NowLoop

I like to think that I am both a professional at what I do and a sports fan still not too jaded to have lost my irrational passions. I'm lucky enough to work at Defector, where I am free to exercise both of those two sides of myself, which is why I can openly throw my bias in everyone's face by saying this, even if I can't believe it as I type it: I am absolutely rooting for Manchester City to come from behind and steal the Premier League title from Arsenal. Trust me, as a renowned and beloved Liverpool fan, this hurts me more to write than it does you to read. My Pool Boys battled with City for years on either side of the COVID pandemic, and came second in all but one year of direct confrontation (the awkwardly interrupted 2019-20 season). Twice Liverpool finished an agonizing single point behind City in a title race, and that's a fate I never thought I'd wish on another club. Until now, that is. Thanks to the events of this past weekend, not only am I rooting for Pep Guardiola and his band of state-bought mercenaries, but I am doing so with few reservations, thanks both to the return of the best kind of Pepball and to the continued existence of Mikel Arteta's torturous brand of soccer. Let's start with Arsenal, because I feel pretty confident in saying that Saturday's 2-1 home defeat to Bournemouth was the worst Gunners performance of the season.

The Milwaukee Bucks fired Doc Rivers on Monday. What a terrible time they have all had. The Bucks failed to advance out of the first round of the playoffs in two previous tries under Rivers; this season, beset by injuries to Giannis Antetokounmpo and showing that characteristic idealessness of a Rivers-coached team, they played to a miserable 32-win record, missed the play-in, wound up in a public fight with their best player, and entered recrimination season well before the close of their official one. Rivers took the job in January 2024, in what looked at the time like a midseason coup d'état: The Bucks had hired Rivers to be an advisor to rookie head coach Adrian Griffin, but Griffin was fired after 43 games, despite coaching the Bucks to a record of 30–13. I cannot confidently accuse Rivers of having played the scheming vizier, but his time as head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers had ended months earlier with grinding frustration and apocalyptic vibes, and a side door might've been his only realistic route back into the big chair with a real-deal contender. In any case, as the prize for a few months of no official duties under general manager Jon Horst and Milwaukee's owners, Rivers found himself coaching in the All-Star game and helming a would-be championship contender. It didn't work: Rivers coached that team to a 17–19 finish and an early playoff exit. The Bucks may have made a mistake in hiring an aging coach who was previously spending his time playing golf and mailing in appearances on Bill Simmons's podcast, but they stuck with their guy. The Bucks won 48 games and avoided the play-in last season, but Damian Lillard came down with deep vein thrombosis in late March, sat out the remainder of the regular season, played like shit for two games of a first-round playoff series, and then suffered a devastating Achilles injury that wiped out his 2025–26 season. In a move that will be rued for a generation by suffering Bucks fans, the team decided to use the NBA's stretch provision to waive Lillard, adding more than $22 million in dead salary to their annual payroll until the summer of 2030. Rivers and Horst flew to Greece ahead of this season in order to convince a skeptical Antetokounmpo that this was good business, that the team could compete by using savings from the maneuver to sign Myles Turner. That also has not worked.

Despite threats—by an editor who shall go unnamed, but who does not have my best interests in mind—to ship me off to Aintree Racecourse to cover the event in person, I am once again conducting an ethnography of English horse race attendees from the safe remove of Getty Images. By year three, one begins to pick up patterns, such as the fact that the atmosphere at the Grand National is not only perpetually soused but also, as is true for much of England, perpetually damp. This year's edition emphasizes the latter point, focusing on attempts to use and/or manufacture an umbrella to stay warm and dry. You will be pleased to hear that dampness is not enough to deter attendees from sitting upon the pavement.

Before Sunday, Wout van Aert's professional cycling career looked most like a testament to the irresistible force of entropy. Before Sunday, the Belgian had never won either of the two biggest one-day races on the calendar, suffering untimely crashes and mechanicals, always seeming to get injured at the wrong time, and occasionally being a victim of his own strength, the sort of rider nobody would work with. Before Sunday, van Aert's glaring inability to win Paris-Roubaix—the race that means the most both to him personally and to Belgian fans collectively—despite finishing in the top-10 all the time and looking like one of the most talented and natural bike riders of his generation had begun to feel like it would be the first line when the story of his career was written. Before Sunday, you could look at van Aert as a tragic figure, haunted by the twinned misfortune of regular-old bad luck on the bike and the bad timing of happening to race at the same time as Mathieu van der Poel and Tadej Pogacar. Before Sunday, you could get away with saying "Wouth Place," to denote a specifically van Aertian genre of bungled win. Before Sunday, you could look at van Aert—world cyclocross champion, one-time Monument winner, author of defining Tour de France performances—and see a rider who could have been more, a 31-year-old who wasted the best chances he would ever get to take a career-defining win. Before Sunday, you could read van Aert's 10 top-10s and zero wins at the two cobbled Monuments as a reminder of cycling's cruelty and painfulness, that losing is the background radiation of the sport and that winning offers but a temporary escape. After Sunday, nobody will ever look at Wout van Aert that way again.

Finally, after 25 weeks, 1,230 games, 59-some-odd-thousand minutes and 280,000-ish points scored, the NBA's Preseason In Hell is over. Whatever awaits in the NBA Playoffs, the world can at least approach it with the comforting knowledge that it won't have to look at or think about the Utah Jazz again until October. Or, for that matter, any of the NBA's other Tankin' Ten, who managed to elevate the art of insulting our collective intelligence to an almost unprecedented degree over the NBA's grueling 82-game prelude to the good stuff. For example, five of those tankers managed to rank among the 17 worst teams for defensive care in league history, and not because they couldn't master the arcana of the high pick and roll. Washington lost 25 of its last 26 games by an average margin of 16 points per game, an astonishing counter-achievement in its own right but also only part of the most aggressively unsatisfying anti-season in modern basketball history. The fact that every team that could tank did so with such unnerving gusto, the high accumulation of injuries both real and contrived, the administrative ruination of postseason awards, the Clippers laughing at the salary cap and getting away with it, and the general sense of misery brought on by reading too much about the Los Angeles Lakers helped make it all a thoroughly dreadful slog. We make the same sense out of Doug Christie keeping his job in Sacramento that we do of Doc Rivers being fired in Milwaukee, which is none at all. The bottom of the league hijacked the top and has held a whoopie cushion to its ear from Christmas Day to now.

Feeling blue? Why not try our Monday crossword? This week's puzzle was constructed by Dylan Fugel, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Dylan is a German-Burmese sketch comedian, arts educator, and occasional puzzle constructor based in New York. Do not talk to him about Borussia Dortmund or the Knicks; there is a history of high blood pressure in his family. 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. Please note that submissions will be closed from April 1 to May 1. 

I had not felt this nervous since buying BTS concert tickets. Like many other Southern California residents, I had dutifully signed up for the presale of tickets to the 2028 Olympic Games. These tickets, we were told, would be available exclusively for us. Well, for us and also residents of Oklahoma City, where softball and canoe slalom will be contested. The arrangement seemed something like a reward for our city hosting one of the largest, most popular, and most outrageously logistically challenging sporting events in the world. It's certainly more than residents are getting for hosting several World Cup games. The advertisements even told us that more than 1 million tickets would be available for the low price of $28. (Get it? Because it's 2028!) So I signed up through LA28's very neon-pink website, and so did my husband. So did many others. LA28's press update said we were joined in the digital line by more than 5 million people from around the world. Beyond that, nobody in Los Angeles really knew what to expect until, suddenly, the emails began arriving. Some of us were chosen—and some of us were not. The ticket draw for locals was scheduled to start on April 2, but word began popping up in various corners of the internet that some people were already getting emails at random saying they had not been selected. A decent portion of the city turned to incessantly refreshing its email, which did not make anyone happier or saner. Conversations with other adult Angelenos hoping for Olympics tickets took on the tenor of high school kids applying to college: Did you get in? How are you feeling about the process? And why won't anyone tell us anything?

For a little while there, it looked like Rory McIlroy was going to make it easy on himself for once. He held a six-stroke lead after the first two rounds of the 2026 Masters Tournament, granting himself the largest 36-hole lead in the tournament's history. That he built his lead with a back-nine blitz on Friday, birdying six of the last seven holes, seemed to be a good omen. Maintain the momentum, sink a couple birdies to start the third round, and he'd breeze to back-to-back Masters titles. Nothing's ever breezy for McIlroy, though. Moving day was not kind to the Northern Irishman. McIlroy followed up his second-round 65 with an ugly 73 on Saturday, and by the time he finished piling up bogeys, he'd fallen into a tie for the lead headed into Sunday. A birdie on the third hole seemed to steady things, but then came a double-bogey on the fourth and a bogey on the sixth, and suddenly McIlroy was two shots off the lead. Say this about Rory McIlroy: He might be prone to hurling himself off the top of the ladder, but he'll hold onto that last rung for dear life. Back-to-back birdies on the seventh and eighth hole got him back in the tournament, and another brace of birdies on holes 12 and 13 put him back in control. By that point, his path to victory was clear: Just get through the final five holes while protecting a two-shot lead over Scottie Scheffler, whose final-round 68 had him leading in the clubhouse.

I went to New Orleans for a wedding last weekend. I used to go there pretty often, for work conventions and lots of Jazzfests, but hadn’t been back since Katrina. I was happy at how much the city, in this small three-day sampling, seemed like its old self. Among the many familiar things that enthralled me all over again: Cafe du Monde. I went twice. So great! But then a certain someone—who, because I admire and respect and like her so much, will only be identified in my story as “Defector editor Brandy Jensen”—told me I made a mistake. I should have instead gone to Loretta’s, which Defector editor Brandy Jensen wanted to make sure I knew “has better beignets.”  No, Defector editor Brandy Jensen, I shouldn’t’ve gone to Loretta’s. For all I know, this Loretta’s place gets all the Michelin stars and sweeps all the James Beards every year for its beignets, and deserves ’em. Perhaps you should go to Loretta’s. But, by god, I still made a righteous choice both times I ended up at Cafe du Monde. 

The premise of Last One Laughing UK is simple and diabolical: stick a bunch of professionally funny people in a room together for six hours and forbid them from laughing. Crack once and you get a warning, break a second time and you’re out.  The first season was an unexpected hit on Amazon Prime last year, largely on the strength of eventual champion Bob Mortimer, who can deliver a phrase like “meats and cheeses, always pleases” in a way that will still make you laugh when you think about it days or weeks later. Mortimer is back for Season 2, which premiered on March 19, ostensibly as a ringer, although the cast this year is so stacked that it doesn’t feel unfair.  Even if you don’t happen to have subscriptions to both Britbox and BBC Select (what can I say, I love watching sardonic detectives solve murders in various damp locales), you’ll probably recognize a few faces. They run the gamut of unflappability from stone-cold deadpan queen Diane Morgan, better known as Philomena Cunk, to Alan Carr, a man so flappable he giggles about as often as he breathes. Also in the mix are comedian Romesh Ranganathan, former Bake Off host Mel Giedroyc, Taskmaster standout Maisie Adam, and a handful of other people who all contribute to the robust entertainment economy of British chat shows.