On this beautiful Tuesday morning, a quick message from this fan of the New York Knicks:
Sports fandom is worth it.
Does your favorite team suck? Does your team always suck? Don’t give up.
Do you ever ask yourself why you spend so much of your brief time on Earth following a stupid team, playing a stupid game? Keep going.
There will come a day when, for reasons you can’t quite explain, things get better. And when they do, you’ll walk around smiling ear-to-ear, thinking about the worst losses you ever watched, the players who couldn’t play a lick, and how you never thought things would ever get better. And you’ll be happy you stuck with it.
– Rodger Sherman
Today’s Lineup
AHHHHHH THE KNICKS
The Steroid Olympics were a disaster for their billionaire backers
Incredible finishes, of both the soccer and IndyCar variety
🗽 The City that Sometimes Sweeps 🗽
The New York Knicks are going to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. I was nine years old then, a city kid. I am now 35 years old, a married man who lives in the suburbs. I am 400 percent older than I was the last time my favorite team reached this stage of the postseason.
The Knicks were the worst team for most of the 21st century. This isn’t an exaggeration: They had the worst winning percentage in the NBA from 2000 to 2020, and only won a single playoff series in that span.
After that stretch, I would have settled for a few drops of postseason competence. Instead, I’ve received been a flood. The Knicks are on an 11-game win streak, coming off back-to-back sweeps in the Eastern Conference semis and finals. They’re playing some of the best basketball any basketball team has ever played. This also isn’t an exaggeration; I’ll break down the numbers in a bit.
One strange part about being a Knicks fan under 60 is a nostalgia for teams that did not even win championships. We fondly look back on the 1994 team, which made the NBA Finals and lost, and the 1999 team, which made the NBA Finals and lost. So in some ways, it feels like this team has already reached the promised land. But there are still games on the schedule, and I’m starting to wonder: What if it the Good Old Days could be even better?
An update on the Knicks’ NBA Span-pionship: The Knicks now have the best three-game span in NBA playoff history in terms of point differential, the two best four-game spans, the four best five-game spans, the four best six-game spans, the four best seven-game spans, the six best eight-game spans, the six best nine-game spans, the six best 10-game spans, the four best 11-game spans, the three best 12-game spans, the two best 13-game spans, and the best 14-game span.
Additionally, they have the two best eight-game spans, the two best nine-game spans, the two best 10-game spans, and the best 11-game span by any team in any set of regular season or postseason games in NBA history.
OK, I’m gonna say that in English. Over the last 10 games, the Knicks have outscored their opponents by 246 points. No team in NBA history has ever done that. Second place is also the Knicks, also during this postseason run. Third place is the 1973 Bucks, an all-time great team with Oscar Robertson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which outscored its opponents by 214 points over 10 games, 32 points less than the Knicks. The Curry-era Warriors never outscored a team by more than 206 points over a 10-game stretch; the Jordan-era Bulls never outscored a team by more than 200 points over a 10-game stretch. And the Knicks’ stretch is happening in the playoffs, when the level of competition is hypothetically higher than most 10-game stretches during the regular season.
Long story short: It really is not that much of an exaggeration to say that the Knicks are on the best sustained run of basketball that any team has ever played at any point in the history of the sport.
That’s not my opinion! There are a lot of numbers saying that!!!
The Knicks have won their three closeout games by 51, 30, and 37 points, all on the road. Per the ESPN broadcast last night, no team in NBA history had ever won three series-ending games by at least 20 points each, and the Knicks won three by at least 30.
Normally, teams show up ready to fight to avoid elimination … instead, series after series, the Knicks are coming out with better intensity and effort than opponents whose seasons are on the line. Jalen Brunson hasn’t played in the fourth quarter of any closeout game this postseason.
The Knicks have won 11 games by more than 10 points this postseason. Here’s the list of teams that have at least 11 wins in a single postseason by more than 10 points: The 1985 Lakers, the 1986 Celtics, the 1988 Lakers, the 2013 Heat, the 2014 Spurs, the 2016 Cavs, and the 2017 Warriors. Not only did all those teams win the NBA championship, they’re all considered among the best basketball teams ever.
Those 11 wins by more than 10 points are more than the Knicks had in 12 of the 26 full seasons since their last Finals appearance. The Knicks have had more wins by 10-plus points than they had in any full season when I was in high school from 2004-2008, years when I was watching like 50-60 Knicks games a season instead of having a social life.
I’m trying to remain clear-eyed here. The Knicks will be significant underdogs against the Spurs or the Thunder in the Finals. Oklahoma City has the deepest and best roster in the league; San Antonio has Victor Wembanyama, who feels like the ideal form of a basketball player.
But there’s reason to believe they’ve got a shot. The Knicks are going to be as well-rested as any team in Finals history, having cruised through back-to-back sweeps with multiple blowouts that gave the team’s best players extended rest. The Spurs and Thunder are going to spend the next two or three (hopefully three) games fighting to win a highly physical series. Every game features at least two Thunder players on “beat up Victor Wembanyama” duty. They’re hitting that French alien with hammers on every possession. The longer that goes on, the better shot the Knicks have.
And I just need to say this one more time: the Knicks are winning their basketball games by more than any team has ever won basketball games. How can you count that team out?
💉📉 Doping dopes 💉📉
There are plenty of fair questions to ask about anti-doping organizations. Are the people in charge of international sports doing enough to convince the world that the top competitors are clean? Why are certain substances banned and others not? Does anti-doping policy actually enforce a level playing field, or merely benefit those who are capable of doping under the radar? Should we trust anybody in charge of clean sports when the two biggest organizations in the world are actively fighting each other?
None of those questions were asked or answered by the Enhanced Games, a farcical pro-doping exhibition for washed up athletes who couldn’t touch the world’s best with a 10-foot needle. The event, financially backed by Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., billed itself as a showcase of peak human performance — our best athletes loaded full of chemicals invented by our best scientists. In reality, it was less a legitimate sporting competition and more an extended advertisement for Enhanced, a company hawking supplements, testosterone injections, and boner pills. (It always seems to come back to boner pills.)
I wasn’t planning on writing about the Enhanced Games — this newsletter tries to cover legitimate sporting events — but the results were so humiliating for The Steroid Olympics that I had to.
Three events were won by clean athletes — “non-enhanced” athletes in the event’s parlance. That included the two premier events, the men’s and women’s 100-meter sprints. I have to imagine the organizers thought the clean competitors would get wrecked by the doped-up ones, and the plan backfired.
Fred Kerley won the men’s 100m running a 9.97, which would have placed him dead last in the 2024 Olympic final where he won a bronze medal. The time wouldn’t have even won the Texas high school state championship. Kerley says he’s completing clean, and he mocked his doped-up competitors after the race, saying, “they need to get on that shit a little bit more.”
As for why clean athletes were participating in the first place … well, the Enhanced Games were giving out a lot of money. The winners of each event got $250,000, which is an absolutely massive haul for some of these athletes. Like, World Aquatics gives out prize money at the World Championships, and even winning four golds and a bronze only netted $90,000 for the highest earner. And the Enhanced Games doofuses were willing to pay out $250,000 for beating three washed-up swimmers in one race?
(Also, it’s pretty sick to race clean and beat competitors who are proudly doping.)
One of the most high-profile competitors was Australia’s James Magnussen, a three-time Olympic medalist who transformed his body with steroids so aggressively that he was sinking in the pool under the weight of his muscles before dialing back his dosage. He finished dead last in both of his events, recording a 49.44 in the 100m freestyle, almost two seconds behind his own personal best.
Even in weightlifting, a sport you’d think would have the strongest correlation between doing ‘roids and winning, no records were set. The Guardian reported that at least one athlete was given a fourth chance to break a record after he failed in his first three attempts, which shows you how legitimate the whole operation was.
One athlete did manage to record a faster time than the official world record. Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev posted a 20.81 in the 50m freestyle. But it’s not exactly an impressive mark: the swimmers were allowed to race in the famously banned skinsuits that led to a slew of broken records at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. And yet, Gkolomeev was only .07 seconds faster than the record set by Cameron McEvoy in March …
……… and it sure looked like the race organizers stopped the clock early. Gkolomeev was still a full stroke away from the wall at 20.81. It was the last race of the day and the organizers had a lot riding on world records being broken. With so little oversight at the event, why wouldn’t they stop the clock early?
The poor showing has investors bailing on Enhanced and the Enhanced Games; the company’s stock tanked more than 40 percent when markets opened Tuesday.
The Enhanced Games only proved the opposite of what its organizers wanted: The world’s best athletes really are one-of-a-kind, and their level of performance can’t be matched by also-rans with well-stocked pharmacies. Honestly, it’s kinda comforting.
🥎👋 Goner Sooner 🥎👋
Big shocker in the NCAA softball tournament, as Oklahoma was knocked out by unseeded Mississippi State. The Sooners have won six national championships since the last time they failed to reach the Women’s College World Series in 2015; Mississippi State has never been to the WCWS before.
What’s really incredible is how it went down: After Oklahoma hit Mississippi State’s pitchers hard in the first two games of the Super Regional, the Bulldogs turned to Delainey Everett, their third-string pitcher, who had thrown 13 innings all season. She didn’t just get the win, she shut out the Sooners — Oklahoma’s first shutout loss since 2019.
The early elimination means that UCLA’s Megan Grant will finish the season with the all-time NCAA home run record. She has 40 (and potentially more!), and Oklahoma’s Kendall Wells is done for the year at 39.
🏎️ Indy .0233 🏎️
Swedish driver Felix Rosenqvist won the Indy 500 by .0233 seconds, the closest finish in race history, weaving by David Malukas with an incredible pass in the home stretch:
Doing some quick math here: The race was three hours, five minutes, and nine seconds long, and Rosenqvist won by .0233 seconds, which is .0002 percent of the total race time. Honestly, I thought that stat would be cooler when I started working it up but I already did the work so deal with it.
🐯🆙 Hull Yeah 🐯🆙
Hull City won promotion to the Premier League with a 95th-minute goal — about as big a goal as any team will score in any game:
We’ve fully broken down the spying scandal that led to Hull’s opponent getting swapped out of the Championship playoffs, now let’s talk about an even bigger story: That a team as bad as Hull City managed to play its way up to the Prem. The Tigers had a measly +4 goal differential, and even that makes them look better than they probably were: Their opponents attempted 168 more shots over the course of the season, resulting in a -13.1 xG rating. That’s not just sub-promotion level … it’s 23rd out of 24 teams in the Championship. Hull City should be going down to the third tier, and instead they’re going up to the richest league on Earth! Shout out to them, however the heck they managed to pull it off.
📈📉 What goes up must come down 📈📉
Another fun pro/rel story, as second-tier German team SC Paderborn scored in the 100th minute to knock out Wolfsburg from the Bundesliga:
(Promotion and relegation … pretty cool, huh?)
This is a big upset because of the format of Germany’s promotion playoffs, which pits the third-worst team from the Bundesliga against the third-best team from the second tier. Generally, the lower-level team with less money that wasn’t even the best team in its league doesn’t have much of a shot. Paderborn became the first team to pull the upset since 2019, and just the fourth since the current format was introduced in 2008.
⛵️🥍 The Lake Show ⛵️🥍
Northwestern women’s lacrosse won its ninth national championship in front of a packed house on Lake Michigan on Sunday, taking advantage of the first Final Four hosted in Evanston. Actual lacrosse watchers were pretty upset that North Carolina’s game-tying goal was waved off because the shooter’s follow-through hit a Northwestern player, but as someone with minimal understanding of the rules, I think it was a great decision made by a brave ref willing to make a gutsy call in a big moment, and I thank them for their service.
Princeton won the men’s lacrosse championship, which honestly makes me a little bit less pumped about Northwestern winning the women’s lacrosse championship.
RIP Kyle Busch
Kyle Busch unexpectedly died at 41 on Thursday. Busch, a two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, died of complications from pneumonia that progressed into sepsis. Busch was the all-time leader in wins with 243 across the top three series of NASCAR, a record he seemed likely to build on for years to come. His final victory came in a Truck Series race in Dover less than a week before his death. When an interviewer asked him why winning still felt so good after so many career victories under his belt, Busch responded, “because you never know when the last one is.”
⚡️🤠 THUNDER-SPURS 🤠⚡️
Series tied 2-2. Game 5: Tuesday, 8:30 p.m. ET, in Oklahoma City (NBC/Peacock)
Everybody keeps saying that the winner of this series will definitely demolish the Knicks in the NBA Finals, so I guess you should watch it! Gregg Popovich went into the Spurs’ locker room following their blowout loss in Game 3 with some choice words, and San Antonio responded with a blowout win in Game 4. Hopefully, the two teams keep playing aggressive, physical, borderline violent basketball for another three games.
🏒🥅 NHL Playoffs 🏒🥅
Avalanche-Golden Knights (VGK leads 3-0) – The whole conversation around Vegas through the first two rounds was “just wait until they actually play a real team” … and we’re still waiting! Game 4: Tuesday, 9 p.m. ET in Las Vegas (ESPN)
Hurricanes-Canadiens (CAR leads 2-1) – Montreal won Game 7 of its first round series with only nine shots, and may have developed a bad habit. The Canadiens had 12 and 13 shots in Games 2 and 3, respectively, both overtime losses. Game 4: Wednesday, 8 p.m. ET in Montreal (TNT/truTV)
🏌️♀️⛳️ NCAA Women’s Golf Championships 🏌️♀️⛳️
Tuesday and Wednesday, in Carlsbad, California (Golf Channel)
Stanford is the clear favorite, shooting 22 under par to clear the rest of the pack by 13 strokes(!!) in the qualifying round … but this is a match play tournament, so the Cardinal might still get upset. RIP to Northwestern’s repeat championship bid as the Wildcats finished 14th and missed out on the eight-team bracket.
🇪🇺 UEFA Conference League Final: Crystal Palace v. Rayo Vallecano ⚽️
Wednesday, 3 p.m. ET, in Leipzig, Germany (Paramount Plus)
This is UEFA’s third-tier European competition below Champions and Europa League, but the winner will automatically qualify for Europa next year … so hypothetically, you could win this year’s Conference League, then win next year’s Europa League to qualify for the Champions League, then win that. Neither Crystal Palace nor Rayo Vallecano has ever won a European trophy.
Thank you for reading and for your support!
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