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Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking universal knife subsidies, noogies, desert island concerts, good doggies, and more. PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m out next week on Spring Break. That’s right, baby. Me and my boys are heading down to Cancun to crush some beers and mack on some fine ladies. And not necessarily in that order, muchacho! I kid, of course. My family and I are off on a road trip all week, which was a good plan seeing as how air travel in this country is no longer possible. But fear not, we’ll have a guest host bagger ready for you folks, so email them your stupid questions and they’ll indulge you. Got all that? Sweet.

The New York Rangers have had a bad enough season as it is, what with being the worst team in the Eastern Conference and all, but charity like this is frankly unbecoming. They left Madison Square Garden Monday night tying a 71-year-old franchise record for fewest shots in a game with nine in a 2-1 loss to the Ottawa Senators, only to head to Toronto this morning for a game against the second-worst team in the Eastern Conference and finding out that, no, they'd actually attempted 10. In a phrase, damn it. In the grander scheme, it doesn't much matter, but in a season this forgettable, in a game this bad, why would you try to find an extra shot to make the night seem less abject? Statistical accuracy, sure. A more accurate reflection of reality, fine. Still, in a game so otherwise bereft, finding that 10th shot seems almost antithetical to the tale being told here. The 10th shot must exist, clearly, but to what end? Nine is just a better number. In fact, any truly valuable league employee would have gone through the tape and taken off a shot or two, just so the numbers could fit the greater truth. The fewest shots taken in a game is actually six, by Toronto, in a series-clinching playoff loss to New Jersey (and we're sure the cheery Toronto mediocracy handled that well) in 2000. In a regular-season game, the record is seven, by Washington in 1978. Frankly, we would have been tempted to eradicate the Rangers' third-period goal by Conor Sheary, but we are clumsy white-collar criminals and surely someone would have noticed if the final score changed. Sheary, for one.

Madison Square Garden is playing host to a copaganda campaign that has infiltrated its sporting events and will culminate in a special concert on March 28, exclusively for officers and civilian employees of the New York City Police Department. Surely you can figure out which very rich person is responsible for this idea. It was only by attending a New York Rangers game Monday night that I became aware of the "Thank You, NYPD" campaign. Compared to the usual ticket price for a hockey game at MSG, it was a relatively reasonable $55 to get in and witness Mika Zibanejad's 1,000th NHL regular-season game, a momentous occasion in which his team, the worst in the East, recorded a historically low total of nine shots on goal in a 2-1 loss to the Ottawa Senators. The following morning, the Rangers were credited with one additional shot. Dignity restored. During a break in the game, I was distracted by the video display's request that fans turn on their phone flashlights to thank the NYPD—a call to action that felt too stupid for a child to have suggested it. Then a QR code appeared on screen, and reappeared throughout the rest of the game, encouraging those in attendance to scan it and record their own videos thanking the NYPD. Who came up with this?

I've never been to Connecticut except to pass through it, so I personally can't speak to how hospitable it is to visitors. But Syracuse coach Felisha Legette-Jack would be happy if she never saw another Nutmegger for the rest of her life. "For us to continue to come to Connecticut year after year after year is, to me, it's a personal attack," Legette-Jack said after her Orange lost, 98-45, in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on Monday. That was just one line of many in her press conference/vent session that all but begged the selection committee to stop grouping early-round teams by region and give Syracuse some other top program's home court to lose on. "To have to come and be in this particular bracket every freaking year is unacceptable," she said. "It's wrong."

The importance of black literature in America has turned on its relation to the canon, and its proximity to political usefulness. The art and biographies of groundbreaking black figures are often turned into blunt tools with which anodyne lessons about equality and acceptance are fashioned. When I first read the works of James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., it was often presented as a lesson. Teachers, sympathetic non-black readers, and American culture at large would remind me, explicitly and implicitly, that these were first and foremost well-written and historically significant PSAs relegated to a narrow experience of life. In other words, black writing was rarely more than a category of moving, powerful, but crucially inoffensive examples of speaking truth to power. The not-so-subtle emphasis: that black literature is more useful for a very specific political purpose than as art. Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison is an intervention into this literary siloing, a work of bracing, rigorous, and thrilling critical appraisal not just of Toni Morrison’s evolution as a writer of fiction, but of the richness and complexity of the black literary tradition. While she is a professor of English at Harvard and an accomplished critic, I knew Serpell first as a novelist and, later, as my workshop mentor. Her epic speculative debut, The Old Drift, blends historical fiction with science fiction, stretching from the Zambezi River to outer space. Her follow-up, The Furrows, charts a family’s grief through the seductive slippage of broken time. With On Morrison, Serpell marshals both her fictive imagination and her critical acumen to bring forth knotted, uncompromising, and often surprising aspects of Morrison’s work.  Over the phone, we spoke about the capaciousness, and frustrations, of the archive, the centrality of Morrison’s difficulty both as a writer and a public figure, Serpell’s focus on the work of the artist over the biography, and how empathy shapes American political thinking. Our conversation has been lightly edited.

This week on Nothing But Respect, we invited back returning champion Maitreyi Anantharaman to talk about the biggest basketball news of the week: the looming return of the Golden State Valkyries. With the new CBA, the WNBA and its labor base avoided missing any games. They will have to fit an entire offseason's worth of business into a five-week window—business that includes not only a regular draft and training camps, but two expansion drafts and the free agency of almost every single veteran player in the league. There's a lot to get into! We also talked a lot about the media coverage of the negotiations, and a little bit about the Detroit Pistons, with whom Maitreyi is coping in incredible ways.

The new baseball season starts tomorrow, and yes, that tall gaunt figure in the black floor-length robe with a sickle where its backpack is supposed to be is standing right next to Aaron Judge, its head tilted meaningfully toward the flagpole in right center. It's all part of the new American tableau that starts with "Here's something you might like" and concludes with "but don't get used to it." Yes, this is a pre-lockout year, or pre-strike year if you are more inclined to sympathize with the idealized version of Scrooge McDuck, and that pressure will sit on the chests of every one of the 2,430 scheduled games this year. It feels surprising that Major League Baseball hasn't already done a deal with Fanatics for commemorative 2027 uniform patches that read "10TH WORK STOPPAGE." If you're that eager for another labor fight, why not take advantage of jersey completists and market it as vigorously as everything else? The Yankees play the Giants in San Francisco Wednesday evening in a game that marks the beginning of MLB's brand-new deal with Netflix. As a metaphor for the accessibility problems to come next year, it works perfectly, and not just because it is available only on Netflix, America's most trusted name in bum fights with production issues. That this game is siloed is not a condemnation of Netflix necessarily, but it does make for a tasty juxtaposition that the same people who finally quit the Duke and Duchess of Kent as content providers, the better to pivot to filming Pete Davidson free-associating in his garage, have signed up Barry Bonds to be in the booth Wednesday night. Even for hidebound voters who have contorted their brains to keep Bonds out of the Hall of Fame, this is a fun chance for the streamer to take. It will also irritate the sport's management, and since they're already there temperamentally, hey, let's party down.

In what could be filed under a statistically unlikely outcome, Carlos Alcaraz suffered his second loss in three matches. The world No. 1 was upset Sunday in the third round of the Miami Open by Sebastian Korda, who once looked to be one of the top prospects of the current American generation. In that 6-3, 5-7, 6-4 victory, Korda served for the match in the second set and flinched, making three untimely errors, but in the deciding set the world No. 36 managed to complete arguably the toughest task in men's tennis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55uq4_xI0fQ Along the way to his win, Korda flexed the muscle that made him such an appealing talent in the first place: his ability to stand on top of the baseline and take every ball on the rise, with clean contact on both wings. He's a gifted ball-striker, and once you add in some superb spot serving, that's a difficult opponent to beat. This wasn't the erratic Carlitos that sporadically rears its head in moments of burnout; Alcaraz played a focused match and fought back from the cusp of defeat. The 25-year-old Korda simply played the best match of his career.

When Connor McDavid speaks, Edmonton listens, because, well, who else is there? The man wasn't nicknamed McJesus for his knowledge of canonical law. Thus, when he was asked after the latest Oilers' sack-fouling, a 5-2 home loss to Tampa Bay on Saturday, the two-time Stanley Cup finalist and no-time Stanley Cup champion went for subtle condemnation of his division. Depending on whose interpretation you choose to embrace, he also may have quietly groined his own team and its coach. We hesitate to be more definitive because even the ultra-polite Canadian soul gets very snippy in public when the local hockey team is disappointing the customers. But McDavid used the entire wretched Pacific Division as cover for his own team's current run of walking, and it is a very stylish way of saying, "We stink, too."

The beauty and tragedy of taking part in a great crowd pop is that you had to be there. The TV sound mixers will not do it justice, nor will that guy who filmed the whole thing on his busted iPhone. The YouTube video you’ll pull up years later, trying to remember the moment, will only underwhelm you in relation to the real thing. (You don't understand: I swear this Tim Hardaway Jr. three prompted the loudest reaction in the history of professional sports. I SWEAR!) So here's the highest praise I can bestow on a highlight: The game-winning shot that sent fourth-seeded Minnesota to the Sweet 16 on Sunday caused such pandemonium that even the sound-mixed, through-a-screen YouTube version of it absolutely rules. Look at the cameras shake!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIC_2C0OnjE