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Aren’t you happy to see our Monday crossword? This week's puzzle was constructed by Patrick Maher, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Patrick is a software engineer and sporadic crossword constructor who lives in Manhattan. His hobbies include having two young children and doing whatever they want. He still plans on watching the Jets this year for some reason. 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."

For a team that was known for playing yesterday's hockey for a decade and being punished regularly for it, the Carolina Hurricanes played a lot like a historically elite team. You just didn't get to see a lot of it because they played so few games, which is proof if proof were needed that the historically elite thing was very real. The Canes won their first Stanley Cup in two decades with a clinical and almost bloodless 3-0 beatdown of the thoroughly gassed Vegas Golden Knights, and in many ways it was their most dominant performance of them all. All, of course, being 19 games, the fewest number of games needed by a champion since the 1988 Edmonton Gretzkys. After four bizarre games to start the series, Carolina controlled the Knights in Game 5 and utterly smothered and shrink-wrapped them Sunday night, nursing an early lead and sealing off Vegas's attempted zone entries so well that Vegas went 18 and a half minutes without a single shot on goal. It was in many ways the perfect example of the tight-checking style head coach Rod Brind'Amour had designed and relied upon when he took the job eight years ago, the style that became the main weapon used by his critics when their abbreviated playoff runs were cited. Going 1-12 in Conference Finals games had become his biography. This game, though, served as repudiation of all those critics and their quibbles, and for a myriad of reasons. It was the zenith (so far) of rookie goalie Brandon Bussi's very brief career; having entered Game 3 when starter Frederik Andersen hurt his knee (a fact concealed until the end of the series), he became the stalwart in net the Canes had been looking for, even though Andersen had bene perfectly competent against low-watt opponents Ottawa, Philadelphia, and Montreal. It was the culmination of Jordan Staal's career, as he became the first player in league history to win two Cups 17 years apart and the oldest player to win the Conn Smythe Trophy—three games after it had been all but ceded to Vegas' Mitch Marner. It was a hat tip to the five players who had come to Raleigh with Brind'Amour and remained (Staal, Jaccob Slavin, Sebastian Aho, Jordan Martinook and Andrei Svechnikov). It was a nod to age and experience in general; the Canes' average age for their top 20 players is 29, and Staal, who received the Cup from NHL bric-a-brac salesman Gary Bettman, saw to it that the first person he handed the Cup to was Andersen, who, while nowhere near a Canes lifer, is 36.

There were a number of intriguing discoveries to be made from the first round of matches in Group D of the World Cup, or as it is coming to be known, the Group Of Deaf. Such was the torrent of nearly hysterical praise directed at the United States team after its nearly ritualistic beating of Paraguay Friday night. No U.S. team had ever been so demonstratively superior in World Cup history, and no team had the level of semi-journalistic and marketing hysteria driving home that point. In other words, a 4-1 victory has rarely looked so 4-1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXD1_mhODBU But the problem of making judgments based on one match worth of data is that it provides less useful information than one thinks. For instance, what if the quiet reveal from that match is actually that Paraguay isn't very good at all? To be sure, the Americans looked and played as though they were physically more imposing and demonstrably quicker both on and off the ball, almost as if the game were too easy for them. But we know from our reading that the U.S. is typically more devoted to grind-it-out games that are hard on the eye as well as the scoreboard, so it is wise to take their Day 2 victory with the proper amount of salt. Say, a metric ton.

Days of humidity had finally broken with a thunderstorm the night before. Brazilians were all over midtown, getting ready for their World Cup game. Puerto Rican and Pride flags were everywhere. "Knicks in five" was no longer a shibboleth or even a prediction; it was now the city's standard greeting. It was a glorious Saturday to be out in New York. The watch parties had started organically. Someone projecting the game onto the side of a building, or a deli tuning its window LED screen to show ABC instead of pictures of sandwiches. Near me, on Smith Street, one man had started by putting a TV in the back of his parked car and setting up a few lawn chairs; by Game 5 it had become the neighborhood spot. Every bar in the city was full, it seemed. Every official watch party sold out within seconds. But if you wanted to watch the game with others, you didn't need a plan. You just went outside. It was everywhere. And when it was over and it was time to party, you were outside already. Here, some photos from the wire of Knicks fans reveling, and occasionally destroying. There were five assaults, according to the NYPD, and 63 arrests. That's tragic and detestable and embarrassing. But mostly it was joyful out there. It's often surprisingly easy, in a huge city, to feel alone. That wasn't possible this month. NYC had a vibe I can only really compare to the 2020 election results coming in, and the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and the 2003 blackout, and the days after 9/11. A sense that we were in this thing together. This was about the Knicks, but the lesson was that sharing it had been the entire point all along. All you had to do was go outside.

Gotham's true heroes, its sanitation brigades, are still sweeping up the dazed, delirious, and confused bodies from the streets of the city, and the clean-up will take them well into this evening. Then they'll have to do it all over again Thursday after the obligatory semi-violent boozer disguised as a parade. These New York Knicks are finally done with being the Knicks of yore, and the city that has come to rely on them as a work in perpetual progress, regress, and occasional undress, has one less thing to rely upon as enduring truth. That loss of identity begins after the parade, after approximately 50 gazumpty-skillion people clog and foul the streets of Manhattan to salute the logical inheritors of the crowns last worn by Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Harthorne Wingo, and Red Holzman. The half-century and change of often performative suffering has finally ended, and Knicks fans finally have a team worthy of their occasionally obnoxious hubris. Now they have to figure out what to do with it, and they are not reliable right now when it comes to figuring that out because they are still on the post-coital cigarette portion of their new journey. They beat the San Antonio Spurs for the final time Saturday night, 94-90, to win the 80th NBA championship, and they did so in the most New York kind of way: by taking early body shots from the younger and springier Spurs and then clinically exposing San Antonio's collective naivete time and again. Through know-how, defensive pressure and new statue-in-training Jalen Brunson, they made the Spurs and allegedly indomitable centerpiece Victor Wembanyama grapple with and eventually submit to their own too-new-for-school demons. The Knicks had done the same things the same ways in Games 1 through 4, and the only reason they needed five games instead of the bare minimum is because Donald Trump attended the third.

With a 94-90 win in Game 5, yet another doughty comeback and superlative Jalen Brunson takeover, the New York Knicks are NBA champions. This is an unsettling and unusual thing to say, because they are the New York Knicks.  Knicks fandom has, historically, been about feeling bad. But feeling bad together is still a communal experience. Much of the conversation in New York these past two months has involved proving and sharing fan bona fides, and given their track record, that takes the form of bragging about all the ways the Knicks have made us feel bad. It was a game of one-upmanship that everybody lost. The Charles Smith game. Oh yeah? How about the Reggie Miller game? Oh yeah? I lived through Eddy Curry. Oh yeah? Well, I believed in Frank Ntilikina. Oh yeah? I thought Kevin Knox was going to be a superstar. That sort of thing. (I don't believe in omens, but Knox and his Fortnite suit might've been both the low point and a portent. Take a look at this photo of him and their other draftee that 2018 evening—now the longest-tenured Knick—and their jersey numbers.) Phil Jackson once said of his time with the Bulls that Madison Square Garden crowds were among the easiest to play against because of their pessimism. Fear was not very far below the surface; even a loud, seemingly confident crowd needed the smallest amount of stress to crack completely. They had seen it too many times, and expected it, and got it. Even now, the thought of the organ priming fans to chant "defense" inspires 'Nam-style flashbacks to all the times the Knicks needed a stop that they would not get. It was an unpleasant way to live. It felt bad.

This past Sunday, Alexander Zverev won his first major title. On the surface, the 29-year-old's Roland-Garros victory is the story of a player who, after roughly a decade of high expectations, accomplished the signature feat in his sport while benefiting from injuries and early upsets that removed the biggest obstacles in the men's bracket from his path. Perhaps it's the story of an elite athlete succeeding despite a childhood type-1 diabetes diagnosis that requires him to regulate his blood sugar levels during competition, or the story of a player who finally conquered the nerves that previously undermined his talent once he arrived at the late stage of a major. But for many journalists and a large swath of the tennis-watching public, it's also the story of a player who has faced allegations of domestic violence from two previous partners. The first accuser, Olya Sharypova, took her allegations public in 2020 through interviews with journalist Ben Rothenberg. Sharypova accused Zverev of repeated instances of physical abuse, including him punching and choking her. There were no legal charges; the ATP commissioned an independent investigation and concluded that there was "insufficient evidence" to substantiate the allegations. (Zverev filed a lawsuit against Rothenberg in German court over the reporting; the case is "winding down," according to Rothenberg.) Brenda Patea, the second accuser and mother of Zverev's daughter, took him to trial in Germany. Court records obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said that Patea accused Zverev of pushing and strangling her. At every turn, Zverev has claimed that the allegations are false, and, as recently as this past weekend, he has claimed that he has been proven innocent in court, even though the 2024 out-of-court settlement does not constitute a ruling on his innocence or guilt.

After a Texas court granted Brendan Sorsby an injunction against the NCAA's suspension of his eligibility due to his gambling activity, the reaction inside and outside of college sports was intense. At Texas Tech, they hear you and they're listening. That's why the school assembled a braintrust to record a 20-minute State of the Union address to assure the public that the school truly has the best of intentions, by welcoming a guy who gambled on his own team back into the fold. https://twitter.com/TechAthletics/status/2065245076280750107 To some, like the commissioners and athletic directors who have decried the judge's ruling and called for stern punishment for Sorsby in spite of it, it is a gross miscarriage of justice that an athlete could directly compromise his sport's integrity by betting on his own team's games but suffer little consequence. But to Texas Tech's braintrust—which includes Red Raiders football coach Joey McGuire, university president Lawrence Schovanec, senior associate athletic director for student-athlete health and wellness (whatever that means) Grant Stovall, and AD Kirby Hocutt—all of this is purely about the best way to treat Sorsby's mental illness, which would naturally involve the healing power of college football and Texas Tech not having to eat its $6 million investment in Sorsby.

There are very few people on Earth who want to see Carter Hart in net for Vegas. Most of them are Golden Knights fans, but no one cares what they think because they are Golden Knights fans. One of them is John Tortorella, who has displayed a deep and occasionally baffling level of loyalty to the goalie, likely dating to their time in Philadelphia. The only others are the Carolina Hurricanes, because they have been beating the shit out of Hart every night and would like that to continue. Hart had already made history by being the first goalie to give up at least four goals in each of the Stanley Cup Final's first four games, so what did he do in Game 5 Thursday night? Gave up four more, as fans gleefully chanted "No means no," as they have before in this series. I find the chant in poor taste, but certainly not for reasons that involve sympathy for Hart. There could be some pathos in watching a man steadfastly earn himself the undisputed title of worst goalie in Cup Final history, were it another man. But it's Hart, whose role in the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal came with an acquittal, but also a fairly clear-eyed consensus in the NHL world that the limits of basic decency did not extend to allowing Hart to resume his career as if nothing happened. That consensus did not apply to the Golden Knights; it rarely seems to. They signed Hart in October 2025, nine days after he became eligible to sign, and put him in net on Dec. 2, one day after he became eligible to play.

Calder Gardens is not so much a museum as it is a shrine to abstraction. The 1.8 acres of land it sits on is immaculately landscaped so that the flowers and grasses change throughout the year from vibrant, flowing, waist-high beauties in the summer to yellow in the winter. The Gardens, which opened in Philadelphia in September 2025, say that "the objects on view respond to architectural moments rather than art historical narratives.” It is not a gallery presented with an eye toward education, but a space built to contain the work and amplify it. In other words, it is a vibe. The building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, twists and turns in surprising ways. Outside, massive sculptures sit gracefully in pockets of the building. Inside, the ceiling is low in places to compress a work that towers in the middle. The balcony from the second floor looks out at eye level to the Alexander Calder mobiles hung from the ceiling. Down the stairs, you can look up at them from underneath as they rotate.  On the lower floor, a few of these "architectural moments" take the shape of notches in the walls, rounded and concave like the inside of an egg. It is only after wandering amongst the mobiles, your neck bent back so that your eyes can gaze up, that you might notice these little spaces, just deep enough to tuck yourself into. They are places to perch—not quite benches, but sills. The architects have built these spaces as if they are suction-cup platforms stuck to a window, and we are their beloved, uninterested housecat who must be encouraged to observe the world outside ourselves.