NowLoop

The sophomore slump is real, in the sense that rookies who have great seasons are rarely able to live up to such lofty expectations the following year, and fake, in the sense that it is hardly a phenomenon limited to rookies and sophomores. Rather, the sophomore slump is a manifestation of that accursèd phrase "regression to the mean": It is difficult for any baseball player, rookie or not, to follow up a great season, perhaps even an all-time great season, with something remotely resembling it. Which is to say that Cal "Big Dumper" Raleigh was not going to dump 60 home runs all over this season like he did in 2025; the question was how much he would fall. The answer right now is: pretty damn far. Raleigh got off to a very poor start to the season, going 0-for-7 with seven strikeouts. This was very poor timing, as he had just drawn an outsized amount of attention for being a redass to his teammate Randy Arozarena during the World Baseball Classic; the whimsy of a given nickname is not enough to free Raleigh from resultant schadenfreude. But before the Seattle Mariners catcher could officially be renamed "Big Slumper" in certain private circles, he picked up his offensive production in April, returning to roughly the sort of hitter he was in the four non–60-homer seasons of his career: as always a pulled fly ball machine, though with overall offensive production hovering closer to 20 percent better than the average MLB hitter, rather than 60 percent. On April 27, Raleigh hit an eighth-inning home run against the Minnesota Twins. Since then—13 days, eight games, 36 plate appearances—he has not recorded a hit.

The Washington Wizards won the 2026 NBA draft lottery and were awarded the first overall selection in the upcoming player draft, scheduled for June 23. They will have their choice of the handful of top amateur prospects in the sport, from what is considered a particularly strong class of players. They can also trade away the pick, a maneuver that would presumably return to them either a handful of future draft picks or a proven NBA player, or both. Michael Winger, president of Monumental Basketball, the Ted Leonsis-owned management company that runs the Wizards, reportedly told third-tier hoops scoopster Jake Fischer Sunday night that his front office "will at least consider" trading the pick, as they do not view their lottery windfall as "a savior moment." The Wizards arrived at this moment by being very bad at basketball. They lost 80 percent of their games this regular season, their third consecutive season with fewer than 20 wins. This one Wizards squad, more or less, is responsible for two of the three seasons in NBA history when a team allowed more than 10,000 total points while scoring fewer than 9,500; per Statmuse, Washington's minus-982 from this regular season is the fourth-worst point differential in history. The Wizards have not been good—not in any serious way—since 1979, but these recent campaigns have been particularly gruesome, and represent the cynical nadir of a period of total basketball irrelevance. This season the Wizards had losing streaks of nine, 10, 14, and 16 games, and had winning streaks of two, two, two, and two. From Dec. 26 to Jan. 6, the team unexpectedly won five of seven behind the steady stewardship of veteran guard C.J. McCollum. The next day, on Jan. 7, they traded McCollum and reserve Corey Kispert to the Atlanta Hawks for Trae Young, whose asset value, distressed by a huge contract, a difficult professional reputation, and a team that plainly did not need him, was at its all-time low. The point was to lose: Following the trade, the Wizards dropped nine in a row. Even that was not enough to push them clear of a large pack of NBA teams that also spent the back half of this season trying to lose. Contorting its roster into hilarious shapes and de-powering itself outrageously, the team finally managed to lose 26 of its final 27 games. Despite all of this, the Wizards finished just two games below the second-worst team in the standings, and just five games worse than the fifth-worst.

The Buffalo Sabres were a great road team this year. Only the Avalanche won more games away from home, and in the first round of the playoffs the Sabres took all three games they played in Boston by a combined score of 13-3. But Montreal, as the city proved in Game 3 of its second-round win over the Sabres, is a little bit different than your average NHL road trip. Something like 40,000 people were in the immediate vicinity of the Canadiens' arena on Sunday night, per the TV broadcast. About half of them were inside the league's largest building—and therefore, in my experience, the loudest. The other half was crowded into the huge outdoor plaza that had to add a third giant screen to keep up with demand. Quebec hasn't been the center of the hockey universe in my lifetime, but it's still hard for me not to get romantic about French-Canadians and their game. From Maurice Richard to Marie-Philip Poulin, there is an overwhelming amount of hockey history tied to this area, and a tremendous pride in that history that fuels a rabid devotion to the teams of today. It's a lot of pressure, and early in their careers I worried about the ability of Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki to carry the weight of this fanbase's anxieties. But as Suzuki's taken over the captaincy and Caufield's become a 50-goal scorer, they've ushered in a new era of Canadiens hockey that has blessed these fans with an unbelievable young core. Players like Juraj Slafkovsky, Lane Hutson, and Ivan Demidov could all easily play high schoolers on a teen drama filmed in Vancouver for the tax breaks. But in Montreal, they're maturing into hockey heroes. Every Habs scorer in their 6-2 win was 25 years old or younger, and the combined force of their attack, coupled with the volume of the Montreal crowd, created a scene that rattled the Sabres.

If you asked philosophers what the most mysterious thing about the mind is, most of them would say: consciousness. It's just a really weird thing. An exhaustive physical description of a brain state doesn't obviously tell us anything about why that state would be associated with the experience of tasting strawberry rather than the experience of sneezing. What is it about that physical state that makes it feel some particular way, that the physical states of being a sodium ion or a national economy presumably lack? Why should anything feel any way at all? These are heady, profound questions about what we are and the universe in which we live. It's hard to even imagine what satisfying answers to these questions could look like, which is why they have produced centuries of chin stroking.  Until recently, we had it on relatively good authority that only conscious things could produce spontaneous, grammatical prose. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) calls that correlation into question. However impressive or unimpressive one finds the outputs, they evidently can produce grammatical text in natural language, and yet they seem remarkably unlike the conscious creatures we are familiar with. How should we react? We could think it's just an accident that for a long time, only conscious creatures could produce grammatical text, and it turns out it can be produced without consciousness (that would be my bet, for what it's worth), or we could conclude that LLMs are conscious after all, because you really do need consciousness to produce grammatical text. The chin stroking has been vigorous lately.  Even if you think it's obvious whether or not LLMs are conscious, a full explanation of why or why not is hard. It's hard because consciousness is already mysterious in the human case. We don't know what about a physical brain makes it conscious, or what consciousness does (or, even, if it does anything at all). So what are we supposed to look for to decide whether an alien system is conscious? If you thought you could only make consciousness out of carbon, you'll want to check the physical machine that's running the LLM; if you thought it was a special kind of representation, you'll be more interested in the software. The mysteriousness of human consciousness infects questions about other possible consciousnesses, however implausible those possibilities are. 

Set the tone for your week and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Kelsey Dixon, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Kelsey is a Southerner by birth, a Mariah Carey fan by choice, and a Chicagoan by the grace of god. When she's not busy working as the crossword editor for the Atlantic, she can be found investigating the Edmonton Oilers polycule or breaking single-use kitchen gadgets. 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 Defector basketball chat was captivated by a sequence of artfully stage-lit photos in Game 1 of the Knicks-Sixers playoff series at Madison Square Garden. They were the work of Nathaniel S. Butler, senior official photographer for the NBA. Butler has shot the league from up close for over 40 years, from the era of cigarette smoke to the era of outthrust smartphones, and he compiled some of those images in a 2024 book titled Courtside. I caught up with him last week to talk about how he crafts these images and finds new ways to look at the game. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. We were admiring some shots you took at MSG during this series. In particular, we really loved the ones where the foreground is softly lit, and the background is so stark and dark. What is it about MSG and the lighting setup there that allows you to capture these images?

The (in)famous Defector Philly Bureau has been oddly silent on this bit of newsy detritus, which is not normally like it. Maybe it was just the giddiness of watching the Phillies beat the Colorado Rockies and extend their run of watchable baseball to two full weeks, or maybe it was the festivities of Mother's Day ("Hi Mom, here's some flowers, some candy and some brunch. We'll try to be home for dinner"), or maybe Eternal Comrade McQuade wasn't around to revel loudly in the quirky details.  Whatever the reason, the fact remains: Playoff season is over for the Children of Billy Penn, already the only town to ever lose two championships on the same day. This time it ended with near-synchronous thuds in the very same building. On Saturday, the Flyers lost to Carolina in overtime, 3-2, to be eliminated in four straight games. On Sunday, the 76ers got jackhammered by New York, 144-114, in a Game 4 that wasn't remotely that close; they too were swept. A six seed and seven seed overachieved right up to the point where they ran out of achievements, and in 24 hours Philadelphia's entire spring was wiped out. 

It should not have taken a month and change for the Golden State Warriors to figure out what they wanted to do with head coach Steve Kerr, nor should it have taken that long for Kerr to figure out what to do with them. If management wanted to punish their Hall of Fame-bound head coach for allegedly mismanaging Jonathan Kuminga (we'll wait for you in the back to settle down), they should have canned him the day after their play-in loss to Phoenix. If Kerr was fed up with his bosses sniping about how he could not somehow draw up a scheme that negated the ravages of advanced age and bad health, or find a fix for a roster with more questions than answers, he should have dropped his pants on his way out of the season recap meeting and hit the road for either a lifetime of golf or an NBA job without the comforts of Stephen Curry. Kerr, we needn't add here, is not insane. So no, neither of those events occurred. In the end, logic, common sense, and good old inertia won out, and the 32 days didn't matter in the end. Reports claimed this process took three actual weeks, but that doesn't include the week and half after the season ended when nothing moved except for the rumor mill. Nevertheless, whatever handwringing and agonized forehead rubs were expended by all parties en route, the result was as it should have been. A few meetings, a little golf, and voila! The status is quo. The center holds; the man who coached the Golden State Warriors last year will coach them in the next. And yet this is still a story of at least minimal consequence, if only because it never got the automatic resolution it deserved. Kerr and Curry are a matched pair, and each helped the other build the last great NBA dynasty; you may quarrel amongst yourselves about the who-did-what ratio, but there's no arguing the broader point. And, as each man was both comfortable and competitive, it seemed appropriate that neither would consider leaving without the other. Curry isn't leaving, and now Kerr isn't, either; this makes sense. But those 32 days didn't feel nearly that inevitable, and a vacuum demands to be filled, and so we got the fevered specu-guessing that we got.

What makes for a memorable NBA postseason? High-level basketball is necessary, as are a few Game 7s, plenty of drama, and maybe an upset or two. But a truly entertaining playoff run also requires a dose of the bizarre. The Timberwolves and Spurs fulfilled the brief during Minnesota's 114–109 victory Sunday in Game 4. You want bizarre? How about Victor Wembanyama, never one to display much more emotion on the court than a serene intensity, briefly channeling his inner Artest and attempting to decapitate Naz Reid with a high-velocity elbow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-t2I6z16xI

There is nothing that sucks the life out of a good time like someone self-consciously asking whether you are having fun. Maybe a moment ago, you were having fun, but now, faced with their anxiety (or worse, their reassurance that certainly you are having a good time, maybe even the best you've ever had), your attention is diverted to them: the fear in this other person's eyes and their terror that it might not be everything they hoped it would be. Whatever fun was in the air is sucked out by the insistence that there is so much of it. That is how it feels to watch the 50th season of Survivor. As the first season with returning players in almost a decade, producers for Survivor 50 should be able to rely on the cast to create drama, intrigue, and mess. The players should be allowed to sabotage each other and ruin one another's opportunities. That is, after all, the point of the game. But instead of allowing the players to play, Survivor 50 has become a cautionary tale in over-production. Take the most recent episode as an example. The players have fully merged into one tribe. They have alliances and plans, hidden idols and secret enemies. If left alone, one assumes they would quickly turn on one another and create sufficient drama. But instead of letting this all play out for the viewer, long-time host and now showrunner Jeff Probst spends every episode insisting we are about to see "the biggest twist in Survivor history" or "the most dramatic tribal council in Survivor history." Maybe, but please ... shut up about it!