NowLoop

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This puzzle was constructed by Will Eisenberg, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Will is a French horn player, music teacher, and puzzlemaker. Will is 3rd horn of Orchestra Iowa, and a member of the leadership team for Lil AVCX. Will helped to edit Midis for Minnesota, a charity crossword pack raising funds for Minnesotan immigrant families affected by ICE's presence. 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. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial:"With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

A playoff series will eventually teach you how to watch it. Once the players have settled into their matchups and the coaches have made their big tactical adjustments, you can start to zero in on a few things that will decide the series. If Team A is able to do Y and prevent Team B from doing X, then they will win, etc. The nice thing about this year's Western Conference Finals is that you don't have to work very hard to find the series' hinge point. You just have to look at the 7-foot-5 guy standing in the middle of the court. The Spurs won Game 4 on Sunday night, 103-82. If you are wondering how the defending champions were held to their lowest scoring mark of the entire season, look no further than Victor Wembanyama. His 33 points, eight rebounds, and three blocks speak for themselves, but as is always the case with Wembanyama, he has to be seen to be believed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5OyiDblFCA

I'm generally loath to make the same pun that all the other media outlets are running with, but the Colorado Avalanche's current situation makes it irresistible. So here goes: Dude, where's Makar? The Avs were the juggernaut of the NHL this year, and after going 8–1 through the first two rounds of the playoffs (the second against a very tough Minnesota squad), they looked like the betting favorite to break the Presidents' Trophy curse—that no team who posted the best regular-season record in an 82-game campaign has gone on to hoist the Stanley Cup since 2008. But against a Vegas group who looked to have a decided disadvantage, all their swagger and beauty has been caked in mud. The Knights triumphed 4–2 in Game 1 on the road, and then on Friday, they scored two goals in the third period (plus an empty netter) to grab another win, 3–1. What's gone so wrong? Well, in the NHL playoffs, you can always point to the crease. Carter Hart, who returned to the league after he was found not guilty in a sexual assault trial, is outplaying Colorado goalie Scott Wedgewood, a 33-year-old journeyman who'd enjoyed a randomly dominant regular season. That's part of the difference, but an even more stressful issue for the Avalanche has been the absence of Cale Makar, who's missed the last two games due to a shoulder injury.

It will comfort New York Giants fans not at all to learn that quarterback Jaxson Dart did not chitter like a raccoon, or bark like a walrus, or vocalize in the manner of any other wild creature when reached on Saturday by teammate Abdul Carter. A little bit of gibberish might even have been encouraging: Carter and Dart, after all, were clearing the air about the latter having spent a portion of his Friday at a right-wing political rally in Rockland County, New York, introducing Donald Trump to the stage beneath a large sign reading "New York Welcomes President Donald J. Trump." Evidence of a dissociative episode would've softened some of that drearily familiar but still very acute misery of learning that someone you've rooted for is an enthusiastic MAGA freak. Sadly, Carter confirmed that Dart has not started clucking like a chicken. "We spoke earlier as Men," he announced in a tweet, hours after posting his disapproval of Dart's appearance at the rally. Dart really did the shit: Friday afternoon, with "Eye of the Tiger" blaring from the sound system and hundreds of smartphone cameras trained on the dais, Dart strutted up to the microphone, be-mulleted, and addressed the audience in the manner of a thoroughly pregamed sixth-year college senior who has just entered a dark and noisy house party and is still trying to figure out if any of his buddies are in the crowd. The speech was not very inspired. https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mmhowtz3wd2m

The Carolina Hurricanes have long known what they've been missing: a dynamite top-line presence (or two) who could force a breakthrough with sheer skill when the team's fundamentally sound play wasn't doing enough to give them an advantage late in the postseason. The underlying engine of the Canes was running without a hitch—this is their eighth straight year with a playoff series win. But in order to beat the very best of the best in the second and third rounds, which they have yet to do in the Rod Brind'Amour era, there was no way around the fact that the Canes needed more talent. That's easier said than done, of course. Carolina tried their best to just go out and get a superstar when they traded for Mikko Rantanen last year, but they quickly had to annul the marriage after just 13 games because it was pretty clear that Moose was there against his will. Instead, they had to make bets on guys who weren't as well-regarded, hoping they'd get the best possible version. You can't argue with the results so far. Looking at their playoff leading scorers, Logan Stankoven was a then-rookie who was part of the return for Rantanen, Jackson Blake was a fourth-round pick in 2021, and now, alongside them on that leaderboard, is Nikolaj Ehlers, their big free-agent signing of the summer. On the day after the Canes' Game 2 win over Montreal to even the series at 1–1, he's looking like one of the best decisions this franchise has made. Ehlers, a winger from Denmark, spent the first decade of his career in Winnipeg, potting between 20 and 30 goals in every single year except his rookie campaign and one where he missed a bunch of time due to injury. That made him something short of an elite NHL scorer but still the best prize of the 2025 free-agent class. It was the Canes who won his hand, and Ehlers delivered a right-on-pace 26 goals for them this past regular season. His playoffs started anonymously, as he missed a game and tallied just one assist in the Ottawa sweep, but he was very helpful against the Flyers in the second round. And on Saturday, with the Canes trying not to drop two straight at home to the Canadiens, Ehlers was downright indispensable.

The Knicks, barring cosmic intervention, are headed to the NBA Finals. All that is left to learn in this series is whether or not New York will let Cleveland have a game. The 121–108 scoreline from Game 3 pretty badly misrepresents the gap between the East's last remaining contenders. The Cavs appear physically spent and mentally boomed. The Knicks, meanwhile, haven't lost in a month, and Saturday night they became just the 10th team in NBA history to win at least 10 consecutive games in the same postseason. Personally, I prefer a quick clean kill to a polite delay, and not only so that I can be spared any more of the sad-sack lower seed. The Western Conference will be sending an ascending juggernaut to the Finals no matter what, so it would be cool if the East's representative is maximally tuned, primed, and in all other ways made ready for the collision. The Cavs, poor helpless clods, deserve precisely the sort of mercy that is traditionally bestowed on the far side of a shed. They are nowhere close to the Knicks. New York spent the closing stretch of Game 1 picking on James Harden, pulling him out and abusing his defensive vulnerabilities. Cleveland's answer in Game 2 was to warp their own defense with traps and double-teams, leading to a career night for Josh Hart and another, far more convincing, Knicks win. If Cleveland had a counter dialed up for Saturday, it was hard to pick out its contours. The Knicks were in a sweet offensive rhythm right from the opening tip, pouring in 37 first-quarter points on absurd 71-percent shooting. New York opened the game with a lightning-quick 9–1 run, and from that point until about the final 150 seconds of the fourth quarter, it felt like Cleveland's entire basketball project had been whittled down to the struggle to merely catch their breath. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GSM_EpblWk&t=1s

Well, well, well. Would you look at that. It's the Friday before a holiday weekend and we don't really want to work anymore. So let's chat! Hit us with your best questions down below. Update (3:12 p.m. ET): OK, we're wrapping up so we can get the holiday weekend started. Thanks for hanging!

What is Josh Hart? If you had never watched his tenure with the New York Knicks and had to reconstruct the player from box scores, season averages, and the sauced utterances of people milling around outside Madison Square Garden, it would be a puzzling task. OK, so he's 6-foot-5, but teams can guard him with centers, or with no one at all, and he doesn't score much anyway. Fans are yelling the words "hard-nosed," "hustle," "intangibles," and so on. On paper, he's one of the all-time great "rebounding guards"; in reality, he's more of an itsy-bitsy power forward who moonlights as a guard on the fast break. He shot 41 percent from three in the regular season, but that's misleading because it was on low volume, and when you actually see him catch the ball gloriously open at the arc, he turns his butt to goal and starts to dribble-handoff to a nonexistent teammate. He's a savvy passer who can't ever really separate from his own defender. He's a versatile defensive player who will switch onto anyone, poke the ball out of passing lanes, and also get blown by constantly. He is irreplaceable, and yet fans constantly call for his replacement. Late in Thursday's Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers, these frustrations and contradictions began to smooth out, and suddenly there stood Josh Hart, essential shooting guard for the Knicks. Emphasis on the "shooting." Like so many past defenses, the Cavaliers threw extra attention at Knicks point man Jalen Brunson and dared Hart to do what he hates most: take open shots. The bashful shooter bricked his first three three-point attempts, which had him chewing his jersey and slamming the ball at the hardwood, and had fans in the Garden chanting "Landry Shamet"—the sniper lower in the rotation, who helped the Knicks claw back in their previous win. Hart had hit two threes by halftime and New York led 53-49, but at that point the Cavaliers probably still felt secure in their decision to throttle Brunson and force an unhappy Hart to keep chucking. In the second half, Brunson continued to dutifully distribute the ball as the coverage dictated, and Hart began to punish Cleveland's gamble. He hit a string of threes during an 18-0 run in the third quarter that would prove decisive. By the end of the night, he had gone 5-for-11 from three, plus one comical late-clock, spinning, fading floater. The Knicks won 109-93 as Hart finished with a playoff career-high 26 points, plus four rebounds, seven assists, and two steals. The fact that the below video exists says a lot about how unusual his night was; he's a player whose excellence typically sits in the exact negative space of a highlight reel.

The American military has always maintained a relatively strong grip on its public perception. Its most essential message—internally and externally, during peace time and active conflict, under presidents Republican and Democratic—is the necessity of its sprawling, expensive, and secretive imperial apparatus as a means of defending the nation and the very concept of freedom. It doesn’t hurt that the media is often only too happy to play along. In his new book God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, journalist Jasper Craven takes a detailed and unflinching look at the bedrock of American military training: the military academy as a locus for and proving ground of antagonistic military policy. America’s war-hungry ethos, embodied to an embarrassingly literal degree by the hare-brained conduct and childish grandiosity of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, has only recently embraced the enfranchisement of all able-bodied Americans, regardless of gender, race, or creed, to this mission.  Still, the underlying social and cultural principle of the American military has always idolized rugged masculinity—essentializing violence and dominance as natural to the very purpose of manhood. As Craven writes, “the military’s masculine archetype has become one of America’s most coveted assets. Like warfare itself, it is ever evolving. A diluted form of military manliness can be replicated in the civilian world, though it is always a clear knockoff. It lacks the high-and-tight haircut, the posture, the gaze, the mythic war stories of conquest, destruction, and dominance.”

In the Western Baltic Sea, fisheries target migrating mackerel and needlefish with pound nets, which funnel passing shoals into a series of smaller nets until they are trapped. The traps are emptied every few days, but as the caught fish idle in the nets, they become quite attractive to passing seabirds, such as cormorants, gulls, and terns. The cormorants sample the fish like a charcuterie board and various enterprising gulls steal the cormorants' catches. Several dozen birds can likely be found loitering near any particular pound net, and their ravenous appetites result in real losses for the fisheries. This battle between pound net fishers and seabirds has been ongoing for decades, and fishers have attempted to fight back in various ways. They've tried covering their catch with a netted cover or providing the fish artificial refuges. But the birds are relentless, and the agile cormorants simply entered the pound nets from below. And the more protective netting the fishers added, the more they found tangled or drowned seabirds alongside their catch. A paper from 2021 estimated that 400,000 seabirds are killed by diving into gillnets each year. As such, scientists have been cooking up new strategies to reduce the number of seabirds snacking on and dying in pound nets. They tried high-contrast panels and bright LED lights, but nothing seemed to work. That is, until Bobby the buoy entered the picture. Here is a buoy similar to Bobby: