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Sometimes circumstances force you to conclude that God bets. And while you may choose to question the existence of a deity, or more specifically wonder who or what it is that would book those bets, the evidence is still the evidence. So, let us walk you over to the Los Angeles Lakers, who spent the weekend getting worked over by the cosmos and its principal guide. First, Luka Doncic, in the midst of a late-season run to become the new heart and lungs of the team and a burgeoning MVP candidate, blows a hamstring bad enough that he will seek treatment in Europe in an attempt to shorten the expected six weeks' recovery time. Seemingly mere moments later, Austin Reaves succumbs to an oblique injury that the team announced on Saturday will also take him offline for a month and change. It is not relevant, or anyway we cannot prove that it is relevant, that all this happened after Reaves enjoyed this friendly exchange with a sympathetic Oklahoma City fan who may or may not have been a terrestrial representative of The Big Oom. Under normal circumstances, we would simply note this as weirdly bad luck for a team that had lately emerged as a solid second-tier contender, if one a tick below true championship pedigree of the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, Boston Celtics, or, lately at least, the Atlanta Hawks. Doncic in particular had been ungodly before his injury, scoring a laughably absurd 600 points in the month of March, an average of 35.3 points per game. The Lakers won 15 of 17 games during that stretch, and had become worrisome to the general populace.

Less than one month after Kalshi got into a legal whoopsie over whether or not they should pay out bettors who wagered on the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the early days of the U.S.'s disastrous war with Iran, the don't-call-us-a-gambling-site's biggest competitor, Polymarket, another gambling site, is facing a similar problem. An F-15 Strike Eagle was shot down on Friday over the southwestern Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, which prompted the U.S. military to spring into action to stage a rescue mission to retrieve the jet's two-person crew. Polymarket then posted what they call a "market" on when the rescue mission would be complete. Users who paged over to Polymarket's Iran tab would have scrolled by "Kharg Island no longer under Iranian control by...?" and "Hezbollah military action against Israel on...?" to get to "US confirms pilots rescued by...?" People got mad at Polymarket pretty quickly, because unlike other betting markets on how many people Donald Trump will deport or whether or not Jeffrey Epstein is confirmed to be Satoshi Nakamoto by the end of 2026, this involves members of the U.S. military. Polymarket removed the wager and said in a statement, "We took this market down immediately as it does not meet our integrity standards. It should not have been posted, and we are investigating how this slipped through our internal safeguards." U.S. Rep. and Marine Corps veteran Seth Moulton called it "DISGUSTING," and later told CNBC, "Polymarket didn’t take that market down because it violated their standards. They took it down because we called them out." He's right. The whole value proposition of prediction markets is that users can bet on anything.

Have a go at our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Faren Roth, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Faren is a soon-to-be Ph.D. student in speech, language, and hearing sciences who lives in Madison, Wis. She discovered the world of crossword construction six months ago, and she's been a bit obsessed ever since! She hopes her first puzzle with Defector is a hit. 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. 

There was a moment early in the third quarter of Sunday’s national championship game when you could see exactly how UCLA was going to win and why. The South Carolina Gamecocks, desperate for offense, had taken to gambling now: sending bold passes through traffic, pawing for steals, taking shots early in the clock. They needed something—anything—and in the absence of a real halfcourt method, the only option left for them was madness. South Carolina point guard Raven Johnson tried to push the pace, lobbing a pass overhead to a streaking teammate in transition. But into the air leapt Kiki Rice to intercept it. The camera lurched and slowly panned back the other way; the other Gamecocks went flying out of the picture. Rice considered her next steps and kicked the ball over to the corner for Charlisse Leger-Walker, who knocked down a three. In UCLA’s hands, the game calmed down. Slow and steady, the race was won. The Bruins defeated South Carolina, 79-51, Sunday afternoon to bring home the program’s first NCAA championship and its first national championship since the AIAW tournament in 1978. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X57QWx6lQMw

If Jo Adell hadn't been so precocious, his arrival as a big leaguer would seem right on time. The Angels made him the 10th overall pick of the 2017 MLB Draft, and the breadth and voltage of his talent quickly made him one of the top prospects in the sport, even before that collection of tools became something more comprehensive. There were extenuating circumstances, as there always are—the Angels' singular dedication to moving its top prospects through the minors at peak speed and the fragrant fug of low-intensity mediocrity sitting over everything they do, the disruption of baseball's Covid hiatus, and how hard baseball is at the highest level even for those with superhuman skills. But the results were what they were. Adell debuted in the Majors as a 21-year-old in 2020 and mostly looked overmatched in the parts of the four subsequent seasons that he spent at the level. Over these big league stints of 38, 35, 88, and 17 games, Adell was mostly unable to reach those tools and pretty comprehensively unable to use them; back at Triple-A, he still looked more or less like Jo Adell when healthy enough to do so, but in the Majors he mostly looked like he belonged back in Triple-A. What separates bad organizations from good ones is how quickly and how well they can straighten out the kinks that introduce themselves into seemingly sure-shot baseball careers like Adell's. The Angels, pardon the jargon, are not a good baseball organization, and so there was some reason to think that Adell might not figure it out there, or at all. And, the Angels being the Angels, it was easy to miss it when Adell started to figure it out in 2024. His defense in right field improved enough to make him playable there, he got to his over-the-fence power in big-league games in a way that he previously hadn't, and the Angels were lousy enough and Adell healthy enough that he finally spent something like a full season in the bigs. It wasn't the outcome that anyone had in mind during his years as one of the game's best-regarded offensive prospects—"you wouldn't exactly feel awful batting him ninth," raved his entry in the 2025 Baseball Prospectus Annual—but very little about becoming a big leaguer is linear even for players as talented as Adell.

Claude Monet's painting The Path through the Irises is hard to ignore. First of all, there's the sheer size of it—the canvas stretches six and a half feet high and over five feet across. The Path through the Irises hangs center stage in its gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and if you have the time to linger, as I did on a recent Monday afternoon, you'll notice the almost gravitational pull that it exerts over the room. No matter where someone entered, they almost always ended up in front of Path through the Irises, even if just for a few seconds. There's just no getting around it. It takes longer than that for the painting to resolve itself into a coherent image, or at least it did for me; the first impression I had was one of almost violent contrasts. The American visual artist George Condo described The Path through the Irises as possessing "some of the ugliest combinations of colors I've ever seen in my life: these polar opposite tones, like purple and yellow, those oranges and green mixed in." My pilgrimage to the Met was precipitated by a desire for a different sort of museum experience than the ones I'd most recently had. Those had all been squeezed into already busy weekends, journeys made with a specific purpose or exhibition in mind. Those visits have their own specific set of pleasures, but what I craved most on this dreary March day, at the end of a month-long break from work, was the sort of unhurried time I associated with my days as a student when my ID granted me free access to the Art Institute of Chicago, and the shape of my life gave me endless hours to while away there. 

As the Final Four game between Michigan and Arizona wound down on Saturday night, the TBS broadcasting crew said a bunch of demonstrably true and contextually confusing things about Arizona. The Wildcats really had entered the game as hot as any program in college basketball, carrying a nine-game winning streak that included a convincing march through the Big 12 Tournament into the NCAA Tournament, then rolling through their first four games there. Before but most strikingly after dropping two games in Big 12 conference play, their only losses on the season, Arizona really had been both consistent and consistently dominant, running up one of the most lopsided point differentials in Division I, an average of 17.3 points per game. They really did spend 10 straight weeks atop the AP Poll during the winter. All of these things were true. And then the horn sounded and Michigan put in a four-man crew of deep-cut bench players that included head coach Dusty May's son, Charlie, and Howard Eisley Jr. How long the game had been decided by that point is both debatable and academic. Arizona, which had never trailed by more than a dozen points all season long, was down 10-1 before three minutes of clock had elapsed, by 16 halfway through the first half, and trailed by as many as 30 in the second half. The most anticipated game of the tournament, between two top seeds that had ranked at or near the top of every metric, advanced and otherwise, all season long, was instead a walkover more or less from the jump. Michigan got whatever it wanted on offense and crowded, overwhelmed, and denied Arizona on the other end; a too-late outbreak of shotmaking pulled Arizona's shooting percentage up to 37 percent and the margin of victory down to 91-73, but those numbers barely do justice to how thoroughly Michigan controlled both ends of the floor. A shorter way to describe all this is that even this game, against one of the best and most balanced teams in college basketball, swiftly revealed itself to be Just Another Michigan Game. That is, it fit with the historic dominance that Michigan has displayed both this March—the win made them the first team ever to score 90 or more points and win by double digits in five straight NCAA Tournament games—and throughout a year in which they were instantly and undeniably much better than even the most optimistic preseason assessment suggested. Michigan blasted some impressive early-season competition back before the calendar turned to 2026, and remained dominant in Big Ten play thanks to one of the best defenses in college basketball, an offense that was both metronomic and electric, and by serving up some hearty helpings of cheerfully brutal physicality. That the same could have been and frequently was said about Arizona coming into Saturday's game only made the gap between the two more startling to behold as it opened and then widened further.

A college basketball coach in the middle of a meltdown is extended grace that generally wouldn't be granted to any other adult having a tantrum in public. On the merits, there's nothing much to say on behalf of a grown man who is stamping and fuming and turning a Cran-apple color while heatedly saying things like "It's about respect." That's just an embarrassing thing to do, and if and when you see an adult doing all that, you can safely assume some unflattering things about, at the very least, their capacity to experience shame. You can generally read a whole worldview into the person doing it and feel confident about those assumptions being correct. But it's different for coaches, or anyway there are ways in which it theoretically could be that work to get them off the hook somewhat. The specific acts of hopping-mad clownishness are still just what they appear to be, of course, but the heightened emotional register and general overage of college basketball create a context that could, again theoretically, be exonerating. Look at Tom Izzo huffing and puffing like a bagpiper on the sidelines and you might be able to convince yourself that he just cares so much about these kids that he has forgotten himself a little. Squint harder than that and you can see Mick Cronin going out of his way to humiliate his own players as a reflection of how much he respects the game. Squint and twist as hard as you can, really bear down, and it's honestly still tough to do much with Dan Hurley constantly acting like Christopher Meloni in Oz, but someone will surely find a way to figure that one out. Coaches are the main characters of college basketball because they stay in one place the longest, and also because of an unfortunate cultural default toward whichever older white guy is screaming the most. This has its benefits and costs, but over a long enough period it has the effect of turning those coaches into caricatures, and finally into cartoons. It was not really surprising that Geno Auriemma responded poorly to Connecticut's upset loss to South Carolina in the women's Final Four on Friday night, both because the defeat ended Connecticut's perfect season and 54-game winning streak, and because Geno Auriemma is the way he is. Coaches are only human, but Geno Auriemma is also only going to do Geno Auriemma-type stuff. He will do it both because he cares so much and competes so hard and because he is, if you want to be nice about it, Geno Auriemma.

Tiger Woods has been charged with driving under the influence and refusing to submit to a drug test, following his March 27 rollover crash in Jupiter Island, Florida. In documents and public remarks, police laid out some behaviors of Woods that suggested to them that he was impaired and could not safely operate a vehicle: Woods provided evasive answers to their questions, had difficulties with the field sobriety test, and declined to provide a urine sample, which police suspect would have proven intoxication from prescription medication. In his press conference describing all this, Martin County Sheriff John Budensiek left out one thing which Woods did that many people tend to associate with culpability: In the moments after the crash, Woods used his phone to call Donald Trump. In body camera footage released by the Martin County Sheriff's Office and the Jupiter Island Police Department, and posted to YouTube by WPBF 25 News, an officer at the scene calls to Woods as he drifts away from the scene of the crash. The golfer turns back and can be heard wrapping up a phone call. "Thank you, thank you so much," Woods says to the person on the other end of the line. "All right, you got it. Thank you. Bye." He hangs up the phone and turns his attention to the officer, who has asked him to remain by the scene. "Yeah, I was just talking to the President." Woods says this with a little flip of his phone hand, and the feigned nonchalance of a desperate name-dropper. The officer declines the bait.

Conspiracy theories about athlete ages are not infrequent, though they have declined in popularity recently, and it is rare that they are applied to people from the United States. However, after the release of a concerning video by the Pittsburgh Pirates, a discussion must be had about Konnor Griffin, the prospect being called up to play his first MLB game in the team's home opener Friday against the Baltimore Orioles. Griffin is the most highly touted prospect in baseball, a potential five-tool superstar who will naturally invite comparisons to Mike Trout. If he is a teenager, Griffin would be notable as the first teenage position player to play in an MLB game since Juan Soto—not too shabby a comparison. But is he really? Working off the aforementioned video, the evidence that Konnor Griffin is 19 is as follows: The Pirates and presumably the United States government say so, for one thing. His name is spelled "Konnor," for another. Also he evidently cannot name any women other than his close relations.