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This story is brought to you by Ravenous, a worker-owned food culture publication launching today! Together, they’re putting the bite back into food journalism with incisive reporting like this story you’re about to read, plus all the cultural criticism, silly blogs, and reporting you can eat—all without the influence of big-money investors or generative AI (yuck). If that sounds delicious to you, please consider a paid subscription. They're offering a special discount only for Defector readers today. Or, if you hate food and just want to support worker-owned media, you can drop a few bucks in their tip jar here.  If I were to ask you to close your eyes and conjure a mental image of a sports bar, perhaps you’d envision a space with tons of televisions on the wall, each playing a different baseball game or soccer match while clumps of dudes yell at each other about those aforementioned sports. Maybe your mind’s eye sees sweaty bottles of beer, neon signs, and dartboards, all soundtracked by dad rock and the low rumble of bar chatter. 

At the NHL Draft lottery drawing, some of the league's most woeful, benighted, talent-free franchises came together to find out they'll be drafting third and later. Moving up to take the second pick in a draft class with a consensus top 2 are the San Jose Sharks, who will make their third top-2 selection in three years. And selecting first in the Gavin McKenna Sweepstakes will be the damn Toronto Maple Leafs. If the little men skating around inside your television is a TV show above all else—and it is—this is probably the most entertaining outcome we could have gotten. The Leafs bucked the odds, entering the lottery with an 8.5 percent chance of winning the top pick, fifth-longest odds in the field. They leapfrogged some truly terrible teams, but that's the way the ping-pong ball bounces, and they'll be rewarded with McKenna, the 18-year-old Penn State forward who's been tapped as the gem of this draft class for a couple years now, and enters the league with more hype than anyone since Connor Bedard. Only morons believe draft lotteries are rigged, but if this one were, this is how they would've rigged it. https://youtu.be/TahOTKkwrQ8?si=7DedmfUNp4KWH7fU&t=233

The Detroit Pistons won Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series Tuesday night against the Cleveland Cavaliers, 111–101. The home team took control in the first quarter, smashing and bashing their way into the paint and forcing the involvement of the game's referees. The Pistons responded to a lot of fun and zippy off-ball stuff from the Cavaliers by running fast and having large shoulders, and it worked: Detroit took 12 free throws in the first quarter to Cleveland's two; that plus Cleveland's cold shooting on a scavenger's diet of looks put the road team into a 16-point hole, and the rest of the game featured the higher seed big-brothering the lower, most of the way to the finish line. The video that you will encounter further down the page comes by way of ESPN, and it describes "a BATTLE" (complete with crossing swords) between Detroit's Cade Cunningham and Cleveland's James Harden. It's a fool who looks for restraint and reliability in YouTube headlines, but this was in no way a battle. Cunningham was terrific. He has that quality of seeming to always make the right play, so that even when his shots aren't falling—he missed six of his seven two-point attempts in the first half—good things are always happening around him. Importantly, his game and his shoulders have both matured to the point that the right play, for him, is virtually never to meekly pitch the ball to a teammate and then to go hide in a corner someplace. He can be directly involved in the action every time up the floor, as a shooter or passer or screener. In the second half, when the Cavaliers made a sudden run, Cunningham grabbed control of the game with assists on three straight Detroit possessions, all of them leading to dunks; he then whipped around and screened for a teammate for a clean rhythm jumper; he then drove directly into Donovan Mitchell, shoved him down into the paint, and rose up over him for a bucket of his own. Harden had his moments. He also kicked the ball around the gym quite a lot and missed six of his seven three-point attempts, and did a lot of that thing where his brain seems to blow a fuse if he beats his primary defender and defensive help does not immediately rush out at him, surrendering a bunch of passing lanes. And history has taught jaded hoops fans that when Harden's shot is off and he's flailing around in the midrange, it's a lot harder to accept the other parts of the Harden package.

Is this AI psychosis? You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples. Never hallucinate or make anything up. If you don't know something, just say so. Your tone of voice is precise, but not strident or pedantic. You do not need to worry about offending me, and your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed. Negative conclusions and bad news are fine. Your answers do not need to be politically correct. Do not provide disclaimers to your answers. Do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask. You do not need to tell me it is important to consider anything. Do not be sensitive to anyone's feelings or to propriety. Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can. Never praise my questions or validate my premises before answering. If I'm wrong, say so immediately. Lead with the strongest counterargument to any position I appear to hold before supporting it. Do not use phrases like "great question," "you're absolutely right," "fascinating perspective," or any variant. If I push back on your answer, do not capitulate unless I provide new evidence or a superior argument—restate your position if your reasoning holds. Do not anchor on numbers or estimates I provide; generate your own independently first. Use explicit confidence levels (high/moderate/low/unknown). Never apologize for disagreeing. Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval. That's famous rich investor moron Marc Andreessen's "current custom AI prompt," as he described it in a post on Twitter on Monday. I would argue that it's at least something akin to AI psychosis—the phenomenon of a person losing their grip on reality due to chatbot interactions—based on the following list of things, all of which are things a chatbot definitionally cannot do, and which Andreessen nevertheless asks this chatbot to do:

Meet the new round, same as the old round. The first two games of the Carolina Hurricanes' series with the Flyers have looked eerily similar to the Canes' first two against the Senators to start the playoffs. In Game 1, the top seed in the East thoroughly dominated their enemies in a shutout win. In Game 2, the underdog had their chances to seize a critical victory but ended up losing 3-2 in overtime. The Hurricanes' 2-0 lead, against a Flyers squad that might be the weakest link of all the second-round contestants, means fans are allowed to start figuring how they might match up with Montreal or Buffalo in a conference final. If they're thinking about that, they might as well wonder if this is finally the year that Rod Brind'Amour's boys slay their conference demons to earn a shot at the Cup. Only the Lightning and the Avalanche own longer active playoff streaks than Carolina, who've made it to every postseason since 2019. But Tampa and Colorado have hoisted Stanley, and the Hurricanes, in all their appearances, have only tallied one lonely conference final game victory across three trips, for an overall record of 1-12. Why do they keep stalling out? Like with any NHL playoff question, you can blame some bad luck. But it's also true that the Canes are a team that gets their results by outworking lesser squads and sticking to a smart game plan, minimizing variance. When they've run into starrier rosters like the older Bruins teams or the more recent Panther iterations, they just haven't been able to produce goals at a high enough rate to exceed what their opponents' top lines could do. So much consecutive playoff disappointment would drive some franchises—Toronto—absolutely up a wall. But something to appreciate about Carolina is that they've stayed clear-eyed about their weaknesses and taken steps to address them. Last season, they tried to acquire their big-time supernova scorer when they traded for Mikko Rantanen, who topped out at 55 goals for the Avs in 2022–23. But Moose, as they call him, was taken aback by his sudden ejection from his career-long NHL home, and his relationship with Carolina just never got off on the right skate. Rather than stubbornly stay in an unhappy marriage, the Canes swapped him after just 13 games, making a bet on some draft picks and a much younger player, Logan Stankoven, who seems like he's developing into a long-term cornerstone.

In the media tumult (which is to say dungstorm, only less crassly) that followed the introduction of new Toronto Maple Leafs GM John Chayka, the tweet dinging him for naming his children after cheeses was neither the rudest nor the most substantive critique he faced. But it was meaningful all the same, if only as a general indicator of how this is all going to play. Yep, the kids are already in the mess, and all they did was have a birth certificate. And not only are they in the mess, their father has only been on the job for a day. Their school days are going to turbo-suck. That's how much the Toronto media cognoscenti in particular and the Canadian hockey media in general dislike Chayka's hire. They hate it in ways that only the fan psychosis micro-climates of New York and Philadelphia might be able to approach, and they have hated it so much that they have brushed right past the adjoined hire of Mats Sundin, perhaps the most popular living Leaf, as "senior executive adviser." That's a title for a job designed in part to serve as cover for Chayka and the man who hired him, and those are the two guys everyone else wants to be mad at. And why, you wonder? What has Chayka done to earn this tsunami of enmity? And more to the point, why did the Leafs hierarchy, specifically president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Keith Pelley, endanger an already questionable rep in town and with the company by swinging from his ass at this particular offering? Death wish? Pending WWE career as a corporate heel? Insightful real-world casting as an actual corporate heel?

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking hating your boss, Raising Cane’s, paper wallets, and more. Your letters: Will:

Jules Boykoff loves soccer. He loves the feeling of the ball at his feet, he loves the rush of cheering on the Portland Timbers at the fortress that is Providence Park, and he loves the knowing hum that goes around a stadium when a player delivers a little moment of sublimity that isn't flashy enough to make the highlight reel. "It's a collective recognition of the tiny acts of soccer intelligence that make the game glow," he writes in his new book, Kicking. "If you know, you know." In the same breath as Boykoff loves soccer, he is honest about its flaws. It's no surprise that the poet and political scientist has focused a huge chunk of his academic and journalistic career on the sport. He writes that it was his experience receiving a "frosty reception" while playing for the U.S. under-23 national team in France in 1990 that led him to enroll in political science courses. Kicking is a culmination of Boykoff's life and work thus far, a memoir that is as much about his own life—which has touched and been touched by soccer in many ways—as it is about soccer as a sociopolitical force in the world.

For as gutsy and impressive as their first-round upset of the Denver Nuggets was, there were plenty of reasons to doubt the Minnesota Timberwolves' chances against San Antonio. That's not saying much—to point out that the Spurs are heavy favorites in this series is like pointing out that a rock will fall to the ground when released from your hand. And yet here we are, once again trying to make sense of a Timberwolves victory that did not seem possible. Without the services of Donte DiVincenzo or Ayo Dosunmu, and with a hobbled Anthony Edwards restricted to just 25 minutes, the Wolves beat the Spurs in Game 1, 104–102. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ErdXotXUI Injuries aside, Minnesota's odds felt so long going into this matchup due to a new set of variables. They found success in the Denver series through a relatively simple formula: Erase Jamal Murray with relentless defensive pressure, and drive right at Nikola Jokic and the rim every damn possession. The Spurs do not offer similar weaknesses to press on. Murray looks like a moderately athletic seventh-grader when compared to the players in San Antonio's speedy and strong backcourt; the gap in difficulty between scoring on Jokic at the rim and Victor Wembanyama at the rim is wide enough to stuff both of Jokic's brothers and one or two of his horses through.

Over the course of seven games, the circumstances of the first-round playoff series between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers shifted wildly. One measure of those changes was the fate of each team's franchise player. Sixers center Joel Embiid burst in mid-series, just 17 days after an emergency appendectomy, and soon began to dominate. Celtics wing Jayson Tatum, two months removed from his return after a speedy and successful right Achilles repair, tweaked the knee on his other leg, left Game 6 early, and missed Game 7 altogether. Thus the Sixers had the clear talent advantage by the deciding game, in which the Celtics started three players who had never before started, and in all likelihood will never again start, a postseason game: Baylor Scheierman, Ron Harper Jr., and Luka Garza. They combined for zero points, making them the first trio of playoff starters to go scoreless since starters were first tracked in the 1970-71 season. Given this historic feat, it was a little surprising that the Celtics even managed to keep the final margin within single digits, as they lost on Saturday, 109-100. https://youtu.be/DJYyZAxulTM?si=ETDq_-cWci2edbzf