🔥 Flopaganda

🏀 Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is in a legal battle over the flopping slander. Betting company Underdog built a version of the board game Operation called Unethical Hoops, where the buzzer goes off anytime you “foul” SGA (points for creativity). The OKC star’s legal team didn’t find it so funny and sent a cease-and-desist letter to Underdog demanding they stop using Shai’s name, image and likeness. 

• Underdog is clearly capitalizing on the narrative online that Shai’s style of play (which some claim is geared towards foul baiting) is ruining basketball. If you’re in this camp, fair enough. But this video makes a pretty persuasive argument that this is all an internet marketing ploy. If you take a hard look at the numbers, the narrative is debunked pretty quickly.
  

• I get that nobody wants to watch an entire game of whistles and free throws, but NBA fans have been complaining for years that the league doesn’t have a true, Jordan-esque mid-range scorer. Now that we have a generational one, everyone wants to call him a foul merchant.

⚾️ Milwaukee Brewers reliever Abner Uribe had one of the most unhinged celebrations I’ve ever seen on a baseball field. After striking out the Cardinals’ Alec Burleson to end the inning, Uribe hit an emphatic triple crotch chop toward St. Louis’ dugout. Nobody knows why he did it, and his own manager called him out for it after the game. Funny enough, the pitch was actually challenged (it was barely confirmed as a strike). If it ended up being a ball, I’m pretty sure Uribe would’ve had to retire.

• If the crotch chop looks familiar, Kenny Powers pulled off this exact move in Eastbound and Down.

🏆 The Knicks are Finals-bound, and it’ll cost you over $1 million for a pair of courtside seats to a game. The get-in price of $3,745 is also an NBA record, but if you want to sit next to Chalamet, Ben Stiller, and Spike Lee, it’ll cost you the equivalent of a 4-bedroom mansion in Oklahoma City. 

• If you’re on the fence, it looks like the courtside seats also come with a year of free Chipotle burritos. The tickets really pay for themselves. 

🎾 World No. 1 Jannik Sinner got bounced from the French Open after losing a battle with the heat. Sinner was one game away from winning his second-round match, but the Paris heat completely broke him, and he ended up losing the next three sets (where he basically didn’t move). One overconfident Kalshi bettor put $50,000 on Sinner to win, a bet that would’ve paid out just $1,000. That must’ve been a rude wake-up. 

• He’s far from the only favourite to get upset early on. Through the first two rounds, it’s the most losses by top-10 seeds at the French Open in over two decades.

• Sinner’s also not the only player to have his body betray him midgame. French player Arthur Gea pleaded with the umpire during his first-round match to let him go to the bathroom mid-game. 

• His direct quote: "I've got the runs, I need to go to the bathroom. I can't move anymore, I'm gonna shit on the court." We’ve all been there (maybe not on national TV, but we’ve all been there). 

🍺 Rays’ pitcher Nick Martinez returned to Yankee Stadium for the first time since being thrown out as a college student. Martinez told reporters before his start in New York that the last time he was in the stadium as a junior in college, he was escorted out after having a few too many adult beverages. Fast forward 15 years, he was on the mound dicing the Yanks for 6 innings of 1-run ball. Talk about a Cinderella story.

💉 The Enhanced Games were a total bust. Things didn’t go as planned at the first-ever drug-enhanced Olympic Games. The Games’ organizers put up a $25 million prize pool, promised to break all of these Olympic records, and ended up barely beating one swimming record over the course of the entire event. Three athletes who competed without any drugs actually won events against their roided-up competitors. 

•  Who would’ve guessed that getting a bunch of washed-up athletes hopped up on steroids wouldn’t automatically make them winners? 

🇨🇦 Yasiel Puig could avoid his 18-month jail sentence and stay in Canada. The former All-Star’s sentencing was delayed for another month, with his lawyers now trying to get the case thrown out (even though he’s already been convicted). At the very least, we get another month of Puig absolutely terrorizing the Canadian baseball league.

🦫 Williams’ F1 driver Alex Albon crashed at the Canadian Grand Prix after hitting a groundhog. That’s gotta be a tough way to get knocked out of a race, but on the bright side, he got the better end of the exchange. I can’t imagine how hard it was to scrape a groundhog off the asphalt that was run over at 200mph. RIP king.

🏒 The Avalanche got swept in embarrassing fashion. The Las Vegas Golden Knights upset Colorado to punch their ticket to the Stanley Cup Finals in one of the most shocking sweeps in NHL history. After the Avs blew a 3-0 lead in Game 3 (something they hadn’t done all season), you kind of knew it was over. 

📈 If you’re looking for questionable investment advice, Kyle Kuzma is giving some out for free on Twitter. I’m confident nobody asked for this, but the Wizards player has been tweeting like a madman about tech stocks, startups, and the future of robotics. I guess if you’re completely washed up on the basketball court, you may as well rug pull some strangers on the internet. Money doesn’t grow on trees.

Alright, that’s enough for one Friday.

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