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Everybody knows Bumpus Jones, even (maybe especially) you! He was iconic for one single day: Oct. 15, 1892, which surely you remember. I definitely do. Little Bumpus was a mere rookie, up in the show for the first time for the Cincinnati Reds. Back then there wasn't even a mound, just a pitcher's box where Charles Leander "Bumpus" Jones stood for his first game as a big leaguer and threw a damn no-hitter. Was it perfect? Definitely not. He walked four guys, and a run came in on his throwing error. But he still pitched a no-hitter in his major-league debut. Sadly, for more than a hundred years, he has been all alone in that success. But no longer! I come bearing great news: A new Bumpus Jones has been crowned. His name is Alimber Santa, and on Monday he made his MLB debut for the Houston Astros. He did not start the game like Bumpus did, and when he came on as a reliever in the eighth, the Astros had a 9-0 lead. It was a fine time for a rookie to make his debut. Sure, there was technically a combined no-hitter on the line, but whatever. Let the kid try! We needed a new Bumpus.

Amid all the joyful preening and proclamations of destiny deferred but no longer denied, the most obstreperous of New York Knickerbockers fans arose today to the knowledge that they were dead-ass wrong about coach/reformed pariah Mike Brown. At least for now, anyway. There is still another series to be played, and the team the Knicks will face in their first NBA Finals since 1999 will have just emerged from a ferocious rock fight that is barely halfway done. This means that there is still time for them to turn back to their original position on him, which was "We should have hired Tiago Splitter instead of this retread boob." Doctrinal error is always something that the person committing the error will try to justify as soon as possible. For the moment, though, Mike Brown is on citywide scholarship. The man condemned on day one for replacing Tom Thibodeau—and remember that Brown didn't fire Thibs, just replaced him—has on day 323 become a genius in the town that wanted so much to hate him. Indeed, if the Knicks had behaved as they normally do, and wrapped their season up when they usually do, the demand for Brown's immediate firing would be a rare point of consensus among New Yorkers. This is what Knicks fans do, mostly: believe, hope, hallucinate, binge-eat disappointment, demand heads on pikes, repeat. They're like most other fans in that sense, only louder, surer, and more insistent. Some of them are also famous.

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show. The idiots of the Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off recently convened at a fancy rented kitchen in Philadelphia—not merely to say mean things about Paul Hollywood, although plenty of mean things were said about Paul Hollywood, but for some baking. It was an intense experience, as you'd expect from a series that has produced so many burned fingers, so many dangerous sprays of molten caramel, so incredibly many sobs of purest anguish. We were there for more than the usual thrills of a timed baking challenge: We were there to satisfy the requirements of Defector's much-hyped 2025 Tip Jar drive. We and our terrible baking were, in a very real sense, the raffle prize.

The Canadiens are being outplayed by the Hurricanes. You can see it in the shot differential, where the Canes held a 38-13 advantage in Game 3. You could see it just by watching, as the Habs struggled again and again to move the puck up the ice without ceding possession to a ruthless Carolina defense. And you can see it—barely—in the conclusion: 3-2 Canes in overtime, to take a 2-1 series lead. Game 3 followed much the same script as Game 2, down to the final score and overtime outcome. But for all the ways that Carolina dominated the run of play, Monday night was in reality as tight as playoff hockey gets. The Canes peppered Jakub Dobes and a few got through; their offense is built on the laws of probability. Montreal, with less volume, required some individual inspiration and luck to keep pace. Maybe the most extraordinary part is that they did, for 74 minutes. Shayne Gostisbehere opened the scoring for the Canes, and Taylor Hall snagged one before intermission, in a period where the Habs were outshot 15-5. But in between those two, Mike Matheson, the old dog on D, got Montreal on the board. He was in the right place at the right time to receive a pass up high after some grimy play beneath the net, and with no bodies between him and Freddie Andersen, Matheson lasered a shot into the near-side corner that the Canes goalie could not catch.

I have a sort of hazy memory to share. I was a kid, riding in my parents' car on a bright sunny day, and we were sitting in traffic on a bridge over the Dulles Toll Road in Northern Virginia. I looked to my right, where you could see several miles of the highway stretching off toward Dulles Airport. Hundreds of cars streamed in both directions. Far off, wayyyyy the hell out there, where the cars were just little dots, the sunlight glinted a little differently off the chrome armature of a police cruiser's rooftop lights, on the half of the highway headed toward our bridge. Because our family's succession of beater cars often had (or seemed to have, at the scale of a small child's experience) things like busted taillights and expired tags, and because by then I'd been in the backseat at least a couple of times when my dad had gotten alarmingly irate about being pulled over, I had learned the habit of looking out for cop cars and speed traps. So I said, to no one in particular, "There's a cop coming," and pointed. What made this memory stick in my mind was that when my mom, in the passenger seat, turned and looked, what I was pointing at was so far beyond the range of her eyesight that she could not discern that there was anything at all there, much less that there were individual vehicles, much less that one of them could be identified as a police car headed our way, distant enough that we'd have to wait a couple of minutes to be able to verify it. For all that she could see, I could have been pointing at the clear blue sky. I might just as well have told her I saw Neil Armstrong's bootprint on the surface of the moon.

Knicks fans travel well, especially when there is a series sweep on offer. The Philadelphia 76ers' home arena was bursting with belligerent New Yorkers during Game 4 of the second round, and that augured grim possibilities for the Cleveland Cavaliers headed into what would be the last game of the Eastern Conference Finals on Monday night. Would Cavs owner Dan Gilbert be able to keep Knicks fans from entering his arena and dicking around while his team got swept like chumps? More importantly, would he be able to keep the rich and famous Knicks fans off the floor? One surefire way to keep Timothée Chalamet from stunting on you in your own building is to not be ass and go down 0-3 in a series. With that option foreclosed, Gilbert and the Cavs chose instead to leverage the power of legalese. Fat Joe became this controversy's whistleblower when he went on an ESPN pregame show and disclosed that, despite purchasing courtside tickets for Game 4, he was informed by the Cavs that his tickets were canceled and that he was being moved back a few rows. "We had bought some courtside tickets to the game, and then once they found out it was superfan Fat Joe, it was like, I can't sit courtside. New York Knick fans can't sit courtside," said Fat Joe. "They took the tickets away." Knicks beat writer Stefan Bondy did some additional reporting and talked to 10 other Knicks fans who had purchased courtside seats, only to receive a phone call from a Cavs executive telling them that they were being moved to a different section. When asked to explain why this was happening, the Cavs provided Bondy with a statement:

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