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DENVER — The Colorado Avalanche's home building, 26-year-old Puck Arena, is a blandly serviceable midpoint between the old-school kookiness of Calgary's Saddledome and the blinding shininess of Edmonton's Rogers Place. But it's what's on the inside that counts, and credit where it's due: Neither of the two Canadian rinks that I visited on this mountain-time hockey trip came close to the atmosphere at the Avs' shootout win over the Wild on Sunday afternoon. You might say it's easier for a weekend matinee to supply a team with a packed house, because it's an ideal time for a lot of families to go to their one hockey game a year. But the start time doesn't inherently guarantee close attention, and that was a huge part of what made this early-bird game memorable. This was a turbocharged crowd that locked in for the final regular season match-up between two great division rivals from the moment the puck dropped. The fans welcomed back trade-deadline reacquisition Nazem Kadri, of the '22 Cup team, like he was Peter Forsberg, and they went nuts just for a backchecking dispossession he pulled off early in the game. They gassed up goaltender Scott Wedgewood with "Wedgie" chants during his first-star-worthy performance, answering a question I had about whether he went by "Wedgie" or "Woody." They made especially loud "Oh!"s on missed attempts that hit my ears like an express train wooshing through a local station. They got exasperated with the zebras who displayed an abundance of caution on faceoffs. They kept the aisles remarkably clear as the vast majority took intermission as their only cue that it was safe to do business on the concourse. And when the Avs found the back of the net, everyone—not "a lot of people," but everyone—rose to their feet, like it was some deeper evolutionary response to seeing a goal. I hesitate to call this a playoff-game feel, because there's an undercurrent of fear to the cheering when there's so much on the line. These were just thousands of people who were so excited to see the Avalanche play hockey. And why wouldn't they be? The Avs may be coming off a heartbreaking first-round loss to the Stars in last year's postseason, but they've played this year at a level that no other NHL team's been able to match. They're tops in the league at both scoring goals and preventing them. They've got the game's leading scorer in Nathan MacKinnon and the reigning Norris winner in Cale Makar. They're getting a randomly fantastic season out of the journeyman Wedgewood. The depth guys are doing their jobs. And relative newcomers to the club Brock Nelson and Marty Nečas are paying off at a level beyond what anyone reasonably expected. Watching live, it's instantly recognizable how fast this team is, how much chemistry they have, and how much trouble the defense has keeping up. Even on Colorado's chances that don't work out, you can often see what they were thinking and appreciate the beauty they would have achieved if they'd just crossed the goal line, like looking at a sketch from a master painter.

Jayson Tatum played his second game of the season Sunday, after having set what seems like an all-time record for the fastest recovery from a ruptured Achilles tendon. Tatum made his debut Friday at home against the Dallas Mavericks, 298 days from his last appearance, and was somewhat wobbly, but fine; Sunday, on the road against the playoff-bound Cleveland Cavaliers, Tatum looked more confident, and against a much tougher opponent. In both cases, he was one happy guy, grinning and high-fiving, accepting the congratulations of teammates, opponents, fans, really anyone who crossed his path. "I can't stress it enough," an obviously delighted Tatum said after Sunday's victory, "I'm just happy to be out here, playing on a team with the guys, competing, making plays, making mistakes, you know, just happy to be out here." Whatever Tatum imagined about his own recovery, back in the miserable aftermath of the injury, he certainly did not expect to be joining a Celtics team actively contending for the top seed in the Eastern Conference. Not only because Boston would be missing his own services: The Celtics dismantled their roster last summer, shipping out three of their top five players by games started and four of their top nine by total minutes, in addition to the loss of Tatum. Anyone might reasonably have expected this season to be devoted to an entirely forgivable tanking operation. Instead, Joe Mazzulla has hit upon a perfectly respectable rotation, Jaylen Brown has emerged as a frontrunner for MVP, and the Celtics are just a couple games back of the sagging Detroit Pistons in an otherwise not-super-impressive conference. Tatum isn't easing back into the relaxed home-stretch of a one-year retooling project; he's dropping into a starter's role in the early crescendo of a title hunt. There will be pressure with that, which Tatum is sure to feel once the excitement of simply playing basketball in a Celtics uniform wears off a little. In the meantime, his return is all gravy, a terrific gust of good feelings for everyone involved. For as long as he is upright, Tatum is doing more than bolstering Boston's depth: He's rewriting what it means for an in-his-prime NBA player to suffer what has long been considered one of the worst possible basketball injuries.

Paradise is a good show. I have to get that out of the way early, because I do think that it's fun and well-plotted and knotted with enough twists to sustain a strong momentum throughout its eight-episode seasons. The premise is simple enough, though doled out slowly throughout the first episode: President Cal Bradford (played with charm by James Marsden) is murdered, and Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (a sometimes-bored, sometimes-transcendent Sterling K. Brown) is trying to figure out whodunit. That by itself would be interesting enough to merit a peek, but the big reveal at the end of the premiere is that all of the events of the show are taking place in an underground bunker somewhere under Colorado. See, the world outside this bunker has been ravaged by what we first think is nuclear war but later, in the show's best episode "The Day," is revealed to be something else entirely. There are conspiracies centered around Bradford's murder and the machinations of Samantha Redmond (codename: Sinatra), and it's all pulpy fun that, in a lot of ways good and bad, reminds me of Lost. I've enjoyed my journey this past week binging the show on Hulu, but it has one glaring problem that ruins almost every episode: The music fucking sucks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2AkkbxwIMI

Call it the Orson Scott Card problem. You want to recommend a piece of sci-fi to a friend, but you know that if you do you'll have to include the disclaimer that the author's politics are diametrically opposed to your own, and you find them downright objectionable. You truly love the book, and you think your friend will love it too, but you wonder if you even want to bother with the whole rigamarole the disclaimer requires. The best way I can describe Dan Simmons, who died last month at age 77, is as someone who got driven crazy by watching too much Fox News after September 11th. Not one but two of his future-set novels feature as major plot points a Global Islamic Caliphate. One of those, Flashback, is basically one long rant about how the American left would ruin the world if they gained power. Not that Simmons didn't have some taste issues before—Song of Kali, his World Fantasy Award–winning first novel, has some moments that read decades later as stunningly racist—but late-career Simmons was at times totally unredeemable. This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror, which inspired the well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition.

For my money, the best part of any World Baseball Classic is not the back end of the tourney, when the field has been whittled to the world's best and the level of play is immaculate. Sure, there's some good baseball there, and high drama, and it's where bragging rights truly get parceled out as the sport's superpowers face each other: your Japans, your DRs, your USAs. No, pool play is where the most fun is to be found. Think of it like the opening weekend of March Madness, where the draw is not necessarily greatness, but joy: teams who have little business holding their own against the titans and doing it anyway; getting to learn about the quirks and traditions of those more obscure teams; heavy-traveling fans who make a neutral site feel like a home game; feeling, secondhand but unmistakable, the pride players take in wearing their colors. With so much baseball going on at the same time, it all just kind of washes over you in a pleasant cultural stew. There's the Emperor of Japan attending an international baseball game for the first time in nearly 60 years. There's the Italians drinking espresso in the dugout. There's Luis Arraez inexplicably turning into Barry Bonds, but once again only for a WBC. There is cool and/or weird shit going on at basically any moment; it is, like baseball itself, best consumed in bulk. And yet, in the five previous editions of the Classic, one not-uncommon thing had somehow never happened even once: a walk-off home run, that purest of baseball joys. On Saturday we got two, and if you're still a little cynical about this tournament or feel like it's not taken as seriously as it could be, this is the stuff you'd want to distill and bottle.

Tuning in for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on Saturday night (Sunday afternoon in Melbourne), I was expecting many things. I was expecting Aston Martin to retire from the race early in order to avoid causing Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll physical harm. I was expecting a few other retirements from the race due to reliability issues and the jankiness of the new cars. I was expecting a George Russell win, and a comfortable one at that. All of those things came true, more or less. Hilariously, both Alonso and Stroll looked to be retiring only to come out miles behind to do some on-track testing; the graphics team surely had fun writing "+12 laps" there. Because I am a fool and a Ferrari fan, however, I did not foresee a vintage dose of Ferrari strategy shenanigans, which only made their traditional appearance on race day all the more demoralizing. Before getting into that, I do have to apologize to the new regulations, for I was not familiar with their game. Right from the start of the race, after the new five-second pre-start procedure, it became clear that these cars had some real racing juice in them. This is not to say that they are faster than last season's—they're not—or easier to drive—they're not—but wheel-to-wheel racing is a lot more viable, as is close following of the car in front of a driver. Thanks to Charles Leclerc absolutely bodying the start of the race—the Ferrari might not have the Mercedes's raw power on straights, but it's a monster in its own right off the line and in corners—the presumptive George Russell stroll to P1 was delayed thoroughly. https://twitter.com/F1/status/2030496063111475552

EDMONTON, Alberta — While fans of the Calgary Flames are steeling themselves to say goodbye to the Saddledome at the end of the 2026–27 season, their rivals to the north are worried about a different kind of countdown. Connor McDavid, the franchise center who's piloted the Edmonton Oilers to back-to-back Stanley Cup Finals, may or may not leave town when the extension he signed before this season expires in the summer of 2028. Either way, by god does this city want to celebrate a Cup before his era eventually comes to a close. The 29-year-old has already earned a trophy case full of individual awards that attest to his greatness, and he can exhibit them in his unspeakably chilling home if he so wishes. But the NHL's assists and points leader (yet again) is special in a more tactile sense when you see him live. Hockey is kind of strange for the way it cloaks the vast majority of its players in anonymity. Even serious attendees paying attention to the action would be hard pressed to rattle off the names of all the guys on the ice at a given moment, because the game is very fast and no one stays on the ice for long and the skaters all look basically the same from far away. But in the four games I've seen McDavid play live—three on the road and one, on Friday, at home—he stands out, in part because the folks in the seats seem primed to exclaim his name as soon as he touches the puck. I noticed it again as the Oilers took on the Carolina Hurricanes: He calmly moved through the neutral zone with possession as two voices on opposite sides of my section shouted "McDavid!" In opposing venues, some goofuses might be more likely to yelp "McJesus!", but that counts too. They do it because special things tend to happen when the puck is on McDavid's stick. He is extraordinarily fast. He contains amusement-park spin moves. He expertly plays the role of Knife opposite the defense's Butter. And sometimes he is just magic personified.

Here is a funny headline from the CBS Sports website: "Hawks will not cancel 'Magic City' event despite Luke Kornet's public plea." Dang! My faith in Luke Kornet's power to halt the promotional machinery of multibillion-dollar professional sports franchises with mildly worded blog posts may never recover from this. They just ignored his plea! Let's back up. The Atlanta Hawks announced, a little over a week ago, that their March 16 home game against the Orlando Magic would also be "Magic City Monday," honoring what the official press release calls the "iconic cultural institution" Magic City, which the official press release carefully does not identify as, but which is, a famous Atlanta strip club, open since 1985 and closely associated with the city's hip-hop scene. Also, Drake (infamously regarded as a culture vulture to that scene) once reportedly had an armored car deliver $100,000 in cash to the club. That is just a fun factoid of dubious provenance and not relevant to this story. It is not mentioned in any of Luke Kornet's pleas. Magic City is associated with the NBA too, in a funnier way. During the COVID-19 pandemic and abbreviated 2019-20 season, Lou Williams, then with the Los Angeles Clippers, was granted an absence from the locked-down Orlando bubble so that he could attend funeral services in Atlanta; during that absence, photos showed up on Instagram of Williams in a largely empty Magic City, in the middle of an afternoon, with the rapper Jack Harlow. Williams, who later admitted that "as far as the public safety issue goes, I probably could have made a better quality decision," explained that he'd just stopped by the club—"properly masked [...] socially distanced [...] doing everything that I thought was appropriate"—to pick up some takeout food on his way back from the wake, and happened to bump into Harlow while there.

Of all the trade deadlines, the NHL's is the best because it is the most active and most chaotic. How chaotic, you ask? Try this. The St. Louis Blues traded defenseman Colton Parayko to the Buffalo Sabres, a big deal given the fact that, in a reversal of traditional fortunes, the Sabres are among the best teams in the league. The two sides agreed to a deal, and then … ONLY THEN, we tell you, did the Blues ask Parayko if he would waive his no-movement clause and accept the deal. And Parayko said no. You would think this would have been done in the opposite order just out of simple logic. "Colton, can we trade you to a team that could win the Stanley Cup?" "No. Piss off." "OK, cool. Tell the Sabres we can’t deal.” But there you go. A player exercising his contract provisions is somehow a surprise because they declined to ask ahead of time. It's not been a particularly good deadline. When the day began, TSN's Trade Centre (yeah, Centre) had a promotion from one of the gambling consortii for an over/under of 18.5 trades on the day itself, and it took until 10:30 a.m. to get the first one, and then another hour and change before the second. You be the general manager? No, you bet on human movement futures and find out that the whole league has a no-trade deal today and you're on the chair-bottom end of it. Even the lack of action makes it worthwhile, because everyone has to back and fill with other rumors that don't come off. And because the actual deadline doesn't mean the end of the news—all trades have to be filed with the league office, which then sifts through the details to see if the money and other provisions work. That means you can get an announcement on a trade hours after the end of the trade deadline, so it's not a deadline as much as a last call.

I remember individual seasons of Survivor by and for their "mood." This is a nebulous bit of recall, because "mood" (or "vibe," if you will) is both subjective and insufficient; distilling roughly twelve hours of programming into one word is inevitably going to leave a lot out. But this is how my brain works, and so we're all just going to have to roll with it. Some seasons are chaotic [derogatory] (Gabon) and others are chaotic [complimentary] (Cambodia — Second Chance). Some seasons are dark (Island of the Idols, Caramoan), and others are brutal (Kaoh Rong with its three medevacs, Africa with the poop water). It's easy to love the ones that can be filed under the "epic" label (Heroes vs. Villains, Winners at War), and most everyone who cares about the show does. But, in my heart of hearts, I think I love Survivor most when it's just "silly." While it normally takes most of the season to decide upon a corresponding mood, the second episode of Survivor's ongoing 50th season, "Therapy Carousel," has made it very clear that this is going to be an extremely foolish season. Again, that is not a bad thing, and it is also not an all-encompassing designation; there have been plenty of thrilling strategic and physical moments already; you've got Cirie swiftly dictating her tribe's votes away from herself and from her ally Ozzy Lusth in back-to-back episodes for the former; anything Jonathan Young has done in challenges for the latter, as much as it pains me to say that. And there was a real bummer of an ending in episode one, as season 48 winner Kyle Fraser had to be pulled from the game after rupturing his Achilles tendon. (He seems to be taking it all in stride.) Survivor is a bloated game, and season 50, with its 24 initial players, couldn't help but avoid the "something for everyone" temptation. It's unclear to me as yet whether that's [derogatory] or [complimentary]. All that being said, wow did episode two really lean into both the intentional and unintentional comedy that's inherent in the show's ridiculous premise. Putting this many people into the wilderness with minimal supplies and food eventually drives everyone more than a little crazy, and while that sometimes manifests in uncomfortable ways, it also opens everyone up to a healthy dose of insanity. Oh, and also gastrointestinal distress, which is how episode two kicked off: Christian Hubicki was simply chatting with tribemate Joe Hunter when he made the same face a baby might make when they fill their diaper. He did this because that's essentially what happened. Christian, a robotics professor and one of the most intelligent and likable contestants to ever play Survivor, fully shat his pants on day four.