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What's the difference between betting on sports and "trading on a prediction market?" For the gambler herself, very little. If you go on Kalshi, the suddenly ubiquitous "prediction market" platform that has enjoyed the backing of the Trump administration, one can click on the "sports" tab and see a list of, among other events, all the college basketball games being played today. One can "buy shares" in, say, Kennesaw St. to beat Gonzaga, and if that result happens, she will collect profit from the money "invested" by the losers. Kalshi, with a straight face, argues that this is different from traditional sportsbook betting because they are a neutral party simply charging transaction fees, instead of a bookmaker charging a vig. But if you define sports gambling as "risking money on a sporting event in the hopes of making more money," all the synonyms in the world can't hide that. The state of Arizona sees it this way, too. This week, the AG of the Copper State became the first to file criminal charges against Kalshi for running an illegal gambling operation. Their argument quite simply amounts to "you can gamble on Kalshi," with the lawsuit detailing 20 straightforward instances of various bets on sports and elections accepted by the platform. That you can bet on any world event besides sports on these things opens up a whole other kind of hell, but for today let's keep the focus limited to sports. On Thursday, MLB announced that it is partnering with Polymarket, a Kalshi competitor prepping for a full-scale U.S. launch, to make them "MLB’s Official Prediction Market Exchange." The deal gives Polymarket the right to use MLB's IP and data, and it supposedly gives the league some power to put restrictions on certain kinds of bets that would be especially vulnerable to insider trading, like individual pitches and manager decisions. As of this writing, MLB's press release refers to this as an "iintegrity framework" [sic].

Nothing But Respect is a little late this week due to a small error that I explain here at the opening of the episode. We had Tyler Parker of the Ringer on this week, because he's an Oklahoma City Thunder fan and after several of our most recent guests have teed off on OKC, we thought it would be a good idea to get a Thunder partisan on the podcast to talk about what it's like to be the villain. Harry also conducted extensive research into the guys who were responsible for defending Wilt Chamberlain in his 100-point game. It should be noted that this episode contains discussion of Charlie Brown Jr.

This week we are launching The Span, Defector’s first and only culture newsletter. Every other week, we will collect the best non-sports writing from Defector so that you won’t miss anything, and also let you in on what we’ve been reading elsewhere. Like the Culture section itself, this newsletter will be driven entirely by our…

A lot of folks don't like the NHL's current playoff format, which tries its best to sequester teams within their own divisions for the first two rounds before matching up the winners in the conference final. The goal is to deliver more rivalries and repeat match-ups in the early stages, which is noble (unless you're a Kings fan). But it can look kind of ridiculous in a case like this year's Western Conference, where the Anaheim Ducks lead the Pacific Division but would sit a distant fourth if they were moved into the Central. As it stands, the three best teams in the West—the Avalanche, Stars, and Wild—will have to fight it out amongst themselves. And then the conference final would begin. This isn't exactly fair to the best teams. But here's a counterargument: I am very impatient to see the Central's terrible trio face each other in best-of-sevens, and the NHL will not make me wait. In the three games that have involved these three teams this month—Stars-Avs, Avs-Wild, Stars-Avs again—fans have been exclusively treated to overtime stalemates that needed shootouts to determine a winner, and thus have no predictive relevance for the eternal OT of the postseason. On March 6, it was the Avalanche who scored an equalizer with 15 seconds left in the third and eventually stole the extra point. A few days later, with yours truly in attendance, Minnesota and Colorado played to their full potential with a 3-2 Avs win that had fans on the edges of their seats for over 65 minutes of action. And on Wednesday, with the Stars traveling to Denver in a contest of teams trying to avoid third-place Minnesota in the opening round, it was second-place Dallas who gained a point on the Avs with a 2-1 win that, once again, required a post-OT tiebreak.

It's been a bit of a tough go for newspaper readers in the San Francisco Bay Area this past week, not that it necessarily matters to the outside world. Two longtime staples of the sporting palaver industry, Dave Newhouse, most notably of the Oakland Tribune, and Carl Steward of the Bay Area News Group (everything in the East Bay that isn't Oakland, essentially) both passed within a few days of each other. They were regulars on people's porches and laptops and in press boxes across the various area codes for many years, as well as admired colleagues and worthwhile companions. They were worth every drink and meal your author ever had with either of them, even if all we were doing was repenting for envying their work behind their backs. But death being non-negotiable and all, we can only be saddened by their transition to Level Two, because that's the way this game ends for all of us, holding tight to our aces and tens while the reaper sits with quad nines.  There is, however, the other matter of the retirement of longtime Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Scott Ostler, the announcement of which is being greeted with entirely the wrong sentiment by his colleagues and readers. In other words, none of his admirers get it. At all. Now Ostler has been at this dodge for most of his adult life, which, given that he just passed his double natural birthday is more than half a century. He has been much lauded in that time, winning the California Sportswriter of the Year award 13 times, or once every four years, give or take; being only 13 behind him in that category, we can only assume this is a good thing, provided there was also cash involved. In short, the guy started out with game, has had game the whole time along, and has game now.

The NCAA men's tournament begins today, and I hope that you’ve got everything you need on hand to enjoy the games when they tip off later this afternoon. Beer? Check. Pre-scheduled takeout order for wings? Check. A slipshod plan to flee the office an hour after lunch? Oh yeah, that’s a check. Almond butter? What’s that, you have no almond butter on hand? You had all winter to get ready for this weekend, and you forgot to get your hands on some of that nutty, oily goodness? Buddy, what the FUCK is wrong with you? Everyone is about almond butter these days, even this Arizona player who I know nothing about.

The colonial travelogue was already a bloated genre by the time Jonathan Swift decided to poke fun at it in the 1720s. London publisher Richard Hakluyt began compiling folios of “true relations” penned by returning sailors as early as the 16th century. They had an episodic quality. Each chronicle was the latest installment in a serial that began in 1492 and extended indefinitely into the future. A full-bearded Englishman (or Dutchman, or Scotsman, or Frenchman) landed on shores where everything was unfamiliar. After trial and triumph, the hero returned home to tell the tale. Except no hero could tell his tale alone. Any chronicle that wound up bound between fly-leaves was first selected by an editor and annotated by a small army of translators and censors. Part of the sport of reading a travelogue was to guess which fantastical claims were true, or at least true to the chronicler’s tale, and which were embellished by the folio’s editor. Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels satirized this dynamic in 1726. In an introductory note, the narrator cursed his editors for their “infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating,” and accused “your printer” of mangling the text with falsehoods. “Do these miserable animals presume to think that I am so degenerated as to defend my veracity?” Gulliver asked his readers, before his story even began.

Whose puck is it? Jack Hughes's overtime goal to win Olympic gold is hockey history, maybe the single most important physical object in American hockey history. You could make the case for some Miracle equipment which surely smells awful by now, but that wasn't even the gold-medal game. The Hughes puck is a pure distillation, the sudden-death difference between defeat and world-champ status in one small, black disc of vulcanized rubber and entrance-fee bait. Any player would want it. Any collector would want it. Any hall of fame would want it. I wouldn't say no, if they'd like to give it to me. But who should have it? (I vote me.) Well, start with who does have it. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, they say, so barring a daring Hughes Brothers midnight raid on the Hockey Hall of Fame, it's in Toronto and staying in Toronto. Jack, when asked about this on Wednesday, stirred the perfect silly 12-hour news cycle for a bored NHL limping to the end of its regular season. "I'm trying to get it," Hughes told ESPN's Greg Wyshynski. "Like, that's bullshit that the Hockey Hall of Fame has it, in my opinion. Why would they have that puck?"

You can tell a lot about a college basketball fan by what they miss. Cut me open and the concentric rings of idle sentiment that have accrued over a lifetime spent caring about this stuff will date me to my precise moment of conversion, on a well-timed sick day back in middle school; it remains the first and only legit sick day among the many I've called in during the first days of the NCAA Tournament in the years since. It will date me in general, too, not just in terms of the players and teams I remember best but for how different the shape and context of those moments were. When the NCAA Tournament starts in earnest, the basketball will be more efficient and polished and beautiful than the stuff that hooked me decades ago, as befits the fact that players are now getting paid for their labor in ways that can finally be acknowledged officially. If there is something unsettled and unsettling about the contemporary college game, it comes down to watching it become optimized in the same degrading contempo-style free-market ways that you'll recognize from every other corner of public life. Again, you have to know what you're actually missing, and that all this novel fuckery is leveling and bleaching something that was once scuzzier, jankier, and less finished is regrettable in some ways without actually being bad and only tenuously qualifying as "new." College basketball is driven by a vigorous gray market in teenage wing players; that market is overseen to no great effect by an irredeemable, corrupt, and badly diminished regulatory authority, and dictated from one moment to the next by the whims of sour monied alumni and local car dealership types and sneaker companies. That has been true for more or less my whole life, and what feels new amounts to an increasing refinement and liberation of that old pursuit. What's uncanny about it comes from watching as college basketball crafts itself into a tiered independent minor-league enterprise more or less from first principles. Liberalized transfer rules allow players to seek out the best pay and developmental situations they can find, and they do; a market proliferates around this as reliably as mushrooms after rain, with brokers and technologies making it possible for schools at every level to participate in this marketplace. How much you spend, here as everywhere else, dictates how much you will get. Every year, now, college basketball is made over by those forces.

I’m a sucker for contrarian tournament picks. Sure, I could spend some time telling you why a one-seed is going to win the title, but who really finds joy in touting the favorite? You’d have to be a heartless sociopath to do that, whereas I am a normal man who spends a lot of his time assessing the relative quality of every college basketball team in Division I. So please indulge me while I tell you why Purdue is going to win the title this year. Let’s start our journey with a fun fact. If you care about filling out a bracket, this is the time of year when you get inundated with fun facts by engagement farmers. They generally go something like this: "Only these teams can win a title based upon [a very specific set of qualifications], which are [cherry-picked with curiously arbitrary cutoffs]." For instance you may hear that, based on history, a team’s offensive rating has to be in the top 31 to win a title. As if a team ranked 32 has no chance. The term for this is data dredging. And while it’s a pretty terrible practice if you’re trying to find a cure for cancer, it’s honestly not that big of a deal if you just want to get a few extra eyeballs on your Reddit post. These nuggets of trivia often make use of my own ratings. I disavow all such efforts, but there’s only so much one can do.