5. Five Pack of Topics for Issue #5
Like a Tapas joint with healthy servings. Except our dishes are footy, hoops, and some volley! A boy can dream.
Lots to cover today. Tapas style. Small bites, lots of flavors. But not the kind of tapas style where you pay 17 bucks for a skewer of steak and everyone gets half a bite. Can’t stand those places. You either leave hungry or everyone at the table has to be selfish and that cultivates a poor energy. Simply not the mantra around these parts. Diving in.
Champions League
To start things off, we are revisiting the Champions League that we covered in Issue 1. Remember when I told you that regurgitating Marc’s footy takes will get you far in life? Did you listen? Let’s hope so, because on February 20th the fella told you that PSG is poised to make some noise. Lo and behold, PSG are kicking off the one game final against Inter Milan on May 31st.
Though PSG are favored, Inter have a veteran club, many of whom lost the CL final in 2023. On top of that, they are coming off the greatest Champions league semi final bout of all time against Barcelona. If you do nothing else, watch the highlights from the second leg of this two match masterpiece that ended 7-6 on aggregate score and featured some brilliant individual and team play.
Interjection: the best player in the world is a 17 year old named Lamine Yamal. The Barcelona man should win the Ballon D’Or this year and is genuinely on his way to becoming the greatest of all time. He is must see TV and he still has braces. Also he was bathed by Messi as a baby. If you click on one link today please make it this one. That is actually baby Yamal.
PSG are searching for their first European title ever. Despite having household names like Mbappe, Messi, and Neymar in the last 5 years, it might be Ousmane Dembele, Achraf Hakimi, and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia that finally get the job done for the Parisians.
I don’t want to keep making predictions because I will look like a fool very fast. But it is fun to have some skin in the game - I’ll take the wily old folks from Inter to avenge their 2023 loss. Some good personal stories on that side of the ball - like this one from Francesco Acerbi. Also they start a Turk in center midfield. Ottoman leadership.
NBA Playoffs
I’ll keep this quick because we do a lot of hoops and we will do more when the finals roll around.
The Cavaliers blew it in a major way. Injuries played a role, but it was embarrassing nonetheless. Check out this stat to see where they statistically matched up, just to get severely outplayed and run out of their own gym in 5 games by Indiana. And if you are ever in a Cleveland based argument, just bring up the Cavalanche. Real misuse of funds.
The Pacers deserve their flowers. They play fast, they play hard, and they are so annoying for opponents. Don’t underestimate them.
Knicks-Celtics is ongoing but after being up 3-1 and Jayson Tatum rupturing his achilles, all signs point to the Knicks advancing. Be ready to see a lot of 90s playoffs clips of Ewing’s Knicks facing Miller’s Pacers.
Quickly on the Knicks and Celts:
The Celtics have led by at least 14 in every game of this series thus far. And yet they are down 3-2.
Brunson has been historically good. How can you not love the way Josh Hart plays. Thibs is outcoaching Joe Mazzulla.
The Celtics keep freezing up and literally stop playing offense. Porzingis has been unfathomably bad. Without Tatum they were forced to move the ball and stick to a plan and it worked. Let’s see if they can find more magic.
The Timberwolves are the real deal and have a perfect 8 man playoff rotation. Since Julius Randle returned from injury a few months ago, they have looked the part of a championship team. The analysis changes drastically depending on the matchup. But you can bet the Wolves think (know) they can beat anyone and have the energy of a team that frankly doesn’t care.
Thunder-Nuggets has been a treat. A hoop lover's dream. The top two MVP candidates in a Game 7. So many reputations on the line. The future of both teams, regardless of what happens in the next round, might rest on this game. 3:30 ET on Sunday. Watch the burly white guy if you want to see a masterpiece. You’ll know who I mean.
WNBA Tip Off
The W season starts this weekend! The league has expanded to 13 teams this year, adding a new one in San Francisco. As a sign of the growth, that team already has more season ticket holders than any other team, and only 5% of them overlap with the NBA’s Bay Area team (Warriors) despite sharing ownership and a stadium. Two more expansion teams will join next year in Portland and Toronto and the league is full of names and faces that draw major crowds. The easiest way to get into a sport is through the characters so here are a few to pick your favorite from and you can follow them:
Caitlin Clark - you already know her. She is the revolutionary star that every sport dreams of and that every successful league has. She plays for the Indiana Fever, is the reigning Rookie of the Year, and can pull up from anywhere.
Napheesa Collier - if anyone reading this knows Napheesa, please please tell me. She’s my crush. The reigning Defensive Player of the Year and runner up MVP also got robbed of a title with some more than fishy officiating in the finals last year. Expect her and her Minnesota Lynx to be on the revenge path.
A’ja Wilson - 3 time MVP and the most dominant player in the league. She also just released her first signature shoe with this commercial that was directed by Sidwell’s very own Malia Obama. Good people doing big things with good people!
Paige Bueckers - you might remember Paige from Issue 3 when I compared my own game to hers. Convenient for me because she was just drafted #1 overall by the Dallas Stars and is likely to win rookie of the year.
Breanna Stewart - Just one of those winners. I mean look at the accolades. She’s coming off a title with the NY Liberty and though she is the less marketable of her teammates (see: Sabrina Ionescu) she is still their best player.
The W still has their haters but the league is growing in a major way. I know the Napheesa Collier plea is far fetched, but seriously if anyone knows someone that works at the WNBA, let me know. That feels more plausible. Substack networking. These kids are so creative nowadays.
College Volleyball
“What? This guy has volleyball in his bag?!”
That’s right pal. What did I tell you in the Manifesto, I follow so you don’t have to. That being said, get some volleyball in your life! Fun to play, fun to watch. The Turkish Women’s national team is one of the world’s best. Came 4th in the Olympics with my family in the stands. I hope they gain another 100 fans at least from this publication.
Anyway, onto the men’s college game. Long Beach State just swept UCLA in the title game for their 4th national title. It was the expected outcome all year mostly because of one man. Simeon Nikolov. Remember the name. The kid is 18. Freshman setter for LBSU and the starting setter for the Bulgarian national team. Won player of the year in his only year in college before he went full professional. He’s 6’9” so he can hit as well as anyone and has the most buttery hands.
I know that's a lot of links, but for a guy no one knows you kinda have to show rather than tell. The end of the season is not the best time to get people excited about a sport, but if you are ever doom scrolling on Instagram, there is a lot of great volleyball content. I recommend @matthewjhoulihan for some fun highlights.
Thanks for indulging my niche sports moment. Congrats, you’ve now reached the laugh at my pain section of the issue.
NBA Lottery
Ugh. The life of a Wizards fan.
We don’t have the time to explain the draft lottery. But in short, all the NBA teams that don’t make the playoffs have their draft order selected by a bunch of ruthless ping pong balls in a lottery machine. Odds for each team are determined by reverse order of seeding from the season and that determines how many permutations of these 4 balls you “own”.
My beloved Washington Wizards owned the second best odds by virtue of being an all around embarrassing on court product for the entire season. This gave us these percentages. In short, the lowest pick we could have received was 6th, and thus, in typical Wizards fashion, we got 6th. In what was supposed to be the biggest day of the Wizards franchise since literally 2017, we were met with extreme disappointment. See below for a photo of an excited young boy with his gear on (5:45pm) and the collective crash out in the group chat (7:25pm).
Let’s all take a breath. Writing that made me relive that moment. Cruel.
No, the lottery is not rigged. Was this outcome about as “rigged” as it could have possibly looked? Yes. Bill Simmons, NBA writer and podcaster extraordinaire, made a list on his podcast the day prior to the lottery of the “least deserving teams to the win the lottery” as determined by a smattering of ambiguous criteria that fans live and die by and the bottom three teams on the list literally came 1-2-3 in the lottery. There was a 0.0114% chance that those 3 teams would be 1-2-3. The Mavericks themselves had just a 1.8% chance of getting the top pick. So of course, they were rewarded for making the worst trade in NBA history by immediately winning the lottery.
Yelling that it’s rigged is fun to do but ultimately not worth it. However, the lottery needs reform. I know this is coming from someone that is personally injured by this week’s events, but this is not hard to see.
The purpose of the draft is to make bad teams better and even out the league. Hence why worse teams have better odds. The purpose of the lottery (rather than doing the NFL system) is to disincentivize teams from egregiously tanking the regular season to lock in top picks. The idea is that there is still some chance involved so you have to put out at least a passable product. They even modified the odds in 2019 to make it less of a sure thing for the worst team. Quick breakdown below:
These were good faith efforts from the league. I have no problem with trying. But we have seen now two years in a row (the Hawks got the top pick in 2024 with only a 3% chance) that the draft is no longer serving its ultimate purpose of rewarding bad teams with good talent and is instead so random that playoff teams (the Mavericks made the finals last year!!!) are getting franchise altering stars. Small market teams rely on the draft to gift them the stars that they can’t attract in free agency. Flailing teams rely on the draft to reset their timelines and retain fanbases.
There must be a middle ground where the 3 worst teams can have a better than 14% shot at the top pick without also giving way to unabashed tanking. The Wiz won 18 games last year and we still had an almost 50% chance of getting the 5th or 6th pick. That feels wrong. The guys at the top of the league office get paid enough money to figure this out. I hope they will.
There are plenty of talking heads that agree/disagree with me and many Twitter trolls that agree/disagree. If nothing else, it is a fantastic table conversation with a buddy. And ain’t that what it’s all about. So don’t miss out on all the exciting things in life - like ping pong balls determining the happiness of thousands of fans.
I leave you with one fun tweet in my favorite sweet spot - the intersection of politics and sports.
Thanks for reading. Hope you’re full. No half-assed tapas here. Dinner dismissed!
Ottoman leadership. Hakan. Read somewhere this week that he's one of the best penalty takers in soccer history -- might be worth a cheeky anytime goalscorer bet.
Thank you chef