I don’t think I can come up with a better advertisement for this newsletter than that three-wide photo header up there. If you want a free newsletter that will bring you stories about Sad Athletes In Big Sports and Extremely Happy Athletes In Other Sports (or Spelling Bees) here’s how to get it in your inbox.

– Rodger Sherman

Today’s Lineup

The critical error that decided the Champions League
How the Thunder became the latest would-be NBA dynasty to falter
The National Spelling Bee spell-off was incredible

⚽️❌ A guide to penalty kicks ⚽️❌

PSG goalie Matvey Safonov didn’t have to make any saves in his team’s win in the Champions League final. Arsenal only had one shot on target in 120 minutes of regulation plus extra time, which ended 1-1 to send the game to a shootout. And then PSG beat Arsenal 4-3 in PKs, thanks to Arsenal’s Eberechi Eze and Gabriel Magalhães missing the net entirely.

Eze in took a particularly awful penalty kick, with a comically overwrought run-up filled with false starts and stutter steps. He went Zaza Mode.
He does this on every penalty he takes — someone made a supercut, and it’s pretty clear whatever tactical advantage he used to gain from doing this has been wiped out by the keeper knowing it’s what he does every time; nobody has jumped early in years.
And it’s bizarre that Gabriel was shooting at all: He’s a center back who had never taken a penalty in his career. Announcer Clive Tildesley presciently said “I’m a little surprised to see him among the Arsenal’s chosen five,” before Gabriel he booted the ball skywards.
He hadn’t scored a goal in any competition since January, and three of his goals this season were headers, and penalty kicks are generally taken with feet. I looked it up. It is actually illegal to dive headfirst and head the ball towards the goal on a penalty kick. You do have to kick the ball.
But that’s the thing about shootouts. You need five guys to shoot! That’s half the team! And two of the three players who had scored penalties for Arsenal this season, Kai Havertz and Bukayo Saka, had already been subbed off.
Don’t feel too bad for Arsenal — remember, they did just win the Premier League! And they had a parade Sunday to celebrate that, despite losing the game on Saturday.
I’ll admit, I’m not a soccer “expert.” But I’m working on a theory with regards to penalty kicks, and given the amount of World Cup knockout matches that end in PKs, I’m hoping players listen. When taking penalties, players should kick the ball at the goal instead of missing the net entirely.
And I’ve got the stats to back it up.
First, a quick analysis of the shots taken in this shootout: Of the eight shots that were on target, seven scored. That’s an 87.5 percent success rate, with 12.5 percent of shots saved by the goalkeeper.
However, of the two shots that missed the net entirely, zero percent were scored, for a zero percent success rate. It’s true that the goalkeepers failed to save these shots, but the ball never went in the net.
There has been a lot of research on penalty kick success — which target zones result in the most goals, whether the stakes of a competition affects the success rate, right-footedness vs. left-footedness, and even success by nationality.
Every study has found the same thing: Roughly zero percent of shots that miss the net entirely result in goals. That’s analytics.
Shooters are significantly more likely to miss the net entirely during penalty shootouts than during in-game penalties. A 2024 study of more than 45,000 penalty kicks published in PLoS One found that while 82.55 percent of in-game penalties are converted, with 12.96 percent saved and 4.91 percent missed, only 74.64 percent of shootout penalties are converted, with 14.3 percent saved and a whopping 11.06 percent missing the net entirely.
So in penalty shootouts, shooters are more than twice as likely to miss the net entirely as on in-game penalties. More than 10 percent of all shootout kicks miss the net entirely!
Come on! Shoot it at the net! I bet it’s easy!
It makes sense: in-game penalties are generally taken by a team’s best shooter, while shootouts involve four other players per team who aren’t as good, after 120 minutes of action, on tired legs, under the biggest pressure they’ll ever face. Those guys might be center backs who have never attempted a penalty!
There’s a solution: simply kick the ball straight at the middle of the net. A study by Opta Analyst found that kicks directly down the middle have a better than 90 percent success rate, with almost no risk of missing the target, due to goalkeepers’ tendency to dive to one side of the other. It’s possible we’re looking at the phenomenon backwards — that shooters are waiting for goalkeepers to commit, then kicking down the middle — but it’s still something to consider.
Again, I’m urging the world’s best players to pay attention to this. World Cup knockout games are cagey, low-scoring affairs that go to penalties about 20 percent of the time.

⚡️ Thunder doesn’t strike twice ⚡️

I remember the first time I saw a clip of Chet Holmgren playing basketball. He was in high school and had committed to Gonzaga. I remember thinking how could somebody that tall and that long move that smoothly? How could someone like him dribble and shoot like a smaller player? Is this kid going to dominate the NBA for decades?

Then along came Victor Wembanyama, who is taller than Chet, longer than Chet, stronger than Chet, moves more smoothly than Chet, and also clearly hates Chet on a personal level and has made it his goal to destroy him.

On Saturday night, Wemby’s Spurs beat Chet’s Thunder in Game 7 to reach the NBA Finals. Holmgren, in particular, disintegrated, only attempting two shots and getting viciously dunked on by Wemby.

The Chet-Wemby dynamic feels like a microcosm of how the NBA works. Just 12 months ago, the Thunder seemed to have it all figured out: they were so young, their roster was so perfectly constructed, and they had the assets to stay competitive for years. Then along came a team that’s even younger, with an even more frightening core, and an almost equally impressive haul of incoming draft picks. What looked like a dynasty may have already peaked.

The Thunder failing to advance to the Finals means another year without a repeat champion, extending the longest run in NBA history without a back-to-back winner. We’ve had eight years with eight different champions.
Last year I wrote a long post that I ended up not publishing about how the Thunder were going to blow that parity to smithereens. They had one of the best seasons of all time in 2024-25, winning 68 games (the fifth-best record in NBA history) with the largest average margin of victory in NBA history. Somehow, they did it with the youngest roster in the NBA. And somehow, on top of that, they had the most upcoming draft capital in the NBA.
I’d link to it, but, you know, I didn’t publish it. Here’s a similar post to what I would’ve written called “The Thunder’s potential dynasty can break the NBA’s parity era.”
(Back before I got on this twice-a-week schedule, I would sometimes write like 3,000 words about something and then tweak it and then tweak it and then tweak it and then tweak it and then tweak it and then by the time I felt comfortable posting it would be several weeks later and nobody would be interested anymore so I’d just bin it. This would happen like ……… twice a month. The current system is much better!)
A year later, the Thunder’s future is much less rosy. They just lost to the Spurs, and the financial implications of keeping this Thunder squad together are not great. Sam Quinn of CBS Sports laid out the situation pretty well here. In summary: 2025-26 was the last “cheap” year for the Thunder, as their young core’s salary extensions will now start kicking in. Next year, they’ll be well over the salary cap and the dreaded “second apron.” Not only will this restrict what players they can add, it will also force the Thunder to pay the largest luxury tax bill in NBA history — more than $200 million, on top of nearly $250 million in salaries — which their owners might not stomach. And this is all before Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s supermax contract hits in 2027-28.
And the Thunder’s draft picks probably won’t be able to help them. They simply don’t have the roster space to use and develop all those picks, and even if they did, those players might not contribute at a championship level.
OK, reality check: OKC still has the reigning back-to-back MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Holmgren is already All-NBA at 24, and can certainly recover from this bad series. And the Thunder got to seven games against San Antonio without SGA’s main sidekick, Jalen Williams, who was injured for most of the series. But it may never be easier for the Thunder than it was the last two seasons, when their stars were cheap and Wemby hadn’t yet figured out his game.
The Thunder’s comedown now feels like an annual occurrence. When the Nuggets won the 2023 Finals, I wondered how anybody could beat Nikola Jokic, who looked like an unstoppable offensive genius. When the Celtics won the 2024 Finals, I wondered how anybody could beat a team that was so historically efficient with such young stars. And when the Thunder won last year, I wrote thousands of words about how the league would be theirs for years to come. Now, the league seems to belong to Victor Wembanyama.
I say all this not to bury the Thunder — again, they still have the back-to-back MVP and his sidekicks locked up. I say it to illustrate that sports success is fleeting. When the Knicks made the 1999 NBA Finals, I was nine and assumed they’d go back all the time; 27 years later they finally did. When your team wins something, cherish it. As Kyle Busch said in his last NASCAR win a few days before he died, you never know when the last one is.

🏆🤓 Machine Gun Spell-y 🤓🏆

The 2026 National Spelling Bee came down to a thrilling spell-off lightning round that might have been the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen anybody do.

I AM NOT OVERSELLING THIS. Please watch this video of 14-year-old Shrey Parikh going Beast Mode and banging out 32 words in 90 seconds to win the bee. No athlete in any sport has ever been this locked in before.

(You can probably skip over the rest of the video; it takes eight minutes for the judges to listen back to Shrey’s spelling and figure out which words he spelled correctly.)

If you’ve ever watched the Bee before, you’ve seen the spellers asking “may I have the language of origin?” or “can you use it in a sentence?” So it’s probably a bit confusing to see Shrey go rapidfire like this.
The Bee adopted a lightning round tiebreaking format because kids got too good at spelling. There were back-to-back-to-back years with co-champs in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and then in 2019, there was an eight-way tie for first place. (The picture of the Octo-Champs awkwardly trying to hold up the trophy together remains an all-timer.)
Shrey and his final co-competitor, Ishaan Gupta, got through 18 rounds of words to get to this point.
Shrey officially got credit for 32 of the 35 words he spelled in the video. I think he got dinged for saying some of the letters too fast.
Louisiana natives are mad at longtime Bee pronouncer Dr. Jacques Bailly for mispronouncing “Natchitoches” (the home of Northwestern State University, for a college sports angle!) Apparently it’s “nah-cuh-tish,” not “nack-i-tosh.” (It’s gotta be hard for Bailly to bounce back and forth between Louisianan and Welsh and Māori — but, sort of a “one job” situation.) Somehow, Shrey and Ishaan both powered through the False Cajun and nailed it.
How was this possible? For starters, the relevant info about each word (language of origin, part of speech, etc.) was displayed on a monitor in front of the competitors in the speed round, which isn’t available during the rest of the tournament.
And Mina Kimes, who called the event (and let out a HOLY MACKEREL after Shrey’s lightning round), explained on BlueSky that the spellers likely sorted through homonyms in rapid-fire mode. Sure, it might sound like the pronouncer is saying “nickel,” but common sense suggests that they’re not asking spellers how to spell a word as common as “nickel” in the championship round of the National Spelling Bee, so the spellers can assume they mean “nicol” instead.
Mina also talked about why the Bee is actually useful as a celebration of the value of human intelligence in an AI era where spellcheck exists. “One of my strongest takeaways from the Bee this week is that it was a showcase for why critical thinking matters more than ever. So much of what the kids do up there isn’t rote memorization—it’s using their insane prep to solve words like puzzles (using etymology, patterns) in real time.”

⚾️ A bad day for Bruins … ⚾️

Stunning upset in the NCAA baseball tournament, as national #1 seed UCLA was knocked out of the NCAA Tournament on a 10th-inning walk-off by Saint Mary’s, the fourth-ranked team out of the four teams in UCLA’s regional.

It’s the second time in tournament history that the top seed has failed to advance out of the regional round, after #1 Vandy lost last year. (Editing note: I initially wrote that these were the first two teams ever to lose like this, b

To summarize how nuts this is: UCLA went 51-6 this season. Saint Mary’s finished seven games out of first place in the WCC regular season standings before winning that league’s tournament. And remember, the NCAA Tournament is double elimination: Saint Mary’s didn’t just beat UCLA once, but twice! At UCLA’s home stadium!

… and then Saint Mary’s promptly got outscored 19-3 in back-to-back losses to Cal Poly, which advanced out of the regional.

(Honestly, this should’ve been one of the big three entries in the newsletter … but I’d already written the other three by the time it happened … sorry or I guess you’re welcome to UCLA …)

🥎 No, a really bad day for Bruins … 🥎

And UCLA also got knocked out of the Women’s College World Series in a true classic. With UCLA down to its final out, Jordan Woolery hit a spectacular home run to save UCLA in the seventh, but the Bruins lost 8-7 in the ninth. (More on the WCWS in a bit.)

🇫🇮🏒🥅 Finnished the Job 🥅🏒🇫🇮

Congratulations to Finland for winning the men’s IIHF World Championship on an overtime goal against Switzerland …

But, MAN, you’ve gotta feel bad for the Swiss. They took silver for a third straight year at Worlds, and second straight losing 1-0 in overtime after last year’s surprise win for Team USA. Swiss goalkeeper Leonardi Genoni literally won tournament MVP last year and was even better this year, allowing just four goals on 133 shots … and it wasn’t enough. And the game was on home ice in Zurich! Poor Switzerland! I need these guys to win it next year!

Congrats are also in order for Norway, not a traditional hockey powerhouse, who beat Canada in the bronze medal match. It was their first World Championships medal ever!

🇫🇷🎾 No, seriously, who’s gonna win this thing? 🎾🇫🇷

Last week I wrote about Jannik Sinner’s stunning collapse in the French Open, leaving Novak Djokovic as the lone Grand Slam champion in the field. Djokovic lost on Friday to Brazilian João Fonseca. (He pulled a Djokovic on Djokovic, too, rallying back from two sets down.)The wide open field is a huge opportunity for everybody else in men’s tennis. This will be the first time somebody besides Sinner, Djokovic, or Carlos Alcaraz has won a major since 2022.

👑🏏. Another crown for King Kohli 🏏👑

Last year I wrote about Indian cricket legend Virat Kohli finally winning the Indian Premier League. He’s done it again, as Royal Challengers Bengaluru won a final that was likely watched by more people than the Super Bowl. Kohli was named match MVP for scoring 75 runs, but 15-year-old phenom Vaibhav Sooryavanshi (who we wrote about last week) was named overall tournament MVP despite losing in the semifinals.

⚾️ Will he ever stop winning? ⚾️

Brewers reliever Aaron Ashby has thrown 36 innings this season in 26 games. He has NINE wins in those appearances, leading the league while Milwaukee holds first place in the Central. He just keeps entering games at the exact moment the Brewers take the lead, then holds on to win. The only comparison for Ashby’s run is ElRoy Face’s 1959 season. He won 18 games in 93.1 innings for the Pirates (with a Hall-of-Fame name, too). The Brewer clubhouse has begun calling Ashby “The Vulture” due to his winning ways. He also wears glasses, which boosts his coolness factor a good bit. Overall, he’s fun to root for, and I can’t wait to see if he keeps this streak going. —Aidan Weiss

On Deck is written by Aidan Weiss and Rodger Sherman.

🤠🗽 NBA FINALS!!! Spurs-Knicks! 🗽🤠

Game 1: Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. ET in San Antonio (ABC)

AN NBA CUP REMATCH! Also, the largest French object to arrive in New York City since they shipped that statue over the Atlantic. Massive X-factor: The pinky finger of Mitch Robinson, who apparently broke a bone in his hand in a non-basketball injury shortly after posting that he was struggling with his mental health. Sure, a defense-and-dunks guy like Mitch is well-adapted to fingerless basketball. He surely can’t be worse at shooting free throws. But if he can’t go, the Knicks are in big trouble. He’s legitimately essential to the team’s hopes of stopping Victor Wembanyama.

🎰⛈️ STANLEY CUP FINAL! Golden Knights-Hurricanes ⛈️🎰

Game 1: Tuesday, 8 p.m. ET in Raleigh (ABC)

Both teams dominated their conference finals, with Carolina winning four straight after dropping Game 1 against Montreal, and Vegas sweeping the regular season champion Colorado Avalanche. The Hurricanes should be favored, as they had the best record in the Eastern Conference, while Vegas wouldn’t have even made the playoffs if they were in the East. But, well, the Knights just swept the best team in the league. Miracle stat: Carolina is 5-0 in overtime games this postseason, and every single one of those games ended with a score of 3-2.

🥎 Women’s College World Series 🥎

Semis Monday starting at noon; Championship Series Game 1 Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET in Oklahoma City (ESPN)

We’re down to the final four. Tennessee vs. Texas in an Orange-off, then Alabama vs. Texas Tech. Texas and Texas Tech both had ridiculous wins on Sunday just to make it out of the elimination bracket; if either of those teams win Monday, they’ll need to turn around and win a doubleheader to knock off a team that hasn’t lost yet. I think Texas Tech can pull it off. The Red Raiders have a pair of great pitchers in Kaitlyn Terry and NiJaree Canady. For Texas to repeat as champions, the Longhorns might need Teagan Kavan to throw 14 innings today, which is a lot to ask even in softball.

⚾️ NCAA baseball tournament, Regional Finals ⚾️

Monday starting at Noon ET (ESPN2/ESPNU)

Ten of the 16 regionals wrapped up Sunday. The other six are headed into an intense Monday. All of these teams have played three or four games in the last four days, in a sport where teams can usually only trust one or two of their pitchers. Monday at a regional always features at least one game where a team’s season comes down to a shortstop or outfielder pitching critical innings. I’m hoping #4-seed Milwaukee can pull off another upset against Auburn after beating the Tigers 13-8 in the regional opener. Regional host Florida State will need to beat #4-seed St. John’s twice on Monday to get out of its regional.

🏌️‍♂️⛳️ NCAA Men’s Golf Championships ⛳️🏌️‍♂️

Monday through Wednesday, in Carlsbad, California (Golf Channel)

Oklahoma State’s Preston Stout leads the individual competition by one stroke heading into the final round after a dominant 7-under third round. He beat former OSU player Viktor Hovland a month ago, so he’s feeling himself right now. On the team side, the Cowboys are playing to get into the eight-team knockout round. Auburn is the #1 seed.

3️⃣❌3️⃣ FIBA 3x3 World Cup 3️⃣❌3️⃣

Monday through Sunday, in Warsaw, Poland (all games streamed on FIBA3x3 YouTube channel)

My biggest pet peeve in the world: the men’s USA 3×3 hoops program. Once again, the women’s team is comprised of college superstars (South Carolina’s Joyce Edwards, LSU’s MiLaysia Fulwiley, LSU’s Mikaylah Williams, Oklahoma’s Sahara Williams) while the men’s team is comprised of 3×3 specialists who haven’t made a name for themselves in college or pro hoops. The women, incidentally, have medaled at back-to-back Olympics, while the men have never medaled. Both teams finished off the podium at last year’s World Cup, though.

Another newsletter with no Knicks content … UNTIL NOW!

Something surprised me the last few days: with my favorite team headed to the Finals for the first time since I was a child, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about The Bad Times. I’ve been remembering the worst players I watched, texting “Jackie Butler” and “Cleanthony Early” to friends, and generally reminiscing about all the times I was hopeful about something that amounted to absolutely nothing.

I wanted to share some memories of The Bad Times I documented over the years:

In 2015, the Knicks gave away free food at a “fan appreciation night” for the final game of their 17-65 season. Seth Rosenthal and I went and tried to eat as much food as possible in hopes of bankrupting James Dolan. We were able to eat about $600 worth (according to stadium pricing) but apparently it didn’t affect Dolan’s net worth too drastically as he maintained ownership of the team.
In 2017, I wrote a comprehensive breakdown of every move Phil Jackson made in his three years as the Knicks’ chief exec. Basically, all of them were disastrous.
And I’m gonna go ahead and break my “never post pictures of yourself from high school online” rule to share this picture of 18-year-old Rodger wearing a t-shirt with the names of every player on the Knicks’ 2007-08 roster that went 23-59: