Impossible brand cycle: 30 years between the 1966 debut of the original CBS television series created by Bruce Geller to the 1996 cinematic reboot starring Tom Cruise, and again between that first film and what would appear t...

On April 7, the New Yorker and Time ran nearly identical stories that might be better described as press releases for the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences. The two stories differed slightly: The New Yorker's headline proclaimed "The Dire Wolf Is Back," whereas Time...

It can be hard to tell when it is safe to officially declare a bad baseball team a historically bad one. You usually kind of know it when you see it, but passing certain mile markers allows you to affirmatively point the finger and declare: These men belong in the pisspot of...