I have always felt that, above any other league, the NBA does a great job of trying to provide the best matchups on the biggest days. The NBA Opening Day brings three phenomenal games. The first is between the Celtics and Pistons, and the last one of the night is between the Spurs and Thunder. Sandwiched between the two games is this one between the 76ers and the Knicks.
The Philadelphia 76ers are most people's pick to win the Eastern Conference this season. Their additions of Jaylen Brown and LeBron James are the main cause of all of the excitement. Adding those two players to the lineup with Tyrese Maxey, Joel Embiid, and VJ Edgecombe gives them arguably the best starting lineup in the league. Their bench is a bit thin, with just Anfernee Simons and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope as the main players. This team isn't built for the regular season; they are built for the playoffs.
There is obviously a long way to go before we get there. There will almost certainly be a learning period for the team to play together. There are now four guys on the team who could be the leading scorer for the team if they got the opportunity. There will be some questions about matchups and defense. There will be some struggles trying to play together. Those may come out tonight against a team with continuity and even more reason to be excited.
The New York Knicks are raising a banner tonight and receiving their rings. That alone will make the entire fanbase of Madison Square Garden go nuts. This team has already captured the hearts of New York, and tonight is the final marker of the celebration from last year's championship. The Knicks have a deep starting lineup with Jalen Brunson being the superstar. Karl-Anthony Towns is still an elite option, and his backup, Andre Drummond, will help the team maintain some strength when he goes to the bench. I like him more than Mitchell Robinson, to be honest.
I am most interested in seeing how the team responds after the opening ceremony. When the ball goes up for tip-off, it will essentially be the same as any other time. The Knicks have the edge in terms of familiarity. That helps quite a bit in basketball, but the big issue for them in this will be on defense. Teams have tried to exploit Brunson on defense for years, but against the 76ers, no matter who he guards, they will have the advantage.
The NBA Preseason doesn't always give us much insight, but I think there might be some opportunity for us to look into how the 76ers did their substitutions. They were trying to keep two of the four- James, Brown, Embiid, and Maxey- on the floor at all times. The Knicks might have a lot of adrenaline coming into the quarter, but I think the rotations for the 76ers, and being a bit amped up, might cause them to not shoot all that well. I think the total of 60.5 points in the first quarter is just a bit too high for this one. Give me the under 60.5 in the first quarter.
The NBA is here, and I am like a kid in a candy store. The NBA is my favorite league, and basketball is my favorite sport. This also means that all four leagues are in action starting now. The World Series is on Friday, the NFL is on Thursday, and the NBA and NHL play every day. This is the best time of the sports year. College basketball will join the fray shortly, and of course, college football is in action. This afternoon, the NBA season kicks off with the Boston Celtics playing the Detroit Pistons.
The Boston Celtics are at a bit of a crossroads. Last season, they were up 3-1 on the 76ers before they lost the final three games, including a game at home, and were knocked out of the playoffs. How did the Celtics respond to that loss? They decided it was time for them to part with a superstar, Jaylen Brown. In fairness, Brown was expressing discontent with the organization and clearly didn't want to be partnered with Jayson Tatum.
The Celtics made a clear choice, and now they have to live with it. Tatum will now be in his first full season after tearing his Achilles in the playoffs a couple of years ago. Tatum shouldn't have any struggle with being the top option on the team. However, he has always had excellent secondary options. I'm not sure Paul George or Derrick White will be at the same level as what he had with Brown. Mitchell Robinson should help the defense and rebounding, but he's injured regularly. This could be a tough year for Boston.
The Detroit Pistons lost 68 games in the 2023-24 season. Take a second read of that sentence. They lost 68 games in one season. They won 44 games the next year and made the playoffs. Last season, they won 60 games and a playoff series. The next step forward would be to win another series in the playoffs and make the Eastern Conference Finals. Cade Cunningham is the leader of this team, and his health pretty much dictates how well this team will do.
The Pistons are relatively deep as a club. They have elite shooting from deep with Duncan Robinson. Ausar Thompson is one of the better young forwards in the league. He needs to take a big step forward this season on offense if the team wants to improve from last year. John Collins will add some rebounding and athleticism, but he isn't as good a shooter as Tobias Harris. Jalen Duren was signed to a long-term deal, but there are still talks about trades for Domantas Sabonis.
For tonight's game, the line has moved in favor of the Celtics, and I'm just not sure that I see it. I don't think the Celtics are that impressive a team. They have the advantage with Paul George, but I think the interior of Detroit is better than the interior of Boston. I'm going to back the Pistons on the moneyline here. Sharp money says otherwise, so it is a risk, but I think them at home, with a better interior, against a team with two new starting lineup pieces is a better look. Give me Detroit.
Marine Le Pen is only around 50% likely to win the French Presidency next spring, according to bookmakers' odds. But Mark Littlewood reckons it's much more likely than that and is well worth a flutter.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be careful when you're behind the wheel this week.
College football is great! Surely you want even more of it, right? We'll get into the problems with a 24-team College Football Playoff (CFP), then talk about the NBA's new betting restrictions, and close with thoughts about President Donald Trump's new government golf course plans. And just in case you don't make it to the end, here's a shortcut to our survey on who you're rooting for in the World Series.
But first, many congratulations to "Gary's 1st Entry" on outlasting everyone else in our NFL Survivor group. There's no prize other than this shoutout, so be sure to print out today's newsletter, highlight this paragraph, and frame it in gold. Perhaps Gary can keep going and challenge Primetime Paulie Rothrock's 13-game winning streak from last season.
Locker Room Links
Both teams in the WNBA Finals left the court for the National Anthem—unclear if this was a protest or just part of the pregame routine. WNBA policy doesn't require teams to be on the court for the anthem, but does require a "dignified posture" if they are.
In the thick of a playoff race, three Zambian women's soccer players are separated from their National Women's Soccer League teams because they played in Uganda, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a three-week restriction on reentry due to Ebola. (There are zero active Ebola cases in Uganda and Zambia.)
This is the kind of excessively nerdy fantasy football content I live for. (Yahoo remains the best fantasy sports system. ESPN's is trash, relying on name recognition to get by.)
I figured out how ESPN calculates fantasy football win percentage, it's bad!
ESPN made a stats 101 error when calculating their win percentage which leads to horribly miscalibrated numbers. ( thread) pic.twitter.com/bDypgjelKj
Saturday was one of the best days of college football ever—or perhaps it could have been, if we thought any of the five top-10 teams who took a loss were now certainly out of playoff contention. Instead, Georgia, Notre Dame, Indiana, Alabama, and Texas are all still very much alive in the championship hunt.
Today was one of the craziest days in college football history:
- First time ever five teams ranked in the top 7 lose in a single week - First time the No. 1-ranked team loses to an unranked team in consecutive weeks since 1990 - First time Texas, Alabama, and Georgia all lose… pic.twitter.com/psVRoM5s5b
With two losses, Alabama and Texas are at least on the edge of the playoff bubble with perhaps no more room for error. But that's only true under this year's CFP format. Next year, the playoff is almost officially set to balloon to 24 teams, making the chaos of a day like Saturday matter even less.
Fans will always celebrate a huge upset or major rivalry win, of course—Tennessee fans don't need playoff stakes as an excuse to get drunk when they beat Alabama. But the joy of a rivalry win in the past was always bigger because of the off-field stakes, too—the first loss for your rival meant they probably wouldn't be national champions, the second meant they'd be out of the Rose Bowl, a third meant you could be proud your team sent them packing for the Alamo Bowl. Winning is great; ruining your rival's season is even better.
With 24 teams in the playoff, the joy is a bit diminished because it will take four or possibly five losses to knock a powerhouse program out of the CFP (Iowa, at 8–4, was ranked 23rd by the committee before last year's playoffs). It'll be a bit like a rivalry win in college basketball—we win, you suck, congrats on getting a slightly worse NCAA Tournament seed.
In the business of sports, more inventory for TV is king, and the powers that be think more teams playing more playoff games will make more money. At Free Agent, we don't begrudge institutions for trying to make more money—we all do the same every day. But it's not clear abandoning conference championship games will be the answer, especially when the Big Ten and SEC championships apparently outdraw many playoff games.
ESPN and the power conferences know fans aren't happy about it—just look at allthechatteronline, and how the crowd at BYU reacted when College GameDay discussed expansion on Saturday (especially when BYU would probably benefit from expansion!). They're betting enough people will watch to make the expansion profitable anyway. The last hope is that fans get loud enough to bully them into abandoning expansion—which only occasionally works, sometimes on things small (putting the trophy logo on the court for the NBA Finals) and large (soccer's European Super League). If any powerhouse considers going independent, that might shock leaders into a rethink too.
Almost every sport I know is adding more: more teams, bigger playoffs, more for TV. As fans, we still eat it up, of course—much to the excitement of the TV executives who are selling commercial time to the people trying to reach us, the viewing public. (The only counterexample is the MLB proposal to cut eight games from the regular season—I'd love to see each sport I follow cut its season by about 25 percent to make regular season games matter more, so I'm interested to see how this goes.)
Perhaps I'm biased because my favorite team, Michigan State, is a dumpster fire—they could expand the playoff to 64 teams and the Spartans still wouldn't deserve a bid. I personally don't have a whole lot at stake in the playoff format now or anytime soon. But as a neutral, the chaos of Saturday might have been viewed with my full attention in the past—instead, this year I just had it on in the background while I played video games.
Sports Are Regulating Bets Without Politicians, Part 3
After last year's major betting scandal, the NBA asked sportsbooks late last week to stop offering certain types of potentially problematic bets. The sportsbooks, which the NBA says handle roughly 99 percent of the U.S. betting market, agreed. No politician or regulation was necessary to solve the problem.
No longer can bettors bet on unders for a bit player who likely won't get more than 12 minutes of playtime. Bettors also can't wager on the opening tip or on players to miss specific shots. Parlays that string together under bets on the same player's statistics are also out (this one seems a bit harsh—if you just want to bet on a certain major player to have an off night, you can bet on stats separately, but not in a big multiplier parlay). Bets on players who have two-way contracts between the NBA and G League were already banned.
This all comes on the heels of similar developments last year in the NFL and MLB. While some people want to ban prop bets altogether, the NFL asked sportsbooks to eliminate bets in four different categories. Sportsbooks largely agreed or weren't offering those bets anyway. MLB, in light of some pitching-related scandals, asked for a $200 limit on pitch-specific bets and to keep them out of parlays—sportsbooks agreed to that too.
As I wrote last year, "Ideally, this is how the regulation of the sports betting industry should go….These approaches are catching the nuances of what works for both the leagues and for sportsbooks without the heavy-handed approaches of politicians who would use an axe to ban all prop bets instead of a scalpel to limit problematic bets."
It's important to note leagues are able to do this because they have commercial partnerships with the sportsbooks. Otherwise, the leagues would have no direct leverage over a sportsbook offering a bet the league doesn't like. Keep that in mind the next time you see people bemoaning a league partnership with a sportsbook or a prediction market.
Trump's Golf Course Plans Have People Teed Off
President Donald Trump has new plans for the National Park Service golf course at East Potomac—again. Last time new plans were announced, the site plan still had its historic miniature golf course, a par-3 course, and the existing road still ringing the property for bicycling, running, etc. Much of the public didn't like that plan anyway—now, none of that remains in the latest plans, just 18 holes of golf and a driving range.
What's really going on here seems quite clear to me: Like so many other things going on in the second Trump administration, this is a scheme to enrich the Trump family. The plan?
Step 2: Use taxpayer dollars to pay for renovation of the course into, allegedly, a championship-level course capable of hosting major golf tournaments (no matter that the area has next to zero parking, is a mile from the nearest Metro station, and only accessible by narrow roads not meant to handle tens of thousands of spectators).
Step 3: Have the federal government sign a sweetheart deal with, who else, the golf division of the Trump Organization to operate the course on extremely favorable and profitable terms.
If you're wondering why the Trump administration is doing something, corruption is usually a good guess.
The arguments for the course don't make much sense. There are plenty of adequate, competitively priced golf courses in the broader Washington, D.C., area. Several of them are already capable of hosting professional golf tournaments. Between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, there were three tournaments at three different courses in the last couple years. The 2030 PGA Championship and 2037 Ryder Cup will happen just over the D.C. line in Bethesda, Maryland.
East Potomac is not the nicest course around, no thanks to the legal limbo it's been in for the past year. But if the National Park Service is going to, for some reason, be in the business of running a golf course, it should be a course that emphasizes and teaches its history instead of the pipe dream of a corrupt madman.
Who Ya Got? 2026 World Series Edition
For the first time in 46 years, we've got a World Series contested by two teams that have never won it before. Brewers against Rays is also a rare instance of the top seeds from each league outlasting the randomness of the MLB playoffs to make the World Series. And before you trot out the tired line that "TV executives must be seething about the small market teams" remember that they care much more about getting a playoff series that goes seven games with close results in each game (What did I say above? Inventory rules all!).
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