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As the Warriors bathed in the luminous joy of ending the Los Angeles Clippers' cursed season, Golden State head coach Steve Kerr offered five perfect words. "For one night," he grinned, "we're us." The 10th-seeded Warriors truly were their old selves, and not in the pejorative sense, turning around what had been a frustratingly out-of-reach play-in game against the ninth-seeded Clippers with some of the purest Warriorball anyone has seen all season, for a 126-121 win. I write the final score out there for emphasis, as the Warriors had been tracking to hit around 100 until the last 9:35 of the game, in which they scored 41 points. The Clippers held a 13-point lead at that 9:35 mark, and the Warriors did not seem to have the juice. They'd cobbled together some mildly functional offense, especially in the third quarter, as Steph Curry and Draymond Green piloted their two-man screen-and-dive hivemind over to interact with Kristaps Porzingis, though the effort it took them to get good shots was visibly taxing. All game, they would cut double-digit Clippers leads down to three or so, upon which they would get exhausted, L.A. would instantly start trying, and the lead would quickly balloon back up to double digits. Derrick Jones Jr. was mostly great defending Curry, especially one-on-one in space, Bennedict Mathurin was particularly good, and L.A. shot well from three on the night. Golden State, meanwhile, was playing an eight-man rotation that had scarcely played together all season. The Warriors had a really tough year, first finding themselves embroiled in a Jonathan Kuminga saga of their own making, then losing Jimmy Butler and Moses Moody to catastrophic knee injuries, then limping into the 10th seed as both Curry and Porzingis sustained injuries of their own. Watching the Warriors in March and April was a brutal experience, with Pat Spencer running the show, Charles Bassey anchoring the frontline, and Malevy Leons playing a big role. They had all the aesthetic bustedness of a tanking team, but not the incentives.

One cannot simply leave behind a life of crime. Your body craves the adrenaline for years afterward. It begs for it. The desire for just one more job, one more hit, one more simple robbery will never really go away, because a normal life is just so boring when compared with the thrill of disobedience. Who will stop you? Let them try. No one knows this better than the San Diego Padres, who after a long dormant winter without crimes have returned to their roguish ways and begun robbing again. On Wednesday night, they left some evidence of their misdeeds. It was the top of the third against the Seattle Mariners, and Julio Rodriguez stood in the batter's box with one ball against him. The victim spotted a beautiful meatball of a pitch: an 89-mph cutter that didn't cut at all and instead sat prettily in the middle of the strike zone. He swung quick and smooth, and the ball soared way, way out toward the deepest part of center field.

The New York Islanders took a moment during their final game of the season to promote a fundraiser for a former NYPD sergeant who was recently convicted of manslaughter. Yeah, sounds about right. During Tuesday's 2-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes, the Islanders' jumbotron displayed a big QR code directing to a fundraiser put together with the Sergeants Benevolent Association, "in its fight for justice" for Erik Duran, a former cop sentenced to three to nine years for manslaughter for killing a suspect in 2023. There were no details provided by the team about what caused him to be convicted in the first place, because if those were made available, one might have concluded that he got off with a light sentence. In August of 2023, Duran was part of an undercover drug sting in the Bronx, intended to target 30-year-old Eric Duprey. When Duprey tried to flee on a motorized scooter, Duran picked up a bystander's cooler and threw it at Duprey, who crashed into a tree and was killed almost instantly. Duran was found guilty by a judge this past February and sentenced earlier this month.

The first thing you notice about the right side of the Stanley Cup playoff map is the almost complete absence of continuity—that is, if you're the sort of person who nerds out on that sort of thing, in which case you've got deeper personality flaws than we are equipped to tackle. But it does have that weird strangers-on-a-train feel that the NHL tends to brag about a bit more than it should. The two teams with the best-looking recent history are located in Tampa and Raleigh, which took you at least five years to get used to, but the rest of this year's field is very much the island of misfit toys. For starters, the four worst teams in the Eastern Conference last year are in the playoffs this time. There are no New York City–ish teams for the first since the Colorado Rockies moved to New Jersey 44 years ago. The two-time champion Panthers had everybody get hurt in unison and were out of contention by Valentine's Day. The never-not-smug Toronto Maple Leafs are in an abyss that the management thinks can be escaped through the use of ChatGPT instead of draft choices, and the Washington Ovechkinii are off this spring for only the third time in 18 years. There are Cup droughts to contend with, like Philadelphia (51 years), Montreal (33), Carolina (20), Boston (15), and, sure, what the hell, Pittsburgh (9). But if you want to boil the East down (an appealing idea), it's about two teams who not only have never won a Cup, but were considered roadside carcasses four short months ago: the Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators.

For the second straight year, Harry and I have assembled a mega-sized playoff preview podcast. Just like last year, it features shortish interviews with people we like who follow as many of the teams in the playoffs and play-in as possible. Unlike last year, it was way too long to cram into one episode, let alone two. So this year, we bring you previews of the Western Conference, the Eastern Conference, and the Denver Nuggets. In the West, we brought on: Tyler Parker to talk Oklahoma City Thunder Eamon Whalen to talk Minnesota Timberwolves Billy Haisley's brother to talk Los Angeles Lakers Isaac Chotiner to talk Houston Rockets Sean Highkin to talk Portland Trail Blazers

Grief has no expiration date, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder. Twenty-one years ago this summer, Steve Cornejo was shot in the back and died in the courtyard of an apartment complex in Fairfax, Va. Cornejo was unarmed. Brandon Gotwalt, who shot him in the back, initially told police he wasn't on the scene, then claimed self-defense, then admitted to flushing the spent shell and his shirt down the toilet, then admitted to carrying an illegally concealed .38 caliber handgun, then said the shooting was accidental. The shooter was never arrested or charged with any crimes.  “They treated him like, ‘Oh, just another dead Latino,’” said Isabelle Janus-Clark, Cornejo’s high school classmate and childhood friend. “The police just acted like he wasn’t worth the trouble. He was worth the trouble.”

It's a tough task to make anyone reading this blog to feel bad for the reigning Premier League champions, a team still solidly in contention for Champions League qualification for next season, and an organization that spent a fortune, perhaps badly, this past summer. (This task becomes infinitely tougher if you are yourself a fan of the presumptive next champions of the league.) But dammit, I'm going to try anyway, because the 2025-26 Liverpool season has been a complete disaster on and off the field, from before the season even started through Tuesday's double whammy of Champions League elimination at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain (3-0 on aggregate) and Hugo Ekitike's ruptured Achilles, which will keep the Frenchman out of the World Cup and most of next season as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=296_fFXt6pE Before I go further, I have to be clear that nothing that has happened to Liverpool during this season, not even Ekitike's horrible and horribly timed injury, compares to what happened right before. Diogo Jota's death on July 3 was one of the rare sports-related events that counts as tragic in the proper sense. The sadness of it has hung over the entire Liverpool season. In many ways, the players and staff are all still grieving, which has surely affected the results on the field. Even if Liverpool had gone on to have a totally normal season in terms of results, this campaign was always going to be remembered first and foremost for Diogo Jota.

I don't remember the first time someone hit on me as a reporter. I believe this is because my brain has come to treat these events as unremarkable. For any woman in journalism, they pile up over the years. What I can recall are the worst examples. Like the guy my friends nicknamed Mr. Creepy. We called him Mr. Creepy (I have changed his nickname somewhat to make it less identifying, but it did include the word "creepy") because he constantly asked me out for drinks. He could do this because he was one of the officials on my beat—covering several small cities for the Miami Herald, a typical job for an early-career reporter—and "asking a young reporter out for drinks over and over, no matter how many times she says no, even though you're married, and she can't choose not to be around you" wasn't against any city code. It did, however, run against the code of journalists: the very good and obvious rule that getting romantically involved with sources, or even appearing to, is off limits. I don't recall saying anything to any of my supervisors at the time about it. Even if I had told someone, there was nothing the paper could do about it. They had no control over him. If anything, saying something would get me moved off my beat, possibly onto one I did not want, and potentially flagged as a complainer. Every other female reporter dealt with it, right? So I dealt with it too.

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Chris answers questions on how to prepare for outings with a baby or toddler.

Pilot is one of those jobs with a rarefied air around it. I see the uniform, and I immediately think, That person knows and can do things that I cannot. If you've ever seen Catch Me If You Can, that power is a key plot point, as nobody questions con man Leonardo DiCaprio's authority as long as he looks like he can fly an airplane. But pilots are people, too. They eat, and they sleep, and they follow sports just like us. Here's proof: https://bsky.app/profile/acarsdrama.bsky.social/post/3mfagkehvrb2x