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The Oklahoma City Thunder are the defending champions, with a talented roster that should set them up for years of success, so it makes sense that they'd have their share of detractors. A team at the top always does. There are other reasons why a neutral observer might not root for them: the origins of how OKC got an NBA team, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's reliance on drawing fouls, that "What a Pro Wants" commercial. That's just sports writ large: You can accept that people will hate your team for some rational or irrational reason, or you can try to argue with all of them and achieve the same level of success as trying to fight the ocean. If you pick the latter option, at least try to make sure your argument doesn't sound insane. According to Eitan Reshef's bio, he's a native Oklahoman now based in Chicago, and works in digital commerce. He's not a regular columnist for the Oklahoman. While Reshef's article appeared under the publication's URL, it's a guest column for the opinion section and carries the following disclaimer at the top: "This piece expresses the views of its author(s), separate from those of this publication." Actually, it was a guest column; the article was deleted sometime Monday afternoon, hours after it was published. You might understand why when you see the headline: "Like Thunder, Israel is an underdog that has become hated." Here's the opening paragraph:

Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano fought for 17 seconds longer than they should have over the weekend. Their brief Saturday encounter in a Southern California hexagon, a comeback for both after ridiculously long layoffs yet still promoted by Jake Paul’s MVP outfit as the biggest women’s MMA fight in history, ended as soon as Rousey set Carano up for an arm bar, the ex-judoka’s trademark finishing move from back when she was relevant. Carano, who gave up the cage for acting and right-wing mouthpiecing, tapped quicker than Fred Astaire.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg4OWWAEoCY

There are many ways that Donald Trump is currently making your life worse, not to mention generally waging war on the concept of "the future": accelerating the death of the biosphere, doing his best to eliminate the federal government and university as sites of middle-class employment, driving up the price of energy now and food in the immediate future thanks to the idiotic war with Iran he's losing alongside his buddy Benjamin Netanyahu (who, if you are Palestinian, Lebanese, or Iranian, is trying to kill your family with Trump's help), and making it impossible for you to vote against any of this. He is also straight-up stealing your money to redirect it to the freaks and sex offenders who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In January, Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization filed a lawsuit against Trump's own Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, demanding $10 billion in damages. The suit stemmed from the case of Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who pleaded guilty in 2023 to leaking the tax returns of Trump and several billionaires to the New York Times and ProPublica in 2019 and 2020. In a more sensible world, the release of those documents should have prompted national elected officials to publicly reckon with the fact that the government and the Americans they supposedly represent were being cheated out of billions of dollars, but instead, Littlejohn faced harsh prosecution. He was sentenced to five years in prison in Jan. 2024. However, even at the time, Trump and his organization made a show of protesting the sentencing. In their view, Littlejohn had not suffered enough and Trump had not been made sufficiently whole for the revelation of information that presidents and presidential nominees customarily have chosen to make public of their own volition since the early 1970s. Trump attorney Alina Habba made a big public stink outside of Littlejohn's sentencing hearing. "A government agency and its contractors and employees have no business stealing the personal data of American citizens in reckless disregard, let alone the then-sitting president," she said. "This likely cost my client thousands of votes and was all by design."

For tennis fans who do not know how to be normal (i.e. me), rooting for Jannik Sinner is as comforting as it can get. There is an aspirational calmness in Sinner's rituals—not elaborate enough to be Nadal-like, but consistent enough to be a little Nadal-lite—that, though it can't eliminate fan neuroses, at least soothes them. He goes to the towel after making a poor error. One can count as he bounces the ball seven times on first serve (four bounces, a glance up at the opponent, then three more) and five times on second serve (three, glance, two). Also, at some point this year, he forgot how to lose. Sinner beat Casper Ruud 6-4, 6-4 at the Rome Open on Sunday. It was his first-ever victory at his home tournament, following a loss to Alcaraz in the final last year. Sinner became the first Italian man to win the tournament since Adriano Panatta 50 years ago. He also became: the second- and, at age 24, youngest-ever man to win the full set of Masters 1000s (Novak Djokovic did it first, at age 31); the first to win six straight Masters 1000s; the second ever to sweep the three clay court Masters (after Nadal), and the first ever to win the Sunshine Double and sweep the clay court Masters in a year. These are records that feel more impressive with more investment in the sport, but he also has some numbers that are easier to understand: He has a 29-match win streak. In that time period, he has lost three sets, by scores of 7-6(3), 7-6(6), and 7-5. The last time Sinner played Ruud in Rome, it was effectively a public execution. The final on Sunday was a different story: Sinner started the match looking as nervous as he gets, usually a quality reserved in response to Carlos Alcaraz. He missed his first seven first serves and went for huge margins, pumping what would normally be comfortable put-away forehands down the center of the court instead of into the corners. Ruud got off to an early break, which was already a better start than last year's match, then Sinner immediately broke back by cracking a backhand down the line. As the match progressed, Sinner settled down. He delivered a feast of gorgeous leaping backhands. His first serve percentage crept back up above 60 percent. After he hit an even better backhand down the line to open the second set with a break, the match lay securely in his hands.

The Washington Nationals won their Rivalry Weekend series against the Baltimore Orioles. This was their second consecutive series win; they have won eight of their last 13 games overall. The plucky Nats today have the top-performing offense in the majors by runs scored, and that is despite having played the second-strongest schedule to date among all MLB teams. Where's the hoopla? Clearly they don't want you to know about the surging Nats. What they do want you to know about—and by "they," I am referring to several of the very worst people to have ever been born, grown up and positioned in the upper-deck seats of Nationals Park for Sunday's series finale—is white genocide. Three MAGA freaks unfurled a large banner in the stands above the first base line during the home team's regular "Salute to Service" segment, seeking to direct attention to the website of a group called Crusader Active Club, with the URL of whitereplacement.org. Allow me to save you the click: The group's website claims that they are standing up "against the 3rd world invasion" and boasts that Crusader Active Club is the No. 1 "Christian/Conservative activist app in the world." There's a ridiculous doomsday tracker on the website's home page, which when I checked it this morning showed that there were more than "90,000,000 million" total foreign-born immigrants, labeled "invaders," in America today.

Solve our Monday crossword, bit by bit. This week's puzzle was constructed by Paul Leistra and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Paul is from Hamilton, Ontario, where he works as an instructional designer. Paul first started constructing crosswords for his four children to solve, particularly on long road trips. Replacing "Are we there yet?" with "Any know what 18-Across is?" was a delight. 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."

Tom Dundon readily admits his parsimony. I guess no one ever got turbo-rich by being profligate, but few billionaires brag so much about how they pick up pennies from the ground or turn off unused room lights. He claims he does not display this behavior when it comes to putting the sports teams he owns in position to win. This is a questionable assertion. As the owner of the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes, his philosophies manifested in offering league-low salaries for GM and head coach. That coach, Rod Brind’Amour, was initially making less than many assistant coaches around the league. Many successes and one extension later, Brind’Amour got a raise that kept him in the bottom half-dozen coach salaries. Now on his second extension and in his eighth straight postseason, he's somewhere in the middle of the pack, salarywise—all he had to do was put together the league's most consistently successful team for Dundon to pay him like a normal coach. The Hurricanes' victories are entirely due to their canny front office and uniquely coached systems, and one suspects that the lesson Dundon has taken from striking gold while mining for tin is that he is a genius, and that everyone else is overpaying for talent. When Dundon finalized his purchase of the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers earlier this spring, he almost immediately started putting the screws to the budget. He is reportedly offering well below market rate for a head coach. Interim coach Tiago Splitter, who did a fab job since taking over unexpectedly in October, is reportedly getting lowballed already. Jared Dudley, architect of the Nuggets' disastrous defense, is reportedly a candidate, presumably because he'd come cheap; he surely won't have other suitors.

After federal law enforcement officers shot and killed two people in Minnesota earlier this year, Maryland Governor Wes Moore got busy talking and typing. Moore went on Fox News to blast the DHS forces as “untrained, unaccountable, and unqualified—and, by the way, armed.” He brought the same wording and vitriol to MS NOW. He posted…

There was a moment early in the first quarter of Sunday's Game 7 between the Detroit Pistons and Cleveland Cavaliers when James Harden had the ball and was isolated against Tobias Harris. "James Harden, acquired from the Clippers, this was the big move that the Cavaliers made for moments like this," said play-by-play man Ian Eagle, moments before Harden drove to the lane and kicked a grenade out to Evan Mobley in the corner, who missed a shot as the clock expired. I smiled to myself when this happened, and did so again a few possessions later when Harden committed the first of his two shot-clock violations. I was thinking about the blog you are reading right now, and how the story of this game, as it has been so many times before, would be about Harden melting down in the playoffs. Well, I was partially right. Harden did indeed submit what might have been his worst performance yet in a big playoff game—nine points on 2-for-10 shooting, 0-for-6 from three—but the Pistons unveiled a surefire method for squandering a vintage "Big Game" James performance: Simply have your entire team play like James Harden did. The Pistons got absolutely rocked, 125-94, in what might have been the most dispiriting loss in a postseason that has been full of them. Game 7s rarely live up to expectations, but this one fell especially short. A nervy, low-scoring contest full of exhausted players can still be fun if the score remains close, and even a blowout can be neat if it happens in front of a raucous home crowd or is the result of the superior team accruing tactical advantages over the course of the series. This was the worst kind of blowout, though: a wire-to-wire domination in front of a crestfallen home crowd that offers little explanation aside from "The Pistons played like shit."

It came in the top of the eighth, with the Dodgers already ahead of the Angels by four on Saturday night. Shohei Ohtani walked to the plate with two outs and runners on first and second, thanks to a Max Muncy single and an Alex Call walk. On the second pitch, Ohtani looped the ball off the end of his bat, the baseball dropping just inside the line then bouncing off the ground and over the wall. Ground-rule double, right? Except the ball didn't go into the stands. It hit the netting that now sits atop the wall and bounded back onto the field. That netting is new, the Associated Press reported, added to Angel Stadium this year. (This is as good a time as any to pause and remember that netting is good—it makes going to baseball games safer for fans.) So was it out of play, or a live ball? On the replay, you can see Angels right fielder Jo Adell, a noted home run thief, throwing his arms in the air, signaling the former. The broadcast team thought the same, at first believing the ball had gone into the seats until it became clear that it had not. Because the moment felt so much like that routine ground-rule double, the broadcast didn't stay on Ohtani for long, necessitating a sudden zooming-out of the camera to capture his sprint toward home and easy slide into the plate.