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Don't stop me if you've heard this one before: The New York Mets are a real disappointment. This was true last year, when they missed the playoffs, and this was true last week, when the team followed a sweep at the hands of the Athletics with one by the Dodgers. It's somehow even more true today, as the Chicago Cubs spent the weekend stretching the Mets' losing streak to 11 games, putting them at 7-15 and dead last in the National League. A common theme in these losses is that New York has failed to plate runs, but on Sunday in Wrigley, they almost got away with it. Riding a 1-0 lead into the bottom of the ninth, they entrusted newly acquired bullpen arm Devin Williams with the save situation, then watched as he fumbled it by allowing a base hit and an RBI double by former Met Michael Conforto. In the 10th, after the butt end of the Mets' order failed to bring around their guy on second, it was another new-to-them reliever, Craig Kimbrel, who let the winning man score on a wild pitch and a sac fly. https://youtu.be/_kIo33I6nbQ?si=iZIZOq6sXT0OM3MV&t=997

Forget what the scouting report said about Munetaka Murakami before he came over to MLB from NPB. As we all know, foreign scouting is not real. Big bombs are real, and Murakami has, in his three most recent games with the Chicago White Sox, delivered three big bombs. One of them even had the additional oomph of being his first career grand slam. 114.1 mph exit velocity, 431 feet to dead center field 103.9 mph exit velocity, 415 feet to center field

Last week, I wrote that Manchester City had to intervene and stop the Arsenal title march, mainly for my own personal enjoyment. While some of you rightfully didn't appreciate that, you can't argue with the results. Arsenal came out on Sunday at City's stadium ready to play and still lost, 2-1, ceding control of the title race with just five matches left in its season. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeFeAiDvFww The stats won't back the argument that Arsenal did anything particularly exciting yesterday, at least at face value. City dominated possession, 59-41, and had 15 shots to Arsenal's nine (five to three on target differential). Arsenal's only goal came from a Gianluigi Donnarumma mistake:

Our Monday crossword is pretty dope. This week's puzzle was constructed by Zachary Edward-Brown and Mishkin Filstrup, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Zach and Mishkin are high school friends from Chicago. Zach enjoys soccer and basketball and rooting for the Bears. Mishkin enjoys playing golf with his family and running track with his friends. 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. Please note that submissions will be closed from April 1 to May 1. 

Monty McCutchen remembers the play unfolding in front of him. With just under two minutes left in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals, the game tied at 89, Golden State's Andre Iguodala grabbed a rebound and dribbled up the floor. He was coming right at McCutchen, who was backpedaling and would end up as the "lead" official positioned underneath the basket Iguodala was sprinting toward. Iguodala and teammate Steph Curry bore down on J.R. Smith, the only Cleveland Cavalier back on defense; Iguodala passed it off to Curry, who skipped it straight back. As the closest referee, McCutchen prepared for a contested attempt at the rim. "I was refereeing J.R. Smith," said McCutchen, one of three officials on the game and now the NBA's senior VP of referee development and training. "I remember thinking, 'You got J.R. Get J.R. Get J.R.'"

Talk about regression candidates. Just over a month ago, football journalist Arif Hasan broke the news that analytics giant Pro Football Focus was purchased by Teamworks, an even larger analytics giant, for somewhere north of $130 million. According to Hasan, many employees working on the consumer side of PFF weren’t informed of the news by the company itself. It didn't take those poor souls very long to discover why that was. Shortly after the deal was consummated, many of those same employees were laid off. HOORAY FOR EFFICIENCY! From Front Office Sports: PFF called employees to an all-hands meeting on Monday, during which it was announced that about half of them would be moving to the new company. PFF possessed both a content side and a data team—all 32 NFL teams subscribe to the company’s enterprise data set—and most of those who survived the layoffs were on the data side, a source said. According to Hasan, many of those laid off weren’t informed of the news by the company itself. They found out through secondhand sources on the internet, which is a bit ruthless even for a company founded on cold-blooded football data.

In the 10 days since Artemis II splashed down safely, NASA has continued to release new imagery from the mission. A personal favorite is the one atop this post, taken from a camera mounted on one of the Orion capsule's solar array wings. It captures Orion, the Moon, and the Earth, helping to add some framing to a perspective that humans were never meant to quite wrap their brains around. The photographs from Artemis have been magnificent. They are meant to be. Part of this test flight's mission was to sell itself: NASA's budget is never secure from year to year, and the administration is responsible for stirring up its own public support. What better way to do that among a visually oriented species like ours than with pictures? They may not all have strictly scientific value, but they carry real worth nonetheless. The vast majority of those images have understandably been captured on top-of-the-line equipment. Shooting in space presents unique challenges, and the Artemis crew trained for 20 hours on photography alone, with professional instructors. But the astronauts were also issued iPhones. Why iPhones? They're compact, easy to use, and offer perfectly decent photo and video quality for personal use. More personal-seeming photos were the whole idea—part of selling Artemis is selling the crew as regular people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. Imagery that's a little less polished and processed helps convey life inside Orion.

The problem with mythmaking is that the myth needs constant feeding, and each dish must be spicier and more exotic than the last. Fortunately for the Buffalo Sabres, they seem to get how it’s supposed to be done. It is no longer enough to cite the 15 years in which they haven't mattered, or how they worst-to-firsted between December and April, or that the man who built the roster, general manager Kevyn Adams, had to be fired for that roster to finally get the idea that suck is not a permanent state. Buffalo is now the representative of cool kids everywhere because narratives have to eat, too. But until Sunday, the enduring truth of the Cup was always lingering in the background—that cool only gets you past the national anthem, and then you get serious, one crosscheck at a time. Buffalo was a team with an excellent record, a revivified fan base and a roster full of playoff neophytes playing against the Boston Bruins, who always seem like a tough postseason out even when they don't make the postseason at all.

From the moment his team defeated the previously undefeatable Oklahoma City Thunder in December, you could start to hear the whispers: Yes, Victor Wembanyama is the future, but is he—could he be—I know it's so soon but maybe is he already, you know, the best player in, well, the NBA? The whispers grew to a din by the end of the season, with Wembanyama playing such a dominant final four months of the season that he credibly mounted an MVP campaign. The nebulous title of Best Player is, if not Wemby's, then up for grabs in these playoffs for whoever makes it out of the Western Conference. San Antonio is not only a trendy pick to win the title among wised-up NBA observers, but oddsmakers have them as the second-most likely winner behind a team they beat four times. That optimism is tempered by a long history of teams like this needing to bleed a little before they hoist a trophy. That's how it works. Breaking the constraints of basketball and physics is cool in February against the Utah Jazz, but the playoffs are different. Other teams face more unforgiving sets of expectations, feel more pressure, and have more at stake this year, having incinerated more of their future than the Spurs. But no other team or player presents as large and compelling a mystery than Victor Wembanyama. Now that the games matter, what will happen? We saw the start of the answer Sunday night, in Wembanyama's playoff debut.

It's been a long road back to the top for Arthur Fils. In the second round of last year's French Open, the hometown hero 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