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It's been a long road back to the top for Arthur Fils. In the second round of last year's French Open, hometown hero Arthur Fils sent the gathered Parisians into hysterics when he downed Jaume Munar in a thrilling fifth set. At this moment, anyone observing a screaming, shirtless Fils—just 20 years old and ranked 14th in the world—would have seen a player who seemed likely to continue rising up the ranks of men's tennis, and right on time. The Changeover thesis was about to be proved almost stultifyingly correct. What more coherent way could there be to balance men's tennis out than to have a volcanic, expressive Frenchman join the laconic Italian and the puppydog-exuberant Spaniard currently dominating the sport? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci_6gKogYlI

The Virginia Tech spring game was supposed to be the beginning of a new chapter for a struggling football program, a scrimmage that could offer a reset after a 3-9 season that saw coach Brent Pry ousted after the school started 0-3 last fall. Now under the stewardship of new coach James Franklin, the Hokies would be entering a … wait, hold on. Aw shit. There's a skydiver stuck on the video board. https://twitter.com/yakubbsmonster/status/2045578828467020048?s=20 Saturday's game at Lane Stadium in Blacksburg opened with the all-too-familiar pairing of college football and military-coded Americana, as skydivers descended over the stadium with American flags clipped to their gear. Video clips from social media show one of the skydivers clearing the video board. The slow simmer of annoyance over pregame festivities halting the actual start of a game turned into anxiety as another skydiver, seemingly caught in erratic winds over the field, drifted closer and closer to peril before colliding with the Jumbotron, left dangling by their chute as the words "This Is Home" blazed across the screen.

When Austin Reaves and Luka Doncic were smote out of the first round of the NBA Playoffs (barring pathbreaking Spanish advances in hamstring science) with muscle injuries, it felt like a death sentence for the Los Angeles Lakers. The injuries occurred right as the team was beginning to look like A Problem, making them instead a wounded quarry to be hunted. They were able to limp into the relative safety of playing a team coached by the offensively befuddled Ime Udoka and anchored on the court by the generally befuddling Kevin Durant-Alperen Sengun duo, though even with home court advantage, they were clearly up against it. Only LeBron James stood healthy for a Lakers team otherwise completely bereft of offensive creation, and only weeks after advancing the Lakers' title chances by finally accepting a downshift in his role, the now-venerable graybeard of the league would have to wind back the clock and be the best player on the court in order for his team to have any chance. Ask any expert, consult any betting market, watch any Amen Thompson highlight reel: that did not feel likely going into Saturday's Game 1 matchup in L.A. But unc was not crucified. Despite the predictably glaring disparity in athleticism, the Lakers put forth an impressive team performance to win Game 1, 107-98. Luke Kennard led the way with 27, Kevin Durant was a surprise scratch, and the Lakers' bench was so thin that JJ Redick was forced to play Bronny James for a spell in the first half. That stretch was an unmitigated disaster, but it ultimately did not matter, as LeBron James Sr. was masterful in his 38 minutes.

Defector is proud of its sweeties and enemies binary. In athletic competition, there are sweeties, who cause a feeling of butterflies in tummies, and there are enemies, who are shitheels. Nobody denies this. This year's NHL playoff bracket looks a little weird. Some teams seem like they've innocently stumbled into a place they don't belong. Other franchises are truly despicable embarrassments to ice. To make sense of the first round, I have divided every series into a sweetie and an enemy. Here they are, without further comment. NHL Playoff Sweeties

I have always found the starter-into-closer pipeline to be demoralizing. Per baseball truisms, even the best reliever would be a starter if they were only, by certain definitions, better. Moving a starter to the pipeline is so often the last-ditch move of teams that do not know how to develop their pitchers. I hope Roki Sasaki finds his groove; I hope that closer-into-starter conversion or reconversion projects go well. That said: Mason Miller, who was traded from the Athletics to the San Diego Padres last year for a whopping four prospects, was practically engineered in a lab to be the exception. The closer is a position in baseball where the best players are, value and contracts and whatever bullshit aside, composed of pure, distilled coolness. It is a different skillset from that of the starter. A closer—who does not have to worry about pitch count, or keeping the arm going through five-plus innings, or the third time through the batting order—is more concerned with quality, delivering more concentrated nastiness on the pitch-to-pitch level than starters can. For Miller, this is best exemplified by his average four-seamer speed going up a full three miles per hour after he moved to the bullpen. Also, now he gets a cool walk-out ritual (depending on one's definition of cool). It is fine, even appealing, that Miller's arsenal is composed of only an absurd fastball, an absurd slider, and an occasional changeup to lefties, thrown so infrequently that the pitch's heat map so far this season resembles six little bullseye targets. A closer with Miller's stuff does not need more pitches than that. His fastball sits at 101.4 mph and touches 103, which does legitimately make his 95.8-mph change-up a change-up. So far this season, 24 pitches have been thrown above 102 mph. One was thrown by Baltimore Orioles reliever Ryan Helsley; six have been thrown by Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Edgardo Henriquez (rocking, despite the stuff, a 5.40 ERA). Miller threw the other 17.

Whoaaaa, get a load of this! The NBA playoffs are starting tomorrow. Yes yes, there are more play-in tournament games tonight, but we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about the real playoffs, and get you caught up to speed so that you may witness these contests with all the basketball knowledge one could possibly need filling your skull. Before we get to the previews, however, we wanted to talk about some other important issues facing the NBA. Below you will find a roundtable discussion between Defector's biggest basketball nerds about tanking, uncompetitive regular-season games, and the NBA's popularity crisis. There's a lot to discuss on those topics, so be sure to check that out. Just kidding! God, that would be awful. OK, here are the previews.

On Wednesday night, the NBA fined LaMelo Ball for his "unnecessary and reckless contact" with Bam Adebayo during Charlotte's victory over Miami in their play-in game Tuesday. It made for a deflating end to what had become a whole media saga over Ball's intentions, or lack thereof, and whether or not the league should suspend him for the next game to make up for the ejection he avoided because the referees missed the incident. Ultimately, the NBA decided not to suspend Ball, hitting him instead with a $35,000 fine for the trip, an additional $25,000 for cursing during his postgame interview, and a retroactive flagrant 2 foul. He is therefore available to play in Friday's game against the Orlando Magic for the No. 8 seed and the right to get stomped by Detroit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C29Pudky5AA Was this the right decision? As always, "... eh." Ball's swipe of Adebayo's leg looked a lot worse in slow motion than in real time, where it just seemed like a typically goofy player prone to losing control of his body, which, if you've ever watched LaMelo Ball play basketball, you know that's exactly what he is. Should the refs have stopped the game to take a further look at the trip? Probably, but 1) the game was moving a hundred miles a minute, so the refs missed their window for it, and 2) the refs tend to lean toward not affecting the outcome of games the later we get into a season, which is the right instinct.

Something about blondies really gets my motor humming. I love brownies, and I really love chocolate chip cookies. But put a thick-cut blondie in front me and suddenly I go as wild as an ape. A blondie is like a chocolate chip cookie but, like, more of it. That’s my kind of 500-calorie snack. With that in mind, it only makes sense that I would try to bake my own blondies, so that I might gorge on them whenever I see fit. I started off on my blondie journey by just using regular chocolate chip cookie dough, spreading it evenly inside a Pyrex dish. Then I moved onto Smitten Kitchen’s blondie recipe. Smitten Kitchen recipes are almost always money in the bank, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with the results of this one. They were a little too dense to scratch my blondie itch. But Smitten Kitchen author Deb Perelman said to tinker with her recipe, so I did. A lot. Because we lack a JUMP TO RECIPE button here at Defector, I’ll blow past the rest of my thinking process so that you don’t get all pissy. Let’s get right to the good shit. This makes 24 bars. INGREDIENTS:

If there is a stronger verity in hockey than "Trust nothing in the playoffs," it is surely, "And whatever else you do, trust nothing you saw before the playoffs." The fetish of the team with the best record rarely proving it when everyone is watching is as secure a bet as past-posting, to the point where the Presidents’ Trophy, which is what the team with the best regular-season record receives, is now aligned with the American president in plain undesirability. But every year, someone wins it anyway, the morons. Either a star goes dim, or a reliable goalie goes bad, or the exertions of the past six months pile up, or a lesser team goes on a heater, or as is often the case, something stupid simply happens. Thus, the most interesting questions about the Western Conference this year were (a) just how bad is the Pacific? and (b) when are the Colorado Avalanche going to figure out that it's time to start tanking for the good of their Cup run? The answers are (a) abominable, and (b) they tried a bit in March but didn't have the stomach to finish the job.

In The Christophers, Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a painter hired by a pair of bumbling siblings for an odd sort of job. They want her to go work for their father, a renowned artist named Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), who has largely shunned the art world, spending his waning days being the Simon Cowell on an obscene reality show called Art Fight and recording Cameo messages to fans for lunch money. What Julian’s kids really want, though, is for Lori to put her skills to work secretly forging a set of paintings to complete their father’s great masterwork, a long-running series of portraits called “the Christophers.” Directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Ed Solomon, what starts as a con movie quickly morphs into something far more delicate and layered. Staged as a kind of a two-hander, and largely confined to the narrow spaces of Julian’s multi-level London home, the flamboyant, witty painter quickly susses out that the young forger has more to her than mere interest in a job, though her plan eludes him. Testing and prodding her, the two begin a contentious dialogue about pouring themselves into art and having their relationship to it transformed by the public’s—sometimes harsh—reaction. Solomon’s funny, lively, florid, and moving script wrestles directly with what it means to lose touch with the reasons people make art in the first place. The film examines how the artist persona can distract from a real sense of purpose, embittering artists in the process. It’s a film about the painful realities that often stop artists in their tracks. It’s also a film about legacies, both positive and negative, and the complicated give-and-take of artistic inspiration. All of it anchored by unfussy, clear-eyed direction from Soderbergh, and a pair of incredible performances from Coel and McKellen, whose interplay feels like watching an acting masterclass.