2026-04-14 23:58:08
"If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything," said no blogger ever. But we're not made entirely out of mud and coal. With the 16 NHL playoff teams officially set, if not yet the exact matchups, I'd like to offer in the meantime a kind of anti–playoff preview, where we cover every team whose season is over. I'll say one nice thing and one mean thing about each. We'll start at the middle of the standings and descend from there.
Washington Capitals
A Nice Thing: In what might be his final NHL season, 40-year-old Alex Ovechkin leads the team yet again with 32 goals. Even if he's just running up the score on Gretzky now, everyone who saw Ovi notch 900 and beyond in person this year is thankful for the memory.
2026-04-14 23:24:46
Everyone gather 'round for a beef update. The beef update is this: Chappell Roan and Jorginho are no longer having one.
According to Jorginho, that is. The Flamengo midfielder, who started this whole beef cycle several weeks ago with an Instagram post, has now declared it finished with yet another Instagram post. After accusing one of Roan's security guards of being rude and mean to his 11-year-old daughter at a hotel in São Paulo, the soccer star is now ready to chalk the whole thing up as a misunderstanding.
"I made my initial statement in the heat of the moment, after hearing that my child and wife had been approached by an adult male security guard in an intimidating way," said Jorginho in his statement. "Since then, I have become aware of new information that has changed my understanding of parts of what happened."
2026-04-14 22:27:46
Basketball has been a key part of my life since I was a little kid, both as entertainment and, very briefly, a possible career. I played school and club ball and participated in numerous expensive training camps knowing that my parents, both of whom played in high school, felt strongly that the world of professional sports might be a viable means of making a living. I never connected with that dream and ditched basketball the second I had the option.
It wasn’t until I started attending Aces games here in Las Vegas that I began to fully appreciate the possibilities of the sport, as a game of finesse and skill and a stage for organized labor. Nascent but scrappy, the Aces were an expansion team created in a city that lacked a cohesive sports identity. The Aces have become a dynastic power in the WNBA, winning three of the last four titles, and their rise has come at a time attention and scrutiny on the league has dramatically increased. My family got a more intimate glimpse of these developments when we became friends with veteran journeyman Carolyn Swords, who played for the Seattle Storm, the New York Liberty, the Chicago Sky, and overseas teams during her career before dedicating her last years to the Aces.
I reached out to Carolyn while the new WNBA collective bargaining agreement (CBA) was still being litigated to chat about her playing years, her time on the executive committee of the 2020 CBA, and what the future of the league holds when athletes continue to advocate for each other. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
2026-04-14 21:09:22
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a deranged old pervert whose brain, long since sodden and pitted from a lifetime of indulgence and Diet Coke, is foaming out of his ears. Over the weekend he wigged out and posted some floridly unhinged shit on his busted little playpen social-media site about how Pope Leo XIV, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, is "too liberal" and "weak on crime"—for God's sake, there's graffiti all over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!—apparently in tantrum response to Leo XIV having criticized both Trump's war of aggression on Iran and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's framing of that war as having been ordained by God. A little while later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, healing by touch a guy who looks an awful lot like Jeffrey Epstein while a crowd of uniformly white people gaze on in wonder.
What else. Oh right. Also, toward the end of last week, Trump announced that the United States would begin blockading the Strait of Hormuz, which the nation of Iran has been blockading ever since the U.S. attacked that country illegally and without provocation at the end of February. For those catching up, Trump has spent the past several weeks desperately attempting to browbeat the rest of the world into opening the Strait by force on his behalf, while also continually insisting on his social-media website that the Strait is of no consequence and also that the U.S. military could open it at any time. Keen students of history may recall way back in double-aught-one week ago, when Trump threatened to destroy the entire civilization of Iran if it did not open the Strait within a few hours. A lesser tactician might observe that responding to a blockade of the Strait by blockading the Strait is the equivalent of punishing a guy for punching you in the face by also punching yourself in the face. What this analysis fails to apprehend is that, in war, you cannot be defeated if, whenever anything happens in the war, you say that it was no big deal and also everybody else's fault and also good actually and due to your genius.
OK back to the AI image of Trump as Jesus Christ. As one might imagine, Trump's choice to propagate this image has not gone down super well with whole huge swaths of the populace, including many of the types of people who, while politically conservative and otherwise sympathetic to many of Trump's hatreds and resentments and perhaps before now proud to have voted for him, are sensitive to what my colleague David Roth called "red-letter Antichrist Shit," and so get a little itchy when an elected world leader A) starts an elective war in the Middle East, and B) portrays himself as the Messiah. In fact, many of those people spent much of the past 36 hours calling him the Antichrist, right there on his own website. Trump deleted the image at some point around midday on Monday.
2026-04-14 04:07:38
Sea, trees, and hills make Monte Carlo the prettiest stop on the tennis tour, but for Sunday's championship, it did its best to dull itself. The singles final featured gray sky, chilly air, and gusts tossing the ball around unpredictably. It was sure to be a rough outing at the Monte-Carlo Country Club, no matter the faces on court or the stakes of the match. The two era-defining players in men's tennis, scrapping for the world's top ranking, could not overcome the weather and redeem the day. Even with Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner out there—or precisely because each was playing against the other—there were wild wind-borne errors and moments of uncharacteristic anti-clutch. Not every installment in a classic rivalry is itself a classic, but Sinner's 7-6(5), 6-3 victory, which snagged his first big clay-court title and let him regain the No. 1 ranking, still left me with plenty to chew on.
One of the most surprising aspects of this matchup is that it took until April 12 for it to happen. Throughout 2025, Sinner and Alcaraz effectively had a standing date in the final of every big event. Because no other player seemed good enough yet to interfere, this pattern was expected to continue in 2026. At the start of this season, they narrowly missed one another in the Australian Open final, thanks to a blazing performance from late-stage Novak Djokovic. Then came another miss in the Indian Wells final, as occasional interloper Daniil Medvedev got out of his funk to beat Alcaraz. (Firmly back in his funk, Medvedev lost his first match in Monte Carlo 6-0, 6-0, and smashed his racket seven times.)
Upsets for Sinner in Doha and Alcaraz in Miami prevented a clash between the top two seeds in those locales, too. All told, it had been about four months since they last met in the championship match of the ATP Finals. After such a lengthy tolerance break, I expected to have my mind lit up by an encounter on clay, the surface that most emphasizes their physicality and point construction, best seen in their generational duel at the French Open last year. That was not the match we got at Monte Carlo. The conditions were just too disruptive, and the players could never settle into enough of rhythm, instead providing a twitchy battle that still had plenty of tension to it, if not rallies constructed like epic poems.
2026-04-14 01:20:34
I like to think that I am both a professional at what I do and a sports fan still not too jaded to have lost my irrational passions. I'm lucky enough to work at Defector, where I am free to exercise both those sides of myself, which is why I can openly throw my bias in everyone's face by saying this, even if I can't believe it as I type it: I am absolutely rooting for Manchester City to come from behind and steal the Premier League title from Arsenal.
Trust me, as a renowned and beloved Liverpool fan, this hurts me more to write than it does you to read. My Pool Boys battled with City for years on either side of the COVID pandemic, and came second in all but one year of direct confrontation (the awkwardly interrupted 2019-20 season). Twice Liverpool finished an agonizing single point behind City in a title race, and that's a fate I never thought I'd wish on another club. Until now, that is. Due to the events of this past weekend, not only am I rooting for Pep Guardiola and his band of state-bought mercenaries, but I am doing so with few reservations, thanks both to the return of the best kind of Pepball and to the continued existence of Mikel Arteta's torturous brand of soccer.
Let's start with Arsenal, because I feel pretty confident in saying that Saturday's 2-1 home defeat to Bournemouth was the worst Gunners performance of the season.
