2026-04-18 02:01:59
Defector is proud of its sweeties and enemies binary. In athletic competition, there are sweeties, who cause a feeling of butterflies in tummies, and there are enemies, who are shitheels. Nobody denies this.
This year's NHL playoff bracket looks a little weird. Some teams seem like they've innocently stumbled into a place they don't belong. Other franchises are truly despicable embarrassments to ice. To make sense of the first round, I have divided every series into a sweetie and an enemy. Here they are, without further comment.
NHL Playoff Sweeties
2026-04-18 01:13:26
I have always found the starter-into-closer pipeline to be demoralizing. Per baseball truisms, even the best reliever would be a starter if they were only, by certain definitions, better. Moving a starter to the pipeline is so often the last-ditch move of teams that do not know how to develop their pitchers. I hope Roki Sasaki finds his groove; I hope that closer-into-starter conversion or reconversion projects go well.
That said: Mason Miller, who was traded from the Athletics to the San Diego Padres last year for a whopping four prospects, was practically engineered in a lab to be the exception. The closer is a position in baseball where the best players are, value and contracts and whatever bullshit aside, composed of pure, distilled coolness. It is a different skillset from that of the starter. A closer—who does not have to worry about pitch count, or keeping the arm going through five-plus innings, or the third time through the batting order—is more concerned with quality, delivering more concentrated nastiness on the pitch-to-pitch level than starters can. For Miller, this is best exemplified by his average four-seamer speed going up a full three miles per hour after he moved to the bullpen. Also, now he gets a cool walk-out ritual (depending on one's definition of cool).
It is fine, even appealing, that Miller's arsenal is composed of only an absurd fastball, an absurd slider, and an occasional changeup to lefties, thrown so infrequently that the pitch's heat map so far this season resembles six little bullseye targets. A closer with Miller's stuff does not need more pitches than that. His fastball sits at 101.4 mph and touches 103, which does legitimately make his 95.8-mph change-up a change-up. So far this season, 24 pitches have been thrown above 102 mph. One was thrown by Baltimore Orioles reliever Ryan Helsley; six have been thrown by Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Edgardo Henriquez (rocking, despite the stuff, a 5.40 ERA). Miller threw the other 17.
2026-04-18 00:24:34
Whoaaaa, get a load of this! The NBA playoffs are starting tomorrow. Yes yes, there are more play-in tournament games tonight, but we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about the real playoffs, and get you caught up to speed so that you may witness these contests with all the basketball knowledge one could possibly need filling your skull.
Before we get to the previews, however, we wanted to talk about some other important issues facing the NBA. Below you will find a roundtable discussion between Defector's biggest basketball nerds about tanking, uncompetitive regular-season games, and the NBA's popularity crisis. There's a lot to discuss on those topics, so be sure to check that out.
Just kidding! God, that would be awful. OK, here are the previews.
2026-04-18 00:14:10
On Wednesday night, the NBA fined LaMelo Ball for his "unnecessary and reckless contact" with Bam Adebayo during Charlotte's victory over Miami in their play-in game Tuesday. It made for a deflating end to what had become a whole media saga over Ball's intentions, or lack thereof, and whether or not the league should suspend him for the next game to make up for the ejection he avoided because the referees missed the incident. Ultimately, the NBA decided not to suspend Ball, hitting him instead with a $35,000 fine for the trip, an additional $25,000 for cursing during his postgame interview, and a retroactive flagrant 2 foul. He is therefore available to play in Friday's game against the Orlando Magic for the No. 8 seed and the right to get stomped by Detroit.
Was this the right decision? As always, "... eh." Ball's swipe of Adebayo's leg looked a lot worse in slow motion than in real time, where it just seemed like a typically goofy player prone to losing control of his body, which, if you've ever watched LaMelo Ball play basketball, you know that's exactly what he is. Should the refs have stopped the game to take a further look at the trip? Probably, but 1) the game was moving a hundred miles a minute, so the refs missed their window for it, and 2) the refs tend to lean toward not affecting the outcome of games the later we get into a season, which is the right instinct.
2026-04-17 22:51:40
Something about blondies really gets my motor humming. I love brownies, and I really love chocolate chip cookies. But put a thick-cut blondie in front me and suddenly I go as wild as an ape. A blondie is like a chocolate chip cookie but, like, more of it. That’s my kind of 500-calorie snack.
With that in mind, it only makes sense that I would try to bake my own blondies, so that I might gorge on them whenever I see fit. I started off on my blondie journey by just using regular chocolate chip cookie dough, spreading it evenly inside a Pyrex dish. Then I moved onto Smitten Kitchen’s blondie recipe. Smitten Kitchen recipes are almost always money in the bank, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with the results of this one. They were a little too dense to scratch my blondie itch. But Smitten Kitchen author Deb Perelman said to tinker with her recipe, so I did. A lot. Because we lack a JUMP TO RECIPE button here at Defector, I’ll blow past the rest of my thinking process so that you don’t get all pissy. Let’s get right to the good shit. This makes 24 bars.
INGREDIENTS:
2026-04-17 22:28:49
If there is a stronger verity in hockey than "Trust nothing in the playoffs," it is surely, "And whatever else you do, trust nothing you saw before the playoffs." The fetish of the team with the best record rarely proving it when everyone is watching is as secure a bet as past-posting, to the point where the Presidents’ Trophy, which is what the team with the best regular-season record receives, is now aligned with the American president in plain undesirability.
But every year, someone wins it anyway, the morons. Either a star goes dim, or a reliable goalie goes bad, or the exertions of the past six months pile up, or a lesser team goes on a heater, or as is often the case, something stupid simply happens.
Thus, the most interesting questions about the Western Conference this year were (a) just how bad is the Pacific? and (b) when are the Colorado Avalanche going to figure out that it's time to start tanking for the good of their Cup run? The answers are (a) abominable, and (b) they tried a bit in March but didn't have the stomach to finish the job.
