NowLoop

Over the course of seven games, the circumstances of the first-round playoff series between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers shifted wildly. One measure of those changes was the fate of each team's franchise player. Sixers center Joel Embiid burst in mid-series, just 17 days after an emergency appendectomy, and soon began to dominate. Celtics wing Jayson Tatum, two months removed from his return after a speedy and successful right Achilles repair, tweaked the knee on his other leg, left Game 6 early, and missed Game 7 altogether. Thus the Sixers had the clear talent advantage by the deciding game, in which the Celtics started three players who had never before started, and in all likelihood will never again start, a postseason game: Baylor Scheierman, Ron Harper Jr., and Luka Garza. They combined for zero points, making them the first trio of playoff starters to go scoreless since starters were first tracked in the 1970-71 season. Given this historic feat, it was a little surprising that the Celtics even managed to keep the final margin within single digits, as they lost on Saturday, 109-100. https://youtu.be/DJYyZAxulTM?si=ETDq_-cWci2edbzf

Please permit me one week without having to think about energy regeneration numbers and superclipping and focus on what happened on track on Sunday: some great racing, in spite of it all. Formula 1 went on hiatus for over a month, as the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix were canceled due to an immoral and murderous war in the Middle East. In keeping with the ethic of the sport, the race that restarted the season took place in the country that provoked the war, and thus the previous cancellations. The Miami Grand Prix is a bloated race weekend that pairs the excess of its presentation with an equal excess of schedule: double qualifying and double races. It was not the first sprint weekend of the season—that honor goes to the Chinese Grand Prix—but the timing after a long layoff made the bloat feel overcompensatory. At their worst, sprint races take the sting out of both the key Saturday and Sunday sessions, either confusing the narrative contours of the weekend or spoiling them entirely. At their best, they can be ignored beyond cherrypicking an incident or two to fuel the next day's tension. I choose to view the Miami sprint in the best possible way, as giving a framework for Sunday without imitating it: The McLaren car can contend again, and baby-faced Mercedes teenager Kimi Antonelli has almost put it all together. The final results, beyond the points allotted, can be safely ignored. McLaren was one of many teams—Ferrari and Red Bull included, with both teams most visibly trotting out their versions of the Macarena wing—to bring a huge upgrade package to its car in Miami. Unlike Ferrari and Red Bull, McLaren also has the benefit of a Mercedes engine, easily the best on the grid right now, which was enough to propel its team toward the very front of the grid. Meanwhile, the sprint weekend showed off many of Antonelli's weaknesses: He had a poor start, received a penalty for track-limits violations, and caused Charles Leclerc to heatedly lambast his wheel-to-wheel racing skills. But it also helped him prove that out-qualifying his teammate, seven-year veteran George "Mr. Saturday" Russell, was not some arbitrary occurrence. Antonelli had the opportunity to do it twice, and in the qualifying session that actually mattered, he stuck his car in pole position, ahead of the Red Bull of Max Verstappen and the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc.

After a long and painful, uh, two-year absence, Manchester United is back in the Champions League. With the club's 3-2 victory over the rotten, no-good, no-fun Liverpool on Sunday, United has now clinched a top-five finish in the Premier League and the glory and continental adventures that come with it for next season. Given where the club was as recently as the new year, with a soon-to-be-fired manager and power struggles behind the scenes, this is the type of success that United will feel that it can build upon in its efforts to return to the true elite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CIjNO6da0w Like most Manchester United successes in recent memory, though, the 3-2 win felt tenuous at times and borderline disastrous at others. (The win itself also was mostly symbolic; while it is probably sweet as nectar to clinch a Champions League spot with a win over a hated and spiraling rival, there was very little risk of United not finishing in the top five.) Despite jumping out to a 2-0 lead by the 14th minute, courtesy of Matheus Cunha and Benjamin Sesko, and despite controlling most of the match's chances, United allowed Liverpool to equalize in quick succession after halftime. First, Dominik Szoboszlai scored an elegant solo counter-attack in the 47th minute, and then a horrendous gaffe from goalie Senne Lammens allowed Cody Gakpo to equalize in the 57th.

I suppose that if I were to complain about how NASA is making available the bulk of the photography captured by Artemis astronauts, NASA would tell me to go to the Moon and get my own pics, if I think I could do it better. But the fact remains that they're just dumping these things: 12,217 new images released this weekend, "available" on a website that barely works, and not sorted, or sortable. Also, a few hundred of the pics, presumably from when they were figuring out camera settings, are just totally black. That's relatable enough. I'm a sicko for this stuff, so I did power through. I thought it'd be a service to share some of my favorites of this new tranche. I must say I'm especially taken with the ones that feel a little less professionally composed—the ones that show a bit of the window of Orion, or a reflection of one of the astronauts taking the photo. It puts it on a human scale that we don't often get from astrophotography, and makes it easier to put myself in their shoes: That's the frickin' Moon out the window.

Simply observing the regular season would have given you a heads-up that Avalanche-Wild in the second round would make a spine-tingling playoff series. But how could anyone have imagined what transpired in Game 1? A night that started like a disappointing Avs blowout quickly turned into one of the craziest goalfests in NHL history, with Colorado eventually overwhelming Minnesota by a final score of 9-6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1EEOlQYWFE If you blinked at all while watching Sunday's game, you probably missed at least one goal. Despite facing a sensational rookie goaltender in Jesper Wallstedt, who had confounded the Dallas Stars in the first round, the Avalanche asserted their status as the best offense in the league by exploding for three goals in two minutes halfway through the first. I confess that when Artturi Lehkonen potted a wide-open shot on the power play to make the score 3-0, I thought to myself, "Well, that's it for tonight." But the Wild had a resolute response, powering the next two past Scott Wedgewood to go into intermission feeling good at 3-2 down.

Don’t be shy! Solve our Monday crossword. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Rebecca Goldstein and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Rebecca is a research scientist and crossword constructor in the Bay Area. She is also a co-director of Westwords, a crossword tournament taking place in Berkeley, Calif., and online on Sunday, June 14. 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. 

In a hypothetical where one person could be an entire group of guys, and in this hypothetical I were the collective and entire Tampa Bay Lightning, after that Game 7 I would order the team bus to be driven to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge—there are closer bridges to the arena in the Tampa Bay area, but none higher—and, at mid-span, drive directly off it. A hockey player is prepared for randomness and bad luck by an entire career's worth of suffering at its whims. All they can do is pray it doesn't come for them in a big game. It came for the Lightning in a Game 7, a 2-1 Canadiens win to send Montreal to the second round and send Tampa into an offseason without even the courtesy of giving them things to kill time regretting. “We couldn’t have played it any better,” head coach Jon Cooper said. The Lightning outshot the Habs 29-9. How rough was it back there for eternal Vezina finalist Andrei Vasilevskiy? In the night's other NHL game, Jesper Wallstedt and Scott Wedgewood gave up eight and six goals, respectively, and both had better save percentages on the night than Vasilevskiy. It wasn't even his fault, really. Two of the Canadiens' nine chances wouldn't even have counted as shots on goal if they hadn't been goals. In the first, Kaiden Guhle flung a prayer at the net that plinked and plunked its way to twine. In the third, Alex Newhook whacked a puck out of the air off of Vasilevskiy's butt and in.

It has been noted that the Montreal Canadiens won Game 7 of their series with the Tampa Bay Lightning on Sunday night with a Stanley Cup Playoff record-low nine shots on goal. This is clearly not true. It was eight. It can only be nine if we are defining "on" as "behind," and "goal" as "the goalie's behind." This matters because the Canadiens won the game, 2-1, and so stole the series despite being dominated by the Lightning in all the ways that the visible eye could discern, provided you're not picky about the scoreboard. It matters because the decisive goal, by Alex Newhook, was actually more of a desperate swipe at an airborne (as in three feet off the ice) puck while he was three feet behind the goal line that struck Tampa goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy on his right leg pad and then his seater and then bounced into the goal with 8:53 to play. It was Montreal's sixth (or technically seventh, if you're going to be whiny about it) shot on goal, and also an extreme example of how hockey can work despite all the provable evidence. Newhook's swinging bunt had no business being a goal for about six different reasons, but sometimes there's that seventh reason you never considered. This time, it won a series that frankly should still be going on this morning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suYKFCVhfBE

With a little under 10 minutes left in his team's Game 7 romp against the Orlando Magic, Cade Cunningham surveyed the floor. Like a wounded animal making a violent lurch, the exhausted Magic defense chose to attack, springing a double team. Cunningham calmly beckoned forth Javonte Green, who clanked a wide-open three. Detroit rebounded the miss, the ball came back to Cunningham, and the Magic sprung an even more desperate double team. This time, Cunningham knew exactly where it was coming from, dribbled away from it, and, impervious to the pressure of two on-ball defenders and rotating help, eyed both the basket and the two far-side shooters that Tristan da Silva could not simultaneously cover. With his eyes, Cunningham manipulated the Brazilian-German into leaping out toward Duncan Robinson at the top of the key, then lasered a perfect pass to Daniss Jenkins in the far corner. Bucket.

"I’ve been trying to avoid writing about Vargas in this space," Baseball Prospectus fantasy baseball writer Michael Waterloo wrote last week. "He’s 34 years old, and the vast majority of fantasy players have never heard of him before the last two weeks. We have a nearly 1,400 plate appearance sample over his career to scream that what he is doing is not sustainable, nor who he truly is, and I fully believe that." These are all decent enough reasons for Waterloo not to write about Ildemaro Vargas, and there are others. The next paragraph started with the word "But." Waterloo was writing about Vargas in the context of players who were likely to be available on fantasy waiver wires but could deliver some short-term help; among the good reasons to avoid such a topic that Waterloo did not mention re: not wanting to write about Ildemaro Vargas is that the last few weeks have marked the only time in his 10 MLB seasons when Vargas could conceivably not have been on fantasy waiver wires. Vargas, whose 27-game hitting streak ended in the first O-fer of his season on Saturday, dropping his average down to a MLB-best .388, won his decade in the bigs on versatility, vibes, and the reliable delivery of the Great Value Brand version of Luis Arraez's offensive loadout—very few walks and even fewer strikeouts, a ton of al dente contact on pitches in but also frequently outside the strike zone. This sort of player is very valuable to actual MLB teams—Vargas is in his third stint with the Diamondbacks—but not really in a way that provides meaningful professional stability. Vargas was signed by Arizona out of an independent league in 2015; before he became teammates with Sean Burroughs and Prentice Redman on the Bridgeport Bluefish, Vargas had done a six-year hitch in the Cardinals' system that topped out with eight games at Double-A. When the Diamondbacks signed him, he was 23 and had an OPS that started with a 6 in the Atlantic League. He was in the Majors by 2017. That Vargas has played in parts of every season since undersells how precarious his big-league life has been. The Diamondbacks traded him for cash in 2020 and reacquired him for cash in 2021; he played for the Twins, Cubs, and Pirates in the interim. Vargas's numbers generally looked better the more he played, but he never played that much, and with the exception of a 2022 season split between the Cubs (again) and Nationals, he was never within shouting distance of league average. There is probably some correlation, there.