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Lotsa games today! Lotsa games tomorrow, too. Feel free to hang out here and chat while you binge on all that spectacular hoops action.

Have you seen this? Are you aware of this? The NBA playoffs are about to begin! This is real. I would not lie to you. This means that the time has come for you, the casual basketball fan, the dunce that you are, the grime on the bottom of a true basketball-knower's shoe, to begin scrambling around for information about this so-called "NBA postseason." There are 16 damn teams in the field, and you need to know stuff about all of them, lest you be driven from the village for your foolishness!

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.

After weeks of receiving insulting emails from the federal government, Sarah Boim learned she was fired from her dream job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at 8 p.m. on a Saturday. The email, which adhered to a template sent to all probationary workers, cited Boim's performance as the reason she was being let go. "That was devastating to me to read, even though I knew that it wasn't true," Boim said, adding that she had received a 4.66 out of five on her last annual performance review. Boim was overwhelmed with feelings from shock to depression. "I basically went through the stages of grief," she said. Then she arrived on a more galvanizing emotion: anger. Boim and other probationary employees fired from the CDC scrambled to get more information about their situation. "Everybody was so scared, first of all that we were being spied on, which I'm sure we were," she said. They created a Signal chat and crowdsourced information, but they found a thicket of misinformation. "So a small group of us decided to start a newsletter to cut through some of that noise and increase access to facts," Boim said.

The NHL postseason stands in the exalted place it does because of two counterintuitive yet almost inviolable truths: that the regular-season standings and the achievements attached therein are an utter lie, and that the most fun is always found in the first round, when even the unworthy teams offer delicious levels of entertainment. Proof of Truth 1: The last time the team with the best regular season record won the Cup in a regulation-length season was 2008.

It's not quite a large enough sample to be significant, and too inherently insignificant to really be worth the sampling, but we've done enough Drew Is About To Go On Vacation episodes of the podcast by now that I can detect their specific vibrational energy. Drew is both a little bit more eager than usual to wrap things up and just absolutely relaxed; I am maybe a bit more inclined to wander afield and go long and as close to absolutely relaxed as I get, as if I was getting some sort of residual contact high from the vacation that the big fella is about to take. It is not quite the episode that would be recorded from a vacation—we've done some of those, too, and likely will do some more—but it has all the energy of having more or less wrapped up work. All of which is to say that, at this anxious and ominous broader moment, I found this week's episode to be kind of a relief, and to reiterate I am not even going on vacation.

One of the earliest photos of me features my grandfather, a doctor from the Philippines, cradling me as a newborn while wearing a face mask. He had a cold at the time and I was as vulnerable as a human being can be. That photo didn’t normalize the idea of wearing face masks for me, though I did feel comparatively inured to the sight as I grew up. Relatives would show up to gatherings wearing them and, in a family of medical professionals, all manner of PPE was unremarkable. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a cultural element to this as well. Up there with that common, meme-ified image of an elderly Asian man out for a leisurely, inquisitive stroll with his hands clasped behind his back is the image of an elderly Asian person out in public with a face mask on. Sometimes, the images are one and the same. I had always assumed the habit of wearing a mask when you or someone else was ill was benign, certainly not a behavior enacted by everyone, but nothing all that interesting. COVID-19 challenged then irrevocably altered that assumption.  I haven’t stopped masking in public since mid-2021, at a time when the public was assured, through a combination of widespread vaccination and boosters, personal health safety measures, and (looking back now) myopic wishful thinking, that the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic was over. It is true that, of the many prevention measures suggested or required by the government during the first years of COVID, masking was the most visible and symbolically load-bearing. At first, a marker of compliance or, glimpsing the half-worn, porous cloth mask slumping below a stranger’s nose, a lack thereof; and later, a potent indicator of political allegiance, the way to tell if someone was a Fauci stooge or a health-conscious Good Samaritan. Sometimes, those who still mask glibly proclaim that they haven’t gotten sick in years. I haven’t been so consistent or so lucky, though my reasons for continuing to wear N95s in public are not necessarily premised on the personal benefits they render onto me. 

A player can look good on the front of his card, but it's what’s on the back that matters. That's where the player's stats and accomplishments appear, and where the bigger story of their career really rounds into shape: what they've done and where they've done it, how well and for how long. The photo on the front might show a guy's only home run all season; if so, the back of the card will tell you. Because they're all grounded in the same categories and expressed in similarly shaped statistics, the numbers on the backs of all those cards can blur together somewhat; they are all different, but they don't really look that different. For instance there is Bill Hanzlik, who averaged 7.2 points per game during his 10 years in the NBA, spent mostly with the Denver Nuggets. The 6-foot-7 small forward was mostly known for his defense, which means that a lot of what he did best didn't show up on the back of his trading cards. But he was there, and the proof is in the 12-card set of Nuggets trading cards that the Denver Children's Hospital released for the 1989–90 season.

Washington Nationals reliever Jorge López was tossed from a game Wednesday night. He came on in relief in the seventh inning and—in the fashion preferred by members of this insanely terrible bullpen—immediately immolated his own team's chances of winning what had been a one-run game. First he allowed two singles and an RBI groundout; with two outs, he threw a first-pitch sinker up and in and plunked Bryan Reynolds. Three pitches later, López fired a fastball at the ear of Andrew McCutchen, which McCutchen avoided only by throwing himself onto the ground. While the umpires conferenced, López and McCutchen began to shout at each other, and soon the benches emptied. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehyFBlpWcSI

Listen, I will happily devour any article about Nikola Jokic. He's my big special guy and every anecdote that gets published about him keeps a place in the most lovingly curated segment of my mind. So it is with great sadness that I am forced to issue a yellow card on this simile from The Athletic's recent story on Jokic, written by Fred Katz: Early in Brown’s season in Denver, the guard went into a handoff play with Jokić. Once the MVP received the basketball, both his defender and Brown’s followed him, which left Brown open. Brown screamed out the proper terminology. “Wolf! Wolf!” he yelled, the Nuggets’ alert that a double team was coming. With no one on him, Brown then cut to the basket, figuring Jokić could hit him for an easy layup. Instead, Jokić tossed a no-look pass far behind him and out of bounds. Later in the game, Jokić explained why. “Don’t cut,” he told Brown. “I’m listening to your voice.” Jokić, like a bat, can tell where people are just by where sound waves originate. From that point on, Brown never cut after yelling for the ball; Jokić hit him with no-look dimes constantly.