For her career, Reese averages 15 points per game on 45.1 percent shooting. In her first career playoffs, she’s averaging 19.4 points per game on 48.1 percent shooting. In her first career WNBA Finals, she’s averaging 21.7 points per game on 56.4 percent shooting.

The numbers are not supposed to go up like that! Playing basketball is supposed to get harder against better competition!

The Dream’s Finals opponent, the Golden State Valkyries, had the best defense in the WNBA. During the regular season, the most points they let up to any individual player was 30, and the most rebounds was 16. Angel Reese had 30 and 16 against them in the same game.

Reese’s ridiculous rebounding is a given; she was named Defensive Player of the Year for a reason. Her ferocity and fearlessness has been on full display in the Finals. It sometimes feels like the Dream have six or seven players on the court.

But earlier in her career, Reese struggled with some basic basketball skills: She was a poor finisher around the rim, shooting just 42.4 percent on layups as a rookie, and a clip went viral in which she struggled to maintain a steady dribble.

In the Finals? She’s drilling threes. She’s shooting 47.1 from three this postseason! She’s 3-for-4 against the Valks! SHE IS A CAREER 18.9 PERCENT THREE-POINT SHOOTER AND NOW SHE CAN’T MISS.

Perhaps most importantly: Reese’s already elite-level trolling and trash talk has ascended into the stratosphere. She’s putting the Valks through 40 minutes of hell and hating a night.

There’s a lot of series left, but, honestly, it feels like Atlanta has this locked up. After blowing Game 1, which they led for 79 percent of the time, the Dream won Games 2 and 3 by a combined 40 points.

The offseason trade that sent Reese from the moribund Chicago Sky to the electric Dream could be an all-timer. The good news for Chicago is the 2027 draft class looks great; the bad news is it also traded away its high pick in this year’s draft for Ariel Atkins, who is no longer on the team.

The Chargers have actually lost nine straight games dating back to last season. I don’t know if Jim Harbaugh declares that nobody has it better than us after defeats; I assume he knows the call doesn’t work as well when the response is “the Denver Broncos,” and that likely means he hasn’t fired up his team by reminding them how good they’ve got it since Dec. 21, 2025.

Until this year, the longest losing streak Harbaugh faced as a head coach was four games. The first instance came in 2007, right after he’d been hired at Stanford. The second occurred late in 2014, when his 49ers lost to the Raiders once and the Seahawks twice, then capped off the skid by blowing a 21-point lead to the Chargers and losing in overtime.

But at least those streaks were counterbalanced with success. Before Harbaugh’s first Stanford squad hit its four-game drought, it managed three wins, including an upset over a Pete Carroll USC team that was favored by 41 points. His final 49ers team went 7-4 before its monthlong slide.

Harbaugh last found himself in a pit this deep as a player with … well, the Chargers. Jim, then 37, was one of three quarterbacks to start for San Diego in 2000. The Chargers lost their first 11 games en route to a 1-15 record, easily the worst season in franchise history. Seven of those 11 defeats were decided by a single score, and six ended with the Chargers losing by no more than three points.

Jim happened to start the game that dropped San Diego to 0-6. He didn’t play particularly well, throwing three interceptions, including one in the fourth quarter when the Chargers were five yards away from a game-tying touchdown.

His comments afterwards did not suggest that nobody else had it better: “It’s a horrible position to be in. I know how I feel, and it’s not very good.”

That wasn’t Harbaugh’s first long skid as a player. Three years earlier, he led the Indianapolis Colts to an 0-7 start before being sidelined with two injuries: 1) a sprained ankle, suffered in that seventh loss against the Buffalo Bills, and 2) a small hand fracture, from punching Bills legend Jim Kelly in the head later that week.

Of note: In 1997, Kelly was broadcasting football, not playing it. Colts Jim was mad at TV Jim because TV Jim called Colts Jim a “baby,” so Colts Jim found TV Jim in San Diego, where the Colts were in town to play the Chargers, and TV Jim was providing color commentary. Some punches and a chipped bone later, Harbaugh expressed contrition in a very Harbaugh way: “I regret that I have a crack in one of my bones in my hand.”

Playing for a losing team and coaching one are two very different things. Jim Harbaugh, journeyman third-string quarterback for the San Diego Chargers, was elevated to a starting role due to injuries when the team was already 0-3. Jim Harbaugh, head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers, owns his team’s 0-6 start much more directly. He swapped in a new offensive coordinator only to watch his team score the fewest points per drive in the league so far this season.

Though Harbaugh has never experienced such a prolonged stumble as a coach, many other successful coaches have lost six straight before. Jimmy Johnson lost his first eight games coaching the Dallas Cowboys! Bill Belichick lost six straight as coach of the 1995 Browns! Andy Reid dropped eight in a row with the 2012 Eagles!

You know what they all have in common? They each won multiple Super Bowls after that experience! Maybe this valley is just what Harbaugh needs to finally ascend pro football’s highest mountain.

Granted, based on two of those examples, he won’t do it with the Chargers, unless they’re about to draft the NFL’s next all-time leading rusher. If Jim Harbaugh has that card in his back pocket, he should probably play it.

First off, let’s list all the stuff that went wrong for Team USA: Hezly Rivera, the only Olympian on the team and the back-to-back all-around national champion, had to pull out with an ankle injury. Her replacement, Dulcy Caylor, had a big fall on her beam dismount. That alone made up the margin between first and second.

Skye Blakely made a barely perceptible mistake on beam: she didn’t fully rotate on one of her elements, a mistake so subtle that even Gymternet users needed zoomed-in screenshots to pick it up. As a result, Blakely’s difficulty score was 0.9 points lower than when she did the same routine in the qualification round. That, too, was the difference between gold and silver.

This was a team of first-timers. Only Blakely had ever competed in the team event at a world championships. She was also the most veteran member of the team at 21; everybody else was 18 and younger.

The Americans posted the best scores on floor, vault, and bars. The only event in which they didn’t post the top score was beam, and that was enough to cost them the team competition.

Rivera would’ve been a huge help on beam. She’s won back-to-back national championships on the apparatus, and was selected to the Paris team after posting the best beam score during Olympic trials. Leanne Wong, the silver medalist in the all-around at last year’s world championships, was injured and also couldn’t compete in Rotterdam.

However, American gymnastics gold medals are not typically decided by tenths of points. They won by 5.8 points at the Paris Olympics. They won by 3.2 points at World Championships in 2022, and a whopping 8.7 points four years before that. The margins of victory were big enough that they could withstand a fall or three. The last gymnast could perform the clinching routine after chugging a couple of beers and they’d probably win.

Emily Giambalvo of The Athletic wrote that “the US women’s gymnastics team is no longer unstoppable,” highlighting a big drop in the degree of difficulty that the team has been attempting. In 2016, the Americans had the top degree of difficulty on all four apparatuses; this time, they didn’t have the highest degree of difficulty on any.

Reinforcements are coming. Jordan Chiles, Suni Lee, and Jade Carey announced that they’ll return for the 2028 Olympics. There’s talk of Simone Biles coming back for one more Olympics, although she hasn’t been training. That’s the entire team from 2024 in the mix.

But how long can Team USA keep hitting the Simone Biles button? She was the oldest all-around gold medalist since 1952 when she won in Paris; she’d be 31 in Los Angeles in a sport where 16-year-olds often win. (Though I bet she’d still win.)

I’d still pick the Americans in L.A. But if you’re wondering what comes next for Team USA when its current generation of Olympic legends finally moves on … that’s still unclear.