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Ahead of Sunday's relegation melee between the visiting Nottingham Forest and hosting Tottenham Hotspur, a key match in the fight for Premier League survival, Tottenham fans went all-out for their side, rolling up to the streets of North London and making the whole thing feel like a trophy parade. There were flares, chants, and nervous excitement, as Spurs headed into a home match against the team directly below it in the relegation battle. It was quite a sight to behold: And then, Tottenham had to play the game. How did that go?

It wasn’t much of one, truth be told. It had little range. It was erratic, as all my attempts at prime athletic achievements were. It was not as erratic as my long-iron play, and only a little more erratic than my four-parry with an epee. It was deadliest from straight-on, since I did all my early work with it in my parents’ driveway, when I wasn’t turning my ankle on the raised edges of the driveway’s asphalt. And I realize now that I did more intensive work on my jump shot for a longer period of time than I have worked on anything else in my life.  It began when I abandoned my two-handed set shot, and my two-handed set shot was a weapon. If I had come up in the 1930s, I’d have been something else, boy. I learned its basics out of an old book by Nat Holman, the coach who led City College of New York to both the NCAA and NIT championships in the same year. However, on Feb. 18, 1951, three of Holman’s players—Ed Roman, Ed Warner, and Al Roth—were busted in Penn Station as they returned from a game at Temple in Philadelphia. The CCNY players were the centerpiece of the whopping point-shaving scandal that almost ruined college basketball in New York. District Attorney Frank Hogan set off one explosion after another, ranging as far as Bradley University in Illinois and, most spectacularly, as far as the University of Kentucky, where Adolph Rupp, the lordly racist coach of the Wildcats, bragged that New York bookmakers couldn’t touch his group of noble Caucasian youths. Hogan proved him wrong, arresting several members of Rupp’s most recent NCAA championship teams, including stars Alex Groza and Ralph Beard. (That Kentucky team, including Groza and Beard, had been the heart of the 1948 U.S. Olympic team in London, where it is not difficult to find bookmakers. The U.S. went 8-0, and won seven of those games by an average of 36 points per game. However, they only squeaked past Argentina, 59-57.  I’ve always wondered about that game.)

You don't need to shoot a three here, but you do need to solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Matthew Sherman and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Matthew is a game show writer and researcher who lives in Culver City, Calif., with his two kids and one wife. 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. 

Life is beautiful due its unpredictability. For example, until this weekend I never would have been able to imagine a scenario in which global pop superstar Chappell Roan and 2021 third-place Ballon d'Or finisher Jorginho were engaged in a feud because a security guard may or may not have yelled at Jude Law's daughter. And yet that is precisely the world in which we live. Roan was in São Paulo to headline Lollapalooza Brasil this weekend. So was Jorginho's wife, Irish singer Catherine Harding, whose 11-year-old daughter was born during her previous marriage to Jude Law. In a lengthy and dramatic Instagram post, Jorginho claimed that a member of Roan's security team accosted his stepdaughter after she walked past Roan's breakfast table at a hotel where both Roan and his family were staying: During breakfast, the artist walked past their table. My daughter, like any child, recognised her, got excited, and just wanted to make sure it was really her. And the worst part is she didn't even approach her. She simply walked past the singer's table, looked to confirm it was her, smiled, and went back to sit with her mum. She didn't say anything, didn't ask for anything. A large security guard came over to their table while they were still having breakfast and began speaking in an extremely aggressive manner to both my wife and my daughter, saying that she shouldn't allow my daughter to "disrespect" or "harass" other people. Honestly, I don't know at what point simply walking past a table and looking to see if someone is there can be considered harassment. He even said he would file a complaint against them with the hotel, while my 11-year-old daughter was sitting there in tears. My daughter was extremely shaken and cried a lot.

St. John's was blowing it. After building a 56-42 lead against Kansas with eight minutes left to play, they suddenly started getting outworked and outplayed by a Jayhawks team that had spent the previous 32 minutes looking totally uninterested in advancing to the Sweet 16. Kansas came all the way back to tie the game at 65 with 14 seconds left, and then the funny stuff started happening. After Darryn Peterson hit his second free throw to tie things up, Kansas noticed an opportunity. The Jayhawks had only committed two fouls in the half, meaning that they had a handful of intentional fouls to dish out without sending St. John's to the line. Over the next 10 seconds, Kansas committed four fouls, forcing St. John's to inbound the ball over and over again as seconds ticked off the clock. Finally, with 3.9 seconds left, St. John's was able to take their final shot. Senior guard Dylan Darling received the inbounds pass just beyond half court, took a few hard dribbles to his right, and finished at the rim with his right hand, mostly unbothered by a Kansas defense that had seemingly cleared the paint for him. https://youtu.be/0RZ29X3M_9Q?t=195

Of all possible beef pairings among NBA players, Luka Doncic vs. Goga Bitadze is one of the most likely of units to get into a scuffle. When Doncic is not racking up technical fouls for yelling at the referees, he is racking up technical fouls for talking impish trash to players, fans, and really anyone who looks at him funny. Bitadze, meanwhile, is a gleeful enforcer who also mixes it up with opponents when he senses any of his smaller teammates have been insulted. He also famously got into a fight with a Pacers assistant during a game in 2021, which was probably more on the coach, but still, this guy will beef. Which is to say: It is not surprising that Doncic and Bitadze got into it on Saturday. Late in the third quarter, Bitadze fouled Doncic on the perimeter, sending him to the free-throw line and kicking off a shit-talking session. As they went down the court, Doncic got into the big Georgian's face, prompting a double technical. This is Doncic's 16th technical of the season, which triggers an automatic one-game suspension. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFpGfI1fUPk

Take a look at Giants running back Cam Skattebo and one thing becomes immediately clear: If he wasn't a football player, he would be spending a significant amount of time menacing Sacramento-area gas station cashiers for not carrying "the good Monsters." Another truth follows naturally from this one: If any NFL player were to go on a podcast and say that CTE and asthma are not real, it would be Skattebo. That is exactly what Skattebo did on a recent episode of the Bring The Juice podcast. "Do you think CTE is a real thing?" asked host Frank Dalena, who did not record a single statistic while playing wide receiver for three years at Fresno State. "No, it's an excuse," responded Skattebo. Dalena and Skattebo then agreed that asthma is also fake, at which point Dalena laid out a highly relatable scenario: "Is there anything worse than when you're in fourth grade and someone's huffin' and puffin'? You're just soft."

Do you remember when Barbra Banda scored a goal on her birthday to tie up Orlando’s match against Denver? How about when Emma Sears ran the length of the pitch with the ball at her feet to put Louisville up 2-0 on Washington? Or when the Spirit came back to tie it up with a Sofia Cantore scorcher and a Leicy Santos snipe?  Of course you don’t. That’s because the Cascadia Rivalry happened.  Friday’s edition of the NWSL’s most storied rivalry—and arguably its only true rivalry, as the manufactured “District vs. Empire” clash between Washington and Gotham has only just started to grow real teeth over the last couple seasons—had an air of the bizarre before the season even started. It was oddly set for just the second week of the season, and would be Portland’s home opener. 

Here is a loose rule that you can use to determine whether or not Tadej Pogacar is going to win a bike race: If you can see the flank of an asscheek protruding through his tattered skinsuit, nobody is beating him. One year after winning Strade Bianche with his butt flapping in the wind following a heavy crash on a descent, Pogacar again fell hard just before the business end of Milan-San Remo on Saturday. The Slovenian world-conqueror was deep into his second attempt at winning La Classicissima when he went down at what felt like the worst possible time, mere kilometers away from the foot of the Cipressa. The race's penultimate climb was the springboard from which he and Mathieu van der Poel launched their winning move last year, and it was once again the lynchpin of his team's strategy. With his left flank spangled with gore, could Pogacar recover in time to make a move? Would he even have the juice to make such a move stick? Absolutely, yes. Pogacar won in a photo-finish sprint against Tom Pidcock on the Via Roma, after six-and-a-half hours of racing. He has now won four of the five Monument classics, not to mention almost every single other moderately significant race in the sport. Tadej Pogacar has nearly completed cycling at age 27, though unlike so many of his previous classics wins, this was no procession. Pogacar had to scrap for his place in history.

Arkansas point guard Darius Acuff Jr. will be selected near the very top of this summer's NBA draft. He will be a boon to any team in need of a crafty, athletic, classically trained point guard. If there's any knock on his pro prospects, it's his size: He's just short enough to profile as a defensive liability, and these days even the most skilled guards can get bullied out of games by beefy perimeter defenders. And indeed, Acuff's size was a bit of a problem in Saturday night's 94-88 win over 12th-seeded High Point University, but in a way it probably never will be again. He was a little too big. That's because Acuff, who led his team with 36 points on 50 percent shooting, was matched up with Rob Martin. High Point's point guard is listed at 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds, and was one of several HPU players who looked like they had wandered into the wrong gym. The physical disparity ended up mattering not at all—High Point gave their fourth-seeded opponents all they could handle, and at times even looked like the most likely to win the game. The Panthers led at multiple times in the second half, and the game was tied at 83 with just over three minutes to play. It took a personal 7-0 run from Acuff to put the game away once and for all, but before this became Acuff's game, it was Martin's. It was his driving layup that tied the game at 83, and he finished with 30 points on 11-of-23 shooting. How does a 5-foot-10 guy score 30 against a team that only started one player under 6-foot-5? You only have to watch Martin for a few possessions in order to stop feeling sympathy over his stature. That's because it doesn't take long to realize that Martin might actually be the most athletically gifted player on the floor. He has a first step that flash-freezes any defender unlucky enough to be in front of him, enough straight-line speed to shrink the court, and an ability to manipulate the ball and change direction without ever having to decelerate. This makes him the perfect point guard to lead High Point's sped-up, bombs-away offense—the Panthers shot 22 more threes than Arkansas—and all that speed was almost enough to engineer another upset.