The chalky NBA Playoffs have been a bore
Padres offense once again goes quiet upon their return to Petco Park, the NBA Playoffs haven't found their stride yet, SDFC fans are itching for Chucky, the WNBA season gets underway, and more!
As a long-time die-hard NBA fan, this is supposed to be my favorite time of the year. But, if I’m being honest, this year’s NBA Playoffs has been pretty boring, so far.
In the first round, there were two upsets. One of them was the Minnesota Timberwolves (battling through injuries) defeating the Denver Nuggets (who struggled without a healthy Aaron Gordon or Peyton Watson). The other was the Philadelphia 76ers (with Joel Embiid rushing back from appendicitis) toppling the Boston Celtics (who were dealing with a new Jayson Tatum injury after he rushed back from an Achilles tear a year ago).
It wasn’t the basketball itself that won those series, but it was one broken-down team dealing with their injuries better than another broken down team. That helps to explain why the 76ers are down 0-2 to the Knicks in the second round (with Embiid missing both games) and why the Timberwolves lost game 2 of their series against the Spurs by 38 points. You can only plan for life without your best players for so long before the floor gives out.
That margin of victory hasn’t exactly been rare, either. Seemingly every night of the NBA Playoffs this year, there is at least one game that is over by halftime because of the dominance of one team over the other. The reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder have yet to lose a game and yet to really have a game close enough that you could theoretically worry about them potentially losing.
Everyone, including myself, is waiting on a Western Conference Finals between the Thunder and Spurs. Those are clearly the two best teams in the league and two of the youngest, which means we could be in for a run of boring, lopsided playoffs for years to come.
Despite the dynastic potential, and the brewing rivalry between these two teams, the NBA needs more than two teams to have a chance here. Especially since those two teams are in the same conference. The NBA also needs the playoffs to be more than just a battle of which teams can stay healthy against which ones can’t (although, I could make an argument that we already had this problem last year when Tatum and Tyrese Haliburton’s Achilles tears turned the playoffs on its head).
These issues are bigger than me and I don’t have any good solutions, I’m just pointing out that….to this point….this has been a pretty lame postseason for NBA fans.
Now, onto the links…
San Diego Padres
King looks sharp, but Padres come up short in series opener - MLB.com
Despite the relatively solid numbers, Michael King hasn’t quite been himself this season. He’s been mostly unable to command his fastball, and he’s had to grind his way through his outings.
But this? This looked more like the version of Michael King from his dominant late-season run in 2024.
King pitched six innings of one-hit, one-run ball, allowing only Alec Burleson’s solo home run in the fourth. Otherwise, he was as sharp as he’s looked all season.
Late swing doesn’t go Padres’ way this time in loss to Cardinals - San Diego Union-Tribune
The Cardinals broke a 1-1 tie by scoring against Bradgley Rodriguez in the seventh inning when Jordan Walker’s double landed just fair down the left-field line and a triple down the right-field line by Masyn Winn got past the sliding catch attempt by Nick Castellanos — pretty much the exact play the younger and much quicker Tatis has made his signature.
How sold-out crowd of Padres faithful gave young Cardinals a test Oli Marmol wanted to see - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
In front of a sold-out Petco Park crowd of 44,966 – the third-largest crowd they’ve played in front of this season – the Cardinals needed a nearly perfect game to best host San Diego and got it. As unbothered by a packed, raucous audience as they were by an inability to generate much offensively, the Cardinals tied the game in fourth, took their first lead in the seventh, and held tight for a 2-1 victory Thursday night. Not starter Michael King’s wily changeup, nor the Padres’ lineup, nor the hostile environment could jar the Cardinals from their steady style.
“You want to check certain boxes when it comes to growth and development with this young group at the end of the year, and one of them is being able to play in tough environments,” Marmol said. “I’d like to see another group as young as ours that calm in an environment like this. … There wasn’t a single player in the dugout who was sped up by any of it.
San Diego Padres sale a full-circle moment for Black baseball - Andscape
The next frontier for African Americans in sports is team ownership. Black bodies have helped build enormous wealth for sports teams and leagues, but ownership remains an economic and cultural mountain that largely has remained out of view.
That mountain came a bit more into focus Saturday when the family of Peter Seidler, the late San Diego Padres owner, announced it had reached an agreement to sell the franchise to an investor group led by Kwanza Jones and her husband, José E. Feliciano, co-founder of private equity firm Clearlake Capital.
If the $3.9 billion sale is approved, the purchase would make Jones, a Princeton grad and Washington, D.C., native, the first Black woman in MLB history to own a majority stake of a franchise. Her husband would be the first majority owner in the league of Puerto Rican descent and would join Los Angeles Angels owner as the league’s second Latino majority owner.
NBA Playoffs
Thunder use depth to take control of Game 2, series vs. Lakers - ESPN
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander served as a cheerleader during the most important stretch of the Oklahoma City Thunder’s 125-107 win over the Los Angeles Lakers in Thursday’s Game 2 of their second-round series.
The Lakers had a five-point lead when Gilgeous-Alexander picked up his fourth foul only 86 seconds into the second half, forcing the reigning MVP to the bench for the rest of the third quarter.
By the time Gilgeous-Alexander returned to start the fourth quarter, the Thunder led by 13. Oklahoma City seized command of the game thanks to a 22-4 run soon after Gilgeous-Alexander’s exit, the key to the Thunder taking a 2-0 series lead and remaining undefeated this postseason.
James Harden’s struggles continue in Cavaliers’ Game 2 loss to Pistons, with turnovers piling up vs. Pistons - Yahoo Sports
The Cavaliers lost 107-97 on Thursday to put themselves in a 2-0 hole as the series goes to Cleveland. No player faced more blame than the 36-year-old Harden, whose postseason struggles have become a defining element of his career across multiple playoff teams.
Harden finished the game with 10 points on 3-of-13 shooting (0-of-4 from 3-point range) with 6 rebounds, 3 assists and 4 turnovers. One of those turnovers essentially put the game away for Detroit.
Why is watching the NBA playoffs at a bar harder than it should be? - The Athletic
This season, the NBA aired games on multiple networks and platforms, including ESPN/ABC, Amazon Prime Video, and NBC/Peacock. Prime Video streamed 66 regular-season games, the NBA Cup and approximately one-third of the playoffs. NBCUniversal aired 100 regular-season games across NBC and Peacock (NBC’s streaming platform), including Sunday night games, plus playoff coverage. The 11-year media rights deal will net the NBA $77 billion.
The league saw high viewership during the regular season, and announced the first round of this postseason (through April 27) had its highest viewership in 33 years, with an average of 3.91 million viewers per game. Imagine how much larger the audience could be if those Prime games were widely available in bars and restaurants.
Odds & Ends
The King’s Court: 23 moments from LeBron James’ 23 seasons - ESPN
There were a few before-and-after inflection points in LeBron’s career -- and this was the first. One way to qualify as a superstar is to lead a lesser team to a playoff series win. James did this in breathtaking fashion, his 48 points in double overtime not only beating the rival Detroit Pistons but breaking their will in the process.
Notebook: Fan’s ‘Free Chucky’ banner captures growing frustration around San Diego FC - San Diego Union-Tribune
Hirving “Chucky” Lozano arrived as the club’s first superstar, an expensive symbol of ambition for an expansion team that wanted to make a good first impression.
Now, as SDFC stumbles through the roughest patch of its young life in Major League Soccer, Lozano has become something else entirely — an unused designated player, a training-ground exile and a growing source of frustration for a fanbase searching for answers.
After San Diego’s 2-1 loss to Portland at Snapdragon Stadium two weeks ago, chants of “Chucky Lozano” could be heard from frustrated supporters in the stands.
Last Saturday, during SDFC’s rivalry match against LAFC, one fan took the message up a notch.
Early in the match, a plane circled above Snapdragon carrying a banner that read: “#FreeChucky = More Wins.”
13 WNBA Predictions We Actually Believe for 2026 - The Ringer
If Caitlin Clark’s rookie season in 2024 was a dry run for the W’s adulthood, this is the real thing. The stars are brighter. The arenas are bigger. The league, with new teams in Toronto and Portland, is getting bigger. The CBA impasse that threatened to impede the league’s momentum was resolved at the buzzer with a new deal. The infrastructure around the sport is catching up to the talent and attention. Player salaries have increased sevenfold and are now into the seven figures, and refereeing reform should be ahead.
World Cup Tallies Another Human Rights Abuse - Defector
The legacy of the World Cup is intertwined with human rights abuses and propagandizing on behalf of killers and despots. The 2026 tournament has already sullied itself with things like the handing of a totally real FIFA Peace Prize to Donald Trump, and FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s botched attempt to engineer a Palestine-Israel handshake photo op. Even Fox, the tournament’s broadcast partner in the United States, has taken it upon itself to further make watching this World Cup an act of moral compromise. In a particularly dastardly move, the network has decided to inflict Jameis Winston on its viewers.
The UFC champ who sold his soul - Sports Politika
Khamzat Chimaev’s story is no longer that of a fearless contender rising to greatness, but of a gifted fighter diminished into a warlord’s prized pet—a UFC champ who sold his soul to the strongman.
Mexico ends school year six weeks early for World Cup, ‘extraordinary heat wave’ - The Athletic
The Mexican government has agreed to end the school year around six weeks early due to their co-hosting of the World Cup and the “extraordinary heat wave” forecast.
Schools were scheduled to break up around July 15, but an official release on Thursday confirmed the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) and the education ministries had agreed to bring the date forward to June 5, six days before the tournament’s first match.