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It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Every country heading into the World Cup faces pressure, but not in equal amounts. For a side like Brazil, who hasn't won the World Cup in an unacceptable 24 years and hasn't even made it to the semis in either of the last two tournaments, the pressure can be suffocating. That's the type of pressure Argentina had heading into 2022, but thanks to one of the greatest soccer matches of all time coming out in Argentina's favor, the level of pressure heading into the 2026 edition has to be at a decades-long low.

The National Hockey League is no more prone to imitation than any other species of parrot, particularly when something that seems counterintuitive works out well. It is for that reason and that reason only that the news out of Edmonton this day is not as gobsmacking at it seems. Wait, Edmonton? What the hell does Edmonton have to do with anything, and why should it pull one's attention from what may be the most weirdly compelling Stanley Cup Finals in decades? Well, grab some pine, meat, and belt up, because we have finally reached the throbbing nucleus of organizational WTF-ness. While the Final is in Vegas and being minded by noted former-and-future head coach John Tortorella, the Oilers are about to hire Mike Babcock, the Captain Philip Francis Queeg of coaches, who is noted in the distant past for guiding championship teams in Detroit and noted more recently for destroying his reputation through a series of bizarre psychological gambits against players that helped get him fired from one job and forced him to resign from another. And because hockey management is an inward-facing phenomenon along the lines of the Habsburg dynasty, the Babcock hire ties directly into these Finals. In other words, you couldn't make this up, and if you could, you should check into a mushroom detox center.

In October 2024, a few months before Heated Rivalry was greenlit by studio producers in Canada, Amazon Prime Video announced that it was adapting the popular hockey romance book series Off Campus. Set at a fictional Ivy League school called “Briar University,” author Elle Kennedy's series follows four rakish men’s hockey players on the Briar U team as they meet the women who convince them to commit to a relationship. With Amazon Prime Video already riding a wave of romance show success with The Summer I Turned Pretty, optioning Kennedy’s Off Campus made sense. Around 2023, hockey romance, a niche subset of the romance genre, began to surge in popularity on BookTok. Romance readers everywhere became obsessed—some to the point that they started showing up to NHL games and borderline sexually harassing players during warmups. It seemed like every other day, some romance imprint was announcing yet another hockey romance novel, often taking gleeful advantage of the punny titling opportunities offered by the word “puck.” Kennedy was one of the early pioneers of hockey romance, publishing the first book in the series, The Deal, in 2015. The series has sold millions of copies, and like Netflix’s Bridgerton, each book focuses on a different hockey player on the Briar team, which makes for an easy book-per-season cadence.  I read The Deal in high school, and learned that Kennedy’s writing has all the markers of a 2010s heterosexual romance that leaves you feeling like you might have sent the women’s rights movement back by a decade. She also doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of how and when NHL prospects are drafted, which irked me. Garrett Graham, the main love interest in The Deal, is hailed as a top college player and he spends a lot of time thinking about how he’ll declare for the draft after his senior year of college—which doesn’t make sense because he would lose draft eligibility by age 20.

Spencer Pratt will not be the mayor of Los Angeles. There should be no need to utter this sentence, much like “You do not have to swallow a rhino whole, tonight” or “Human shit will not rain down from the sky.” Well, of course not. Should I have been worried about that?  According to more than a few self-styled Serious Thinkers—perhaps still haunted by the shock they experienced on the night of Nov. 8, 2016—who insisted on treating Pratt’s mayoral primary run as a legitimate rebuke of status quo politics: Yes. The Free Press worked harder than anyone has ever worked before to imbue Pratt's candidacy with a sense of “woke Democrats just might lose because of woke” verve.   https://bsky.app/profile/passantino.bsky.social/post/3mnqlfoemb42g

Despite plenty of cause to fear that the NBA Finals would be derailed by Donald Trump's attendance and the resultant security apparatus that turned Madison Square Garden into a cage within a cage within a cage, Knicks fans showed up early Monday night, packed the house, booed the President, and watched their team lose a frustrating Game 3, 115-111. So much of the story of Game 3 concerns the various, overlapping off-court spectacles framing the game—the chirring that's emanated from a New York City totally entranced by its team's now-snapped 13-game playoff win streak; the multiple associates of Jeffrey Epstein who took in the game from premium seats; the outrageous price of tickets for both normal people and the countless celebrities in attendance—and not just because they are so significant on the merits. The game at the center of all this simultaneously felt elevated to a new plane of competitive fervor by the baying crowd, and also slightly warped on account of being the object of such intense, idiosyncratic focus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH1fAm8Enok

Brendan Sorsby won the latest round in his fight to suit up come fall. On Monday, a Texas court granted the request from Texas Tech’s allegedly gambling addicted bonus baby quarterback for an injunction preventing the NCAA from barring him for the 2026 season and beyond. Sorsby transferred to the Red Raiders in January after two years at Cincinnati, a move that reportedly would net him a $6 million NIL windfall. After word broke that he was being investigated by the NCAA for betting on a lot of things—including his own team’s games and balls and strikes from Cincinnati Reds pitchers—Sorsby entered a residential rehab facility for treatment for a gambling addiction. The NCAA subsequently announced he’d been, essentially, banned from participating in college athletics.    Sorsby asked for the injunction on the grounds that gambling is a mental illness, and the NCAA can’t punish somebody for being sick. Judge Ken Curry of the 99th District Court in Lubbock seems to have mostly agreed with Sorsby’s argument, throwing out the punishment.

In the third inning of the Brewers' 7-1 win over the Rockies on Saturday, Milwaukee pitcher Jacob Misiorowski threw a four-seam fastball low and outside to Kyle Karros for a ball. The pitch was special and routine all at once. Its measured velocity of 103.7 mph makes it the fastest pitch by a starter in official recorded history. But the speed of that fastball has somehow become business as usual for the Brewers' 24-year-old ace. In this game alone, Misiorowski threw the 58 fastest pitches of the game, and 45 of those pitches were above 101 mph—another record. When Brewers manager Pat Murphy looked like he was going to the bullpen after his starter allowed runners on the corners with only one out in the 7th, Misiorowski refused, shaking his head and saying "No" in the direction of the dugout. Then he proceeded to pitch back-to-back strikeouts, hurling a 101-mph fastball on his 98th pitch of the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EJKeC18FqI

I can't say that "amount of that dog in them" has always factored into my evaluation of a tennis prospect, but it should, and with Mirra Andreeva, it was always the central factor. In civilian life, being well-adjusted as a good thing, but in tennis, its opposite can be a kind of performance enhancing drug. Back at the 2024 Australian Open, Andreeva was a 16-year-old flying into the fourth round. To get there, she had to make a dramatic comeback from 1-5 down in the third set. During the match she bit her own arm in anger. Noted grit-possessor Andy Murray admired her grit as he watched on TV. Andreeva played astounding tennis, and more astounding still is what she said after, when most players would have been awash in gratitude.  “Fourth round is nothing," she said afterwards. "Maybe if I win a Slam, I have to win three more matches, and it’s really tough to win seven matches in a row. I don’t think that I did something incredible. I have time to do it, I hope." From that fearsome moment onward, I knew she would win one of these, and on Saturday, she completed that quest, winning the Roland-Garros title 6-3, 6-2 over Maja Chwalinska.In the years since proclaiming that the fourth round of a major—which would amount to a lifetime accomplishment for the vast majority of tennis players, not least a 16-year-old—was "nothing," Andreeva has only refined her game. Back then she already had the technical and tactical foundation in place, especially her note-perfect backhand, smooth movement, and ability to anticipate her opponent's next play. In the years since, she's become taller and stronger, and the teenage counterpunching has matured into a more assertive game style. On top of the already cunning point construction, she's been able to juice up the groundstrokes; over the last season and change she's even become an excellent server, which is more of less a prerequisite for a multi-Slam champ in the modern game. Andreeva's partnership with Conchita Martinez, herself a former teen prodigy who rose as high as No. 2 in the world, is one of the game's best player-coach relationships to follow. That's because it's hilarious to watch a good-natured personality like Martinez wrangle a pupil as challenging as Andreeva, who admitted once that she can be "a little brat." In recent months the brat-like behavior manifested as a tantrum at Indian Wells that climaxed with her yelling "Fuck you all!" twice at the crowd on her way off the court as a spectator literally clutched at her necklace. Then came a third-round match at Madrid, where she blew a big lead in the deciding tiebreaker and, at the change of ends, told her box, "I’m not a champion. I’m not a champion. I will lose." (She went on to win.)

I am sorry to report that despite the FIA extending the program yet another year, the Monaco Experiment is still a failure. The battle between engineers trying to "make cars fast" and "let cars pass" has, at least in Monaco, resulted in racing that allows for neither and resists outside intervention. Last year's double pit stop experiment proved futile; this Sunday showed that the new regulations and slightly smaller cars still could not provide for better racing. If there is entertainment, it needs to come from racing so atrocious to watch it loops right back around to "fun," or other sessions, or, depending on your media diet, inane celebrity hullabaloo. This is why I propose we rename the Monaco Grand Prix to something more apt. The Monaco Qualifying Prix, perhaps. More like Monaco Grand Penalty Sunday. I'll work on it. Street races make for great qualifying viewing because the boundaries are so obvious; in other words, they make it easy to demonstrate how good Formula 1 drivers are at their jobs. In Monaco, the barriers, which have the faintest give, need to be kissed in order to maximize pace, providing a demonstration of the absolute limit. The margin between pole position and the wall is, as Charles Leclerc knows after heartbreak after heartbreak in his home race, very narrow. And despite Mercedes dominating from the start of the season, qualifying was any of the top three teams' game. While Driver's Championship leader Kimi Antonelli was strong, his teammate George Russell never had the pace to contest for pole. The Ferraris performed very strongly across the three practice sessions, and Leclerc topped Q1. Both Red Bulls looked pacier during the weekend, with Max Verstappen topping Q2. Verstappen looked just about on track to win pole position as well, holding the provisional place with a time of 1:12.094 before Antonelli took his final flying lap. Sector 1 and Sector 2 passed, with Antonelli notching personal best times, but no purple sectors, the indicator that he had beaten the rest of the field. Then Sector 3 passed, absent once again the telltale purple, but it was just enough: Antonelli squeaked by Verstappen by 36 hundredths of a second into pole position, and Leclerc hit the wall on his very last attempt to close out the session.

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. You're watching to see if Cristiano Ronaldo at age 41 is still worth watching. You know you are. You're trying to force-feed a LeBron James comparison into your cerebral cortex because you know what happened in the past, but have no idea about the future except that 41-year-olds are unreliable predictors. So you make up reasons why Portugal's chances at a deep run are dependent upon Ronaldo's résumé, when in fact we won't see Portugal's true mettle as the fifth-rated team in this tournament until they have escaped a deeply rudimentary group with Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uzbekistan. Historically, Colombia is a formidable knockout stage team, though it missed out entirely in 2022. Uzbekistan is at its first Mundial ever and the DRC has only made one, in 1974 when the country was known as Zaire, and lost all three matches. President Mobutu Sese Seko offered to jail them all when they returned. So that's fun. Against this field, we will learn little, but your Ronaldo fixation will be dealt with next month, so be patient.