2026-03-31 23:10:18
This week on the show, we were joined by Papo2oo4, the New Jersey rapper behind last year's excellent Papaholic, Vol. 1 and, more relevantly, a New Jersey basketball expert par excellence. We talked about Andrei Kirilenko, when Papo briefly started a podcast that was derailed because his co-hosts were only interested in talking about Kanye West, and why Kyle Anderson was the best high school basketball player he's seen. We also talked a little at the top about a harrowing basketball-watching habit I have, and Harry shared a galactic-brained Darryn Peterson take.
You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!
2026-03-31 22:47:19
Any hotshot high schooler who commits to South Carolina is also committing to a kind of amnesia. How many points you scored last game, how old you are, whether you’re a starter or come off the bench, whether you’ve been on this stage before—none of those things seem to matter as much as what you’re doing right now, in this game. When sophomore Joyce Edwards was asked, after Monday night’s Elite Eight game against TCU, how she was motivated to put up a 24-point, 12 rebound performance after a quieter game in the Sweet Sixteen, she seemed almost puzzled by the question. “I didn’t feel like my last game was necessarily bad. Obviously, my point production was reduced,” Edwards said. But that was last game, a self-contained universe with its own rules. Oklahoma had sent two or three defenders her way; TCU didn’t. It wasn’t a matter of fuel so much as it was a matter of circumstance. “Whenever you get single coverage, coach tells you to go score it, and so that’s what you do.”
This is what South Carolina does: Their 78-52 win over TCU sent the Gamecocks to a sixth straight Final Four and set up a Final Four repeat of sorts, with last year’s field of teams all returning. Edwards shone alongside freshman Agot Makeer, who came off the bench but ended up earning her 31 minutes by taking on a tough defensive assignment—TCU star point guard Olivia Miles had just six assists to four turnovers—and then adding 18 points of her own.
2026-03-31 22:31:45
The West Sacramento Athletics are the last winless team in baseball, which is not much of an accomplishment in and of itself. Someone is always the last winless team in baseball, going all the way back to the beginning of baseball and for that matter, winning in general. All you have to do is not win, and eventually even the last winless team will screw that up.
But it's the way that the A's are not winning that stands out, a frenzy of aerobic exercise centered around swinging a baseball bat but without the associated achievement of striking a thrown ball with it, and capped by a short brisk plod back to the dugout. They lost their fourth consecutive game last night in Atlanta, 4-0, and were better at hitting the ball than they have been in any other game, which is mostly to say they were poorer at missing it.
The A's have sent 145 batsman plateward so far this year, and 57 have walked back to the dugout moments later without having put the ball in play. This is the worst start for contact in the measured history of the sport, which is to say since 1898; that includes the Cleveland Spiders, which settles that argument for good. The A's struck out 16 times in their opener in Toronto, 19 times the next day, and 15 the day after that. On Monday in Atlanta, that figure was only seven, which leads us to believe that manager Mark Kotsay mentioned their little bit of history to his team at least in passing. Too bad on that last one, too, because they'd been on a pace to strike out 2,700 times, breaking the old record by 1,046. Now their projected figure is only 2,308.
2026-03-31 21:17:08
Among a certain class of politics reporters and pundits, the single most legitimizing thing a Democratic politician can be is "loathed by everyone younger than, browner than, or to the ideological left of James Carville." Safer by far than engaging with a politician's policies, ideology, or track record is to simply take an index of how liberal and progressive types feel about him. Do they hate his guts? Then he is serious. Look out, bleeding hearts and socialist teens! This guy does not have time for any namby-pamby "believing in stuff" crap; he recognizes The Stakes. He gets that some things are just too important to approach in principled or intellectually serious ways.
This reflects at least two tidal forces in America's legacy politics press. One is that it is largely peopled by weenie meritocrat twerps whose families have done quite well in the system as it exists; they would never dream of anything as gauche or tacky as being Republicans, but they also do not want the alternative to entail any commitment to actually changing the basic arrangement of power and privilege in American society. Better to set the leftmost edge of the Overton Window at "means-tested private-school tuition-refund vouchers for the minor children of any U.S. citizen who starts a woman- or minority-owned small business and runs it for at least 18 months in a neighborhood with population density higher than that of Jackson Hole, Wyo., and with a median per-capita household income less than 66.6 percent of that of the wealthiest census tract within 12.5 miles, provided the children commit to founding a woman- or minority-owned company within 18 months of college graduation," and then police that boundary vigorously.
The other deranging impulse, closely related, is the legacy press's addiction to horserace-style political analysis. The Detested Center-Right Ghoul is both a fellow adherent to and the physical embodiment of the idea that all that matters, in an election, is detecting which candidate everybody else—imagined uniformly as rubes and ignoramuses with doctrinaire Reaganite values, a wary and incoherent pink mass oscillating at all times between credulity and cynicism—will fall for, and then scolding anybody who attempts to complicate that candidate's path to victory by starting a conversation about what they'd like government to actually do beyond rewarding election winners with jobs. You can cover Gavin Newsom, for example, without the tricky business of interrogating beliefs and policy ideas: He has none, and regards the entire concept of having any as self-evidently foolish.
2026-03-31 04:54:29
Rayan Cherki is not the best soccer player in the world. In fact, he's not even a locked-in, sure-fire starter for either of the two teams he currently plays for, Manchester City and France. But though there are certainly several other players who make a bigger, more consistent impact on their teams' performances, I don't think anyone in the sport today can match the volume of spine-tingling, head-smacking, astonishment-inducing plays Cherki so effortlessly produces when he is on his game.
Because I decided to spend my Sunday afternoon watching Barcelona Femení dropkick the remaining teeth out of Real Madrid's skull, I had to miss the France vs. Colombia friendly that started at the same time. While I do not regret my choice, it was a shame that my viewing of the latest gruesome Clásico beatdown meant I couldn't also get to see the much more elegant display in Maryland. Aside from the cackling Blaugrana fans, almost every tweet I scrolled past during that aforementioned time slot on Sunday featured messages of almost coital bliss inspired by how France was playing, and specifically what Cherki was doing. Though I was bummed not to see the Cherki show live, in a match that ended in a comprehensive 3-1 France win, I knew I'd have a individual compilation to sink my teeth in later, and neither the comp makers nor Cherki himself disappointed.
2026-03-31 04:32:19
The phrase "31-0 run" in basketball might trigger visions of rhapsodic, jogo bonito ball movement, virtuosic shooting, and impregnable defense. The actual 31-0 run achieved by the Toronto Raptors on Sunday looked a little more ordinary than that. If there was anything spectacular on display, it was the incompetence of the team on the receiving end: the Orlando Magic, who have now lost seven of their last eight games as they slip into play-in territory. In truth, it requires both the goodness of one team and badness of another to produce such a historic event. The Raptors' 31-0 run was the largest of the NBA's play-by-play era, which began with the 1997-98 season. They would only build on that run to win 139-87, delivering the worst loss in Magic franchise history.
Give Toronto precisely as much credit as they deserve. They are ranked fifth in the league by defensive rating, and they're a strong team on that side of the floor even when missing one of their best defenders, the faintly Draymondian rookie Collin Murray-Boyles, as they were last night. Scottie Barnes is a rare gem who, during this game, accumulated 100 blocks and 100 steals in a season, the first to do so since Andre Drummond in 2018-19. The Raptors employ one of the more aggressive schemes in the league, and they applied brutal ball pressure on Orlando, mixing in sudden traps, too. But this defense is not so special that it should ever look quite this difficult for an NBA team to advance the ball past halfcourt in a late-March game.
