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Well, well, well. Would you look at that. It's the Friday before a holiday weekend and we don't really want to work anymore. So let's chat! Hit us with your best questions down below.

What is Josh Hart? If you had never watched his tenure with the New York Knicks and had to reconstruct the player from box scores, season averages, and the sauced utterances of people milling around outside Madison Square Garden, it would be a puzzling task. OK, so he's 6-foot-5, but teams can guard him with centers, or with no one at all, and he doesn't score much anyway. Fans are yelling the words "hard-nosed," "hustle," "intangibles," and so on. On paper, he's one of the all-time great "rebounding guards"; in reality, he's more of an itsy-bitsy power forward who moonlights as a guard on the fast break. He shot 41 percent from three in the regular season, but that's misleading because it was on low volume, and when you actually see him catch the ball gloriously open at the arc, he turns his butt to goal and starts to dribble-handoff to a nonexistent teammate. He's a savvy passer who can't ever really separate from his own defender. He's a versatile defensive player who will switch onto anyone, poke the ball out of passing lanes, and also get blown by constantly. He is irreplaceable, and yet fans constantly call for his replacement. Late in Thursday's Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers, these frustrations and contradictions began to smooth out, and suddenly there stood Josh Hart, essential shooting guard for the Knicks. Emphasis on the "shooting." Like so many past defenses, the Cavaliers threw extra attention at Knicks point man Jalen Brunson and dared Hart to do what he hates most: take open shots. The bashful shooter bricked his first three three-point attempts, which had him chewing his jersey and slamming the ball at the hardwood, and had fans in the Garden chanting "Landry Shamet"—the sniper lower in the rotation, who helped the Knicks claw back in their previous win. Hart had hit two threes by halftime and New York led 53-49, but at that point the Cavaliers probably still felt secure in their decision to throttle Brunson and force an unhappy Hart to keep chucking. In the second half, Brunson continued to dutifully distribute the ball as the coverage dictated, and Hart began to punish Cleveland's gamble. He hit a string of threes during an 18-0 run in the third quarter that would prove decisive. By the end of the night, he had gone 5-for-11 from three, plus one comical late-clock, spinning, fading floater. The Knicks won 109-93 as Hart finished with a playoff career-high 26 points, plus four rebounds, seven assists, and two steals. The fact that the below video exists says a lot about how unusual his night was; he's a player whose excellence typically sits in the exact negative space of a highlight reel.

The American military has always maintained a relatively strong grip on its public perception. Its most essential message—internally and externally, during peace time and active conflict, under presidents Republican and Democratic—is the necessity of its sprawling, expensive, and secretive imperial apparatus as a means of defending the nation and the very concept of freedom. It doesn’t hurt that the media is often only too happy to play along. In his new book God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, journalist Jasper Craven takes a detailed and unflinching look at the bedrock of American military training: the military academy as a locus for and proving ground of antagonistic military policy. America’s war-hungry ethos, embodied to an embarrassingly literal degree by the hare-brained conduct and childish grandiosity of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, has only recently embraced the enfranchisement of all able-bodied Americans, regardless of gender, race, or creed, to this mission.  Still, the underlying social and cultural principle of the American military has always idolized rugged masculinity—essentializing violence and dominance as natural to the very purpose of manhood. As Craven writes, “the military’s masculine archetype has become one of America’s most coveted assets. Like warfare itself, it is ever evolving. A diluted form of military manliness can be replicated in the civilian world, though it is always a clear knockoff. It lacks the high-and-tight haircut, the posture, the gaze, the mythic war stories of conquest, destruction, and dominance.”

In the Western Baltic Sea, fisheries target migrating mackerel and needlefish with pound nets, which funnel passing shoals into a series of smaller nets until they are trapped. The traps are emptied every few days, but as the caught fish idle in the nets, they become quite attractive to passing seabirds, such as cormorants, gulls, and terns. The cormorants sample the fish like a charcuterie board and various enterprising gulls steal the cormorants' catches. Several dozen birds can likely be found loitering near any particular pound net, and their ravenous appetites result in real losses for the fisheries. This battle between pound net fishers and seabirds has been ongoing for decades, and fishers have attempted to fight back in various ways. They've tried covering their catch with a netted cover or providing the fish artificial refuges. But the birds are relentless, and the agile cormorants simply entered the pound nets from below. And the more protective netting the fishers added, the more they found tangled or drowned seabirds alongside their catch. A paper from 2021 estimated that 400,000 seabirds are killed by diving into gillnets each year. As such, scientists have been cooking up new strategies to reduce the number of seabirds snacking on and dying in pound nets. They tried high-contrast panels and bright LED lights, but nothing seemed to work. That is, until Bobby the buoy entered the picture. Here is a buoy similar to Bobby:

You know what it is. Many-time NBR guest Noah Kulwin came back this week to talk about the two pretty incredible NBA Conference Finals we have going. Noah predicted both the Boston Celtics' ultimate fraudulence, as well as the New York Knicks' comeback in Game 1, so we had to bring him back. We also talked about the Oklahoman publishing an op-ed comparing the Oklahoma City Thunder to the state of Israel, which Samer wrote about this week. Speaking of Israel, Noah's podcast Blowback (which is great!) is about to drop a mini-series about the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship. It's called "No Daylight," and it drops next Friday, May 29. Subscribe!

It took only 33 seconds to safely write off the Montreal Canadiens as just another quaint overachiever, the kind of humorously game yet clinically overmatched entrant that has filled out nearly every conference final field since the National Hockey League decided to have conferences. They come, they seem like an appealing alternative to the oppressive chalk that surrounds them, and then they disappear again to the churn of the pack, hoping for another turn in a decade or so. It subsequently took 27 seconds to rethink ce paragraphe premier, and then another 10 minutes or so to wonder if the quaint overachiever here isn't actually the Carolina Hurricanes. In those 11 minutes and change, the Canadiens not only scored four goals in response to Carolina’s first, but posed the corresponding matter of whether the Canes had too many days off after their two playoff cake tours. Or maybe Montreal is simply the real deal, and we are about to find out that it doesn't matter that they often cut their margins too fine and don't know what they don't know about high-stakes playoff competition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDYtHLjs0Xo

A late-May crisis has struck Major League Baseball. What seemed on May 16 like a funny, isolated incident, in which Shohei Ohtani scored a Little League home run (officially scored a triple and an error) against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, has turned out to be far more insidious. No one at the time could guess what would follow for the next week. No one knows when it will stop. A day from now? A week? Never? First, there was the Washington Nationals' James Wood, who, on May 19, notched his first-ever official grand slam off an inside-the-park homer. Naturally, this event took place against the Mets. The defining characteristic of this play was the ball ricocheting off the glove of Mets left fielder Nick Morabito as he jumped to the wall and then fell down in front of his teammate, center fielder Tyrone Taylor. While the ball trickled back into center field, Taylor stared at Morabito, who pointed futilely toward the ball, before taking matters into his own hands and running for the baseball. Wood, who is an average runner, would easily beat the off-target throw to home.

ESPN will still on occasion tear itself away from the subjects and sports leagues with which it shares bed space, and so it was with Alden Gonzalez's 2,800-word free-weight on the newly innovative (wait for it, and don't spit out your coffee when you see it) Miami Marlins. Whether or not this story is a compelling argument for the resuscitation of this largely cursed and generally ignored franchise, it is at least an acknowledgement that most of what Miami has been doing for the previous three decades has amounted to buying 30 calendars and taking the rest of the year off. Meanwhile, a team that truly changed baseball to its great competitive benefit is closing in on 20 years of mostly consistent success with only two holes in their CV: a World Series, and anyone else giving a damn. Now there's something for the Marlins to reflect upon as they talk about reimagining baseball, perhaps by doubling down on their stolen-base fixation by hitting more inside-the-park home runs. We are referring, of course, to Miami's brother without a mother: Tampa Bay. As the day dawns, the Rays are preparing for a weekend series with the New York Yankees; the Rays, not the Yankees, come into this series with the best record in the American League, thanks to a run of 21 wins in their last 25 games that staked them to a four-game lead on New York. It is not a fluke—the Rays have the third-highest success rate in the sport since they stopped trying to do everything everyone else was doing in 2008. True, that was also the year they shortened their nickname from Devil Rays at the behest of some religio-wackjobs who thought the franchise was invoking Beelzebub rather than a charming bit of local aquatic fauna, but that's not how they turned things around, and it sure isn't how they've kept everything pointed in the right direction. That was done mostly through innovations in roster, rotation, and game construction that bother some folks even today, and through a dedication to keep messing around with what works to see if it could be made to work better. This hasn't won them a World Series, but it has had a measurable impact on the game as we understand it.

ANAHEIM, Calif. — There is no fandom quite like the fandom of teenage girls. It is powerful and pure, untainted by the burdensome knowledge of adulthood while burning with an intensity that feels beyond human comprehension. That's why the screaming for Alysa Liu sounds the way it does, and why it starts immediately, the moment her thousands of fans believe she is about to head out on the ice. They have come here to cheer, to cry, to sing along with the lyrics to the songs she skates to. They are prepared for this moment in a way that adults cannot really be prepared for anything. But also, in a more basic sense, they are prepared; I am thinking here of the two young people I heard behind me in line for the bathroom, who spent part of the wait time discussing what they would do when the reigning Olympic gold medalist came out and performed her viral "Stateside" skate. We are here, at the Southern California tour stop of the Stars On Ice show, for all the figure skaters, of course—for "Quad God" Ilia Malinin, for U.S. champions Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito, for Olympians Evan Bates, Madison Chock, Danny O'Shea, and Ellie Kam. All get heavy rounds of applause and calls from the crowd of "We love you!" But there's no denying that there is one skater for whom the audience got and stayed the loudest, for whom the most phones go up in the air. Liu is still in college, but there's no age minimum for being a pop star. The 20-year-old from Oakland is inarguably one of those now. At this tour stop, the show starts late because it's up against the most recent installment of the Dodgers/Angels non-rivalry. That game is happening across the street as I arrive, making traffic around the arena even worse than the usual woeful Orange County standard. But by the time the lights go down, the stands are packed; Shohei Ohtani played to a sold-out house, too, but these stars come to town much less often. Our show opened with a group number to a brooding piece of music called "Brink of Annihilation/Fearless"—followed by skates from Andrew Torgashev (to Bradley Cooper's "Out of Time" from A Star Is Born), Levito (living her best ice princess life, skating to Madonna's "Material Girl"), and ice dancers Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko (a super-fun medley of Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right" and "Maneater"). All earned huge responses from the crowd.

It’s great how little you have to think about Paige Bueckers. This isn’t the same as not caring about her. The scads of cheers she gets during player intros, even on the road, are proof that she’s cared about very much. She just happens to be the sort of player whose competence speaks for itself, whose game demands no further tinkering or accommodation. Play her with a big lineup or a small one. Play her at the one, two, or three. Play her off the ball, or on it. Play her in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse. Her versatility lets the Dallas Wings be whatever they want to be.  What they’ve been so far this year is one of the WNBA's most potent offenses. With playmakers at every spot, these Wings are moving, cutting, sharing the ball, and scoring from everywhere, well enough to rank second in the league in offensive rating. On Wednesday night in Chicago, they put up 99 points on a respectable Sky defense and notched their third win of the season. Five games in, they’re already in good position to beat last year’s win total of 10. Conspiracy theories abounded when the Wings bypassed the bigs in this year's draft and used the first overall pick on Azzi Fudd, a much-needed source of shooting and strength in the backcourt, and who, yes, has said in the past that she’s dating Bueckers. The easy explanation is that they’d already made the frontcourt the focus of their free agency when they signed Alanna Smith and Jessica Shepard, both formerly of the Minnesota Lynx. Smith hasn’t shaken her habit of picking up awful fouls, and she’s looked a little out of whack since breaking her nose in the preseason.