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Heading into the most important four days of its season, Arsenal was spiraling. That's a relative term, because the Gunners were still in first place in the Premier League (via goal difference) and had escaped Madrid with a 1-1 draw against Atlético in the first leg of the Champions League semifinal. But! Manchester City was riding high domestically and had closed the points gap, looking great while doing so, and Atlético is a frisky opponent to get rid of, no matter the locale. Arsenal looked on the verge of collapsing, something that filled onlookers with dread or glee, depending on rooting interests. Simply put, these past four days had to go exactly Arsenal's way, or the growing panic would turn into blaring alarm bells. Good thing, then, that these past four days went almost as well for Arsenal as any Gooner could have hoped for. Starting with a confident, necessary, and dare I say entertaining 3-0 demolition of a very good Fulham team on Saturday, the three results Arsenal needed to go its way did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGnCdeEJuGs

On April 1, the best video art related to the 2025–26 NBA season was published. One month later, Harry and I had the creator of said art on Nothing But Respect. Danny of Who's Next is about a full decade younger than either of us, so we spent a lot of the episode talking through the different ways we consume sports, the media ecosystems we've spent time in, and what's been lost and gained in the phase shift to video over the last decade. We also talked about the playoffs themselves, with attention paid to the Donovan Mitchell windmill crossover, the Celtics' collapse, and why Joel Embiid deserves our love. This was a fun one! We got kids watching.

A sword, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is a "weapon ... with a long blade for cutting or thrusting that is often used as a symbol of honor or authority." A sword, as defined by Rob "Pitching Ninja" Friedman and quantified by Statcast, is "when a pitcher fools a hitter so badly that he forces a non-competitive swing, one where a batter either regrets his choice or can't stop himself from taking a hack that looks so ugly it ends up going viral on social media." By Statcast's standards, the swing Houston Astros second baseman José Altuve made against a Shohei Ohtani sweeper Tuesday night, on a 1-2 count with two outs in the fifth inning, would not qualify as a sword. It was simply too high quality: a good swing with pace, that only happened to be at a ball far, far off the plate. But if Altuve felt any good about the swing at its beginning, he regretted it by the end, when a likely chorus of thoughts such as "No, no, no, no, NO" and "Ah, shit" had failed to stop him from following all the way through. The official title for this video on Baseball Savant simply reads, "Ohtani escapes a jam."

A Boston-area jury found former New England Patriots receiver Stefon Diggs not guilty Tuesday of all the criminal charges brought against him, after a former private chef working for the player told law enforcement he had tried to choke her following a fight about money she was owed. Diggs had been charged with one count of felony strangulation or suffocation and one count of misdemeanor assault and battery. The Boston Globe reported that the Dedham District Court jury reached its verdict after deliberating for under two hours following closing arguments earlier in the day. Local reporters in the courtroom signaled that a key moment in the two-day trial came during the chef's testimony. Boston 25 News, which broke the story of the criminal charges back in December, reported that Diggs's defense lawyer asked the chef Jamila Adams, "You know that someone on your behalf has demanded 5.5 million dollars from Stefon Diggs, don't you?" Adams replied that she had a workers' comp claim and was also exploring her civil options. The Associated Press reported that, when further pressed about the $5.5 million demand from her lawyer, Adams didn't answer the question directly, saying "I can't speak on that." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDGaI0CUdW0

LIV Golf is going ahead with this weekend's tournament at the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C. This, despite the fact that the tour nobody has ever watched or cared about is getting unmoored from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which kept LIV afloat for all these years with ludicrous amounts of financing. The yokels left in charge of this ghost ship are putting on a brave face about the tour's future, but some of the players aren't so willing to express optimism. That shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone, given that their only reason for joining LIV Golf in the first place was access to the Saudi money hose. The tour made a few players from Legion XIII—pause here to chuckle and remember that one of LIV's big innovations was putting golfers on teams with stupid names—available to reporters on Tuesday. Team captain Jon Rahm, one of the more famous and well-compensated players who defected to LIV from the PGA, more or less admitted that he's only still playing because he is being held prisoner by his contract. From ESPN: "Right now, I have several years in my contract left," Rahm said. "I'm pretty sure they did a pretty good job when they drafted that, so I don't see many ways out. Right now, I'm not really thinking about it because we still have a season to play and majors to compete for. It's not something I want to think about just yet."

The National Hockey League made sure to schedule only one game for Tuesday night because their designated daily centerpiece was intended to be the draft lottery, which by most definitions of entertainment lands somewhere around high-tech old-folks-home bingo night. And what playoff hockey game could compare with the spectacle of ping pong balls get shoved through pneumatic tubes while Gary Bettman, looking like a faulty AI-generated version of Ken Jennings, blurts out nonsensical commands to some functionary or other? The idea is to inject drama into what is mostly a night that commemorates a season of disappointment for the league's losers before rewarding one with a bit of lousy luck. The result is just what it is. And then the Toronto Maple Leafs won the first pick as a reward for their embarrassing season, decisions, and people. This made the whole production almost worthwhile for the joy, annoyance, and anguished cries of "FIX! FRAUD! CHICANERY!" that followed. It was cheap and yet somehow fulfilling in that half-hour-I-can't-get-back kind of way; as a lottery show, it was at the very least miles better than the NBA version. So the scheduled game, already relegated to a bare simmer at the back of the stove, would have to be another doozy to steal back the stage. Minnesota at Colorado was the designated show pony, a much anticipated second-round battle between titans which had already produced a Cirque du Soleil of goals in the first game, a 9-6 Avs win. The playoffs have already been a festival of weirdness, so a 15-goal night was all in keeping with the general theme.

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: