Strubel on Substack: Blog

Nice Try, MLB

John Strubel — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:40:34 GMT

Major League Baseball tried to trademark “Play Ball.”

Let that sit for a second.

The sport invented by Americans, perfected by Americans, and abandoned by Americans between the ages of 18 and 35 tried to own the two words that announce a game is about to start.

The USPTO said no. The phrase is too common, too universal, too much a part of shared life for any single organization to lock down. Which is a polite legal way of saying: you don’t own the game. You just run the league.

The Shakedown

Professional sports is built on a simple hustle: take something fans created through decades of collective love and passion, then charge them to access it.

You want to wear “Play Ball” on a t-shirt? Pay us.

You want to call your pizza shop’s game-day special the “Super Bowl Sub”? The NFL’s lawyers will be in touch.

You want to host a church watch party and advertise it by name? Better check your liability.

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The NFL has spent decades terrorizing small businesses, bars, and broadcasters over two words that describe the event everyone is watching.

Not an official sponsor?

Then you didn’t watch the Super Bowl — you watched “the Big Game,” which the league’s lawyers forced the culture to adopt.

It worked.

This is not about intellectual property. Nike’s swoosh tells you who made your shoes. “Play Ball” tells you that a game is starting. These are not the same thing, and leagues know it. This is about taxing the language fans use to talk about things they love.

A Culture the Leagues Didn’t Build

Here’s what gets buried in the licensing agreements and cease-and-desist letters: leagues didn’t create any of this.

Fans did.

Generations of them, showing up in bad weather to watch bad teams, passing the ritual down to their kids, building something that feels less like a product and more like a religion. The leagues are the custodians of that inheritance. They didn’t earn it. They inherited it — and then spent the last fifty years figuring out how to monetize every square inch of it.

Sell the jersey. Fine. Sell the broadcast rights, the stadium naming, the bobbleheads, the mobile app with the in-game betting integration. The commerce is not the problem.

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The problem is … claiming ownership over “Play Ball.”

The problem is … suing a bar for a chalkboard sign.

The problem is … building a legal apparatus designed to extract rent from the culture that made you.

Trademark attorney Josh Gerben framed the MLB ruling cleanly: If consumers can’t associate a phrase with a specific company making a specific product, no single company gets to own it. The phrase has to do work as an identifier, not just as a cash register.

“Play Ball” does no such work. It’s what everyone says when the game starts. It has been since before anyone in the commissioner’s office was born.

The USPTO Made the Obvious Call

This ruling won’t change anything structurally. The leagues will keep filing. The lawyers will keep sending letters. “The Big Game” will keep being a thing people say with a straight face.

But occasionally the system works the way it’s supposed to. A government agency looks at a corporation trying to own a piece of the commons and says: no. This one isn’t yours.

“In theory, a trademark has to be capable of identifying the source of goods. If a consumer were to hear a particular phrase, they need to be able to associate that phrase or that name with a company that’s making the product. If the average consumer can’t do that, then the argument is that it’s too general of a phrase or too commonplace of a phrase for one company to own. In this case, they are saying that the phrase has become so ubiquitous and it has this underlying meaning.” — Josh Gerben/USPTO trademark attorney

The USPTO’s job isn’t to protect culture. It’s to sort out who owns what. But occasionally those interests converge, and a bureaucrat in Washington looks at a billion-dollar sports franchise trying to register “Play Ball” and writes, in the careful language of federal procedure, what amounts to: nice try.

That’s not justice. It’s a speed bump. But right now, nobody owns “Play Ball” — and that means every kid who’s ever picked up a bat owns it a little.

The leagues can have the rest.

Hi! I’m John Strubel. I am a freelance journalist with a deep passion for storytelling. This blog, and my Substack as a whole, help me scratch my lifelong itch. I hope you enjoy the content and will consider subscribing to my newsletter. Thanks for taking the time to stop by and explore the site.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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The WNBA Is Beating Its Own Golden Goose

John Strubel — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:55:56 GMT

Earlier this week, Alyssa Thomas of the Phoenix Mercury drove a fist into Caitlin Clark’s throat. Then stepped over her. No foul was called. No review was triggered. Clark eventually left the game with a back injury.

Indiana Fever head coach Stephanie White stood at a postgame podium and did something coaches rarely do: she begged the league to intervene.

The WNBA responded by suspending Thomas for a Flagrant 2.

Too little. Far too late.

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This wasn’t an isolated incident. Over the course of Clark’s young professional career, she has been punched, elbowed, slapped, shoved, and targeted with a frequency that would be unacceptable in any professional sport — and that defies any honest explanation beyond resentment.

The physicality directed at Clark bears no resemblance to standard defensive intensity. It looks, to any objective observer, like something uglier: a coordinated effort by players and a complicit officiating corps to run the most valuable asset in women’s basketball out of the league through attrition.

The tragedy isn’t just moral. It’s financial. And the WNBA’s leadership needs to reckon with what it stands to lose.

What Clark Is Worth

Let’s be precise about the economics. A finance professor studying the 2024 season determined that Clark was directly responsible for more than 25% of the WNBA’s total revenue — attendance, television, and merchandise combined.

Her estimated economic impact on Indianapolis alone that year was $36.5 million. Her projected national economic footprint for 2025 approached $875 million, with analysts suggesting it could easily eclipse $1 billion.

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Indiana Fever games average 1.26 million viewers. Non-Fever WNBA broadcasts average 549,000 — less than half. That gap isn’t a coincidence of market size or scheduling.

It is Caitlin Clark, full stop.

The league is entering the first year of an 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal — a contract that would not exist in its current form without the cultural surge Clark ignited. Sponsors are lining up. Expansion franchises are being awarded.

The WNBA, for the first time in its history, looks like a legitimate growth business.

The Jealousy No One Will Name

There is something uniquely corrosive happening in the WNBA, and it is rooted in an emotion that professional sports leagues almost never have to navigate at scale: jealousy from within the product itself.

Clark arrived as a generational talent — an Iowa point guard who broke the all-time NCAA scoring record, drew 12 million viewers to a women’s college basketball game, and turned a mid-tier women’s pro league into must-watch television essentially overnight.

She did it with skill, toughness, and a competitive fire that any serious basketball fan recognizes immediately.

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And some of her peers — not all, but enough — have made it clear they resent every bit of it.

The fouls against Clark carry a different energy than standard physical play. They are personal. They are celebrated in certain corners of the league. And the officiating, inexplicably, has often looked the other way.

When a player can be punched in the throat mid-game without a whistle, and the replay review still results in a foul called against the victim, something has gone badly wrong — not just with the refs, but with the culture the league has permitted to fester.

What the League Is Actually Risking

The WNBA’s marketing position has never been stronger. It has a compelling star, a real audience, and landmark media money on the table. What it lacks is the institutional will to protect the player who made all of that possible.

This matters beyond Clark herself. Every game she misses to injury — every sequence where she’s knocked down without consequence — is a data point that future investors, broadcasters, and sponsors will eventually notice.

The $2.2 billion media deal was built on a projection of growth. Growth requires Clark to be healthy and on the floor. It requires casual fans who tuned in for her to keep watching. It requires a product that doesn’t feel like it’s penalizing its best player for being its best player.

The league is also sending a message to the next generation of transcendent talent: if you draw the crowd, your peers will punish you for it, and the league will let them.

That message doesn’t attract the next Caitlin Clark. It repels her.

What Needs to Happen

The fix isn’t complicated. The WNBA needs to protect Clark with the same urgency the NBA used to protect Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and LeBron James — not because stars deserve special treatment, but because the league’s business model depends on them being available, healthy, and in the spotlight.

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That means stiffer, faster suspensions for flagrant fouls. It means officials who are accountable for failing to notice obvious targeting. It means the commissioner standing in front of a camera and saying, without hedging, that this will not be tolerated.

The WNBA has spent decades building toward this moment. It finally has a transcendent star and a mainstream audience to match. Allowing jealousy, resentment, and institutional cowardice to undermine that — one foul at a time — isn’t just bad for Caitlin Clark.

It’s the most expensive mistake the league has ever made.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

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The Middle Is the Work

John Strubel — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 16:05:00 GMT

The camera caught Casey Chenoweth leaning over the railing of the St. Louis Cardinals dugout on a Friday night, watching a pitch, tracking a swing. He belongs there now — trusted, credentialed, employed by one of the most storied organizations in Major League Baseball. But belonging is earned slowly, in small rooms and cold mornings and long silences where no one is applauding.

Ten years ago, Chenoweth was sleeping in his car.

Not crashing with a friend, not renting a room month-to-month, not grinding through some cinematic “lean years” that polished up nicely in the retelling. He was living out of a 2004 Buick Regal. Everything he owned was in it. He gave hitting lessons, collected what he could, and parked where he had to. By almost every external measure, he had no business believing this would work.

He believed anyway.

“Everything I owned was in the car,” Chenoweth said. “Every time I think about it, I was actually super happy and felt like I was in a really good place. I felt like everything I was doing, at least at that moment, was getting me closer to where I wanted to be. I was surrounded by people who were challenging me to grow. It was a fun and exciting time.”

Read that again. Not the resignation of someone talking themselves into something. Not nostalgia softening a genuinely terrible period. That is the voice of a man who understood, in real time, that proximity to the right work and the right people is its own form of wealth — even when the bank account says otherwise.

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The right people have names. They always do.

Arnold Flores ran a construction company and sponsored youth baseball teams that included his two sons. They became some of Chenoweth’s early students. When Flores found out his hitting instructor was sleeping in a car, he didn’t look away. He stepped in.

“I’m glad I was there at the right time,” Flores said. “Everything happens for a reason. God put me in his path to guide him and lead him in the right direction. You don’t quit. You run into some roadblocks, walls, and you have to figure out how you are going to get over them or go under them.”

Over or under. Not through — that implies a straight line. Flores understood something that most motivational language misses: the path bends. It detours. Sometimes it dead-ends and you have to back up. The question is never whether the wall is real. The question is whether you’re still moving when you find it.

Chenoweth was still moving.

There’s a version of this story that’s easy to misread. The car becomes a symbol — of sacrifice, of humility, of the cost of dreams — and the lesson becomes: suffer enough and you’ll make it. That is not the lesson.

The lesson is about clarity.

Chenoweth was not suffering his way toward a goal. He was oriented. He knew what he was working on and why, and the discomfort of his circumstances hadn’t confused those coordinates. That is a rarer quality than talent. You can develop talent. Staying oriented when everything around you is unstable — that’s something most people spend years learning, or never learn at all.

The people chasing something real right now know this feeling intimately. The writer submitting pieces to outlets that don’t respond. The coach taking clients at half price to build a reputation. The entrepreneur who has revised the pitch deck seventeen times and is about to revise it again. The athlete who gets cut and shows up to the next open tryout anyway. They are not waiting for permission to feel good about what they’re doing. They feel good about it now, in the middle of it, because they understand the middle is not a detour. The middle is the work.

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Nobody noticed the Buick in the parking lot. Nobody was supposed to.

The important things were happening inside the car, in the gyms, on the fields where Chenoweth was teaching the mechanics of a swing — breaking it down, building it back up, learning by doing it for others before he’d ever been paid to do it at the highest level. That’s how preparation works. It is almost always invisible.

Now the preparation is visible in the Cardinals dugout on a Friday night. A major league organization looked at Casey Chenoweth and saw someone they trusted to develop hitters at the game’s highest level. That trust was not given. It was constructed, piece by piece, in the years when there was no one watching and no good reason to keep going except the internal certainty that it was worth it to try.

Arnold Flores was right. You don’t quit. You find a way over or you find a way under.

And sometimes, years later, a camera pans to the dugout and catches you exactly where you always believed you’d be.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

Thanks for reading Strubel on Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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If the Ballpark Belongs to Everyone, It Can’t Belong to a Cause

John Strubel — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:49:35 GMT

The first professional baseball game was played in 1869. In the 157 years since, almost everything about it has changed — the ball, the mound, the gloves, the size of the men swinging the bats, the pitch clock now ticking behind them. The game evolves.

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That isn’t a complaint. It’s the whole point of a sport that has outlasted nine generations of Americans.

But one recent evolution has nothing to do with the game on the field, and it deserves a harder look than it’s getting.

Over the past week, Major League Baseball has taken heat for hosting and promoting Pride events at the ballpark. The usual fight broke out on cue — one side calling it bigotry to object, the other calling it propaganda to participate. I want to step out of that trench, because I think both sides are arguing about the wrong thing.

The question isn’t whether you support the cause. The question is whether the cause belongs on the promotional calendar at all.

The line nobody can draw

Here is the problem MLB has quietly created for itself. The moment a league decides one cause is worthy of a night, it has to answer a question it can’t answer: Which causes aren’t?

If LGBTQ Night earns a date in June, on what principle do you deny the ASPCA a night for the shelter dogs? Or a night for homeless veterans? Or for cancer research, or literacy, or the local food bank, or any of the ten thousand genuinely good causes that would love a captive crowd of 30,000 and a video board? Every one of them has advocates as sincere as the last. Every one of them can make the case that visibility matters.

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So MLB ends up doing one of two things. It hosts everyone — and the calendar becomes a blur of ribbons and awareness colors until “theme night” means nothing. Or, more honestly, it picks. And the instant it picks, the schedule stops being a schedule and becomes a ranking: a public statement about which identities and which causes the league has decided are worth its platform, and which ones can wait.

That’s not inclusion. That’s a hierarchy with better marketing.

The inclusion paradox

We’ve been sold the idea that adding more nights makes the game more welcoming. I’d argue the opposite. The more the league elevates specific groups, the more it signals, by omission, that the others are an afterthought. You cannot put a spotlight on part of the room without throwing the rest of it into shadow.

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Real inclusion isn’t a calendar full of designated nights. Real inclusion is a ballpark that asks nothing of you at the gate — not your politics, not your beliefs, not your tribe — and hands the same game to everyone in the building. For a hundred-plus years, that’s exactly what baseball was: maybe the last shared civic space in America where the guy in the union hat and the guy in the country-club polo cheered the same double off the wall and went home without ever knowing how the other one votes.

That common ground is rare now. It is worth protecting. And you don’t protect it by turning the third-base line into a billboard for whichever cause is having its moment.

“But you’d erase Jackie Robinson”

This is the objection I respect most, so let me meet it head-on.

April 15.

Number 42 retired across the league. Every player wearing it.

Here’s the distinction that matters: Jackie Robinson is baseball’s own story. It happened on this field, to this game, and the league honoring it is no different than honoring Aaron or Mays or the men who integrated the dugout. That’s institutional memory, not external advocacy.

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A league is allowed — obligated, even — to remember its own history. It is a very different thing for that same league to rent its platform out to causes that have nothing to do with the box score.

Honor your past. That’s heritage. Adjudicate the nation’s culture wars between innings — that’s mission creep, and there’s no bottom to it.

The cleaner answer

I believe in freedom. This country has hung its hat on that word for 250 years, and freedom cuts both ways. It’s the freedom of an organization to advocate — and the freedom of a fan to buy a ticket to a baseball game without being quietly enlisted in someone else’s campaign on the way to his seat.

So here’s the modest proposal: get out of the advocacy business entirely. Not “no Pride Night because we oppose it.” That would just be picking the other side. I mean no advocacy nights, period — for any cause, full stop. Treat every fan, every group, and every belief identically by refusing to put a thumb on the scale for any of them.

That’s the only neutral position available. And neutrality, in a country this divided, might be the most inclusive thing a baseball league can offer.

The game already belongs to everyone. MLB’s job isn’t to keep adding people to the guest list. It’s to remember that nobody needed an invitation in the first place.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

Thanks for reading Strubel on Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks for reading Strubel on Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Keep Showing Up: The 20-Year Climb of Mike Brown

John Strubel — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:11:07 GMT

On Saturday night in San Antonio, Mike Brown stood on a podium, soaked in confetti, leading his players in a booming chant of “Who let the dogs out?” while holding a slightly confused child. He looked like a man who had finally exhaled after 20 years of holding his breath.

He had just coached the New York Knicks to their first NBA championship since 1973. Their first title in 53 years. And his first ever as a head coach.

He is 55 years old. It took him almost his entire adult life to get here. And the only reason he got here at all is that he refused to stop showing up.

The firings

Let’s start with the part nobody puts on a banner.

Mike Brown has been fired four times. Twice by the same organization.

Cleveland hired him in 2005 to coach a young LeBron James. He took the Cavaliers to the 2007 Finals, built a defensive juggernaut, won 66 games and Coach of the Year. Then, in 2010, the moment LeBron’s exit loomed, they let him go and looked for someone new.

The Lakers hired him next. He went 41-25 his first year. The following season, after a 1-4 start, they fired him five games in — one of the fastest in-season dismissals in league history.

Cleveland brought him back in 2013. One season, 33-49, gone again. That’s twice the same franchise decided he wasn’t the answer.

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Then came Sacramento, and this one was the cruelest of all. Brown took over a Kings team that hadn’t made the playoffs in sixteen years — the longest active drought in the NBA — and ended it. He won Coach of the Year unanimously.

And barely a year and a half later, after a rough start and just months after signing an extension, they fired him too.

Four times told he wasn’t enough. Four times sent to clean out his office while someone else kept his whistle.

The wilderness years

Here is what makes the story land: in between those firings, Brown kept winning championships for other people.

For six seasons he sat on the Golden State bench as an assistant under Steve Kerr. Three rings came during that stretch — 2017, 2018, 2022. In the 2017 playoffs, with Kerr sidelined after surgery, Brown stepped in as interim coach and went undefeated, 12-0, steering a title contender without missing a beat. His very first ring, way back in 2003, came as an assistant in San Antonio under Gregg Popovich.

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So before Saturday, Brown already owned four championship rings. Every single one earned helping someone else’s name go on the trophy.

Think about what that takes. To be good enough to win at the highest level, over and over, and to keep doing it from the second chair. To watch other men get the credit and the contract and the statue, and to keep showing up to the film room at 6 a.m. anyway.

Most people would have grown bitter. Most people would have quit, or coasted, or convinced themselves the game was rigged against them.

He just kept working.

Nobody’s first choice

When the Knicks went looking for a coach last spring, Mike Brown was not the name on the marquee. By most accounts he was somewhere down the list — they chased a half-dozen other candidates, several still under contract elsewhere, before circling back to him.

He got the call, in part, because the people they wanted said no.

He didn’t sulk about being the backup plan. He took the job, looked at the roster, and went to work the only way he knows how.

The Knicks lost just one game in their final sixteen of the postseason. They closed out the Spurs in five. Jalen Brunson took home Finals MVP. And the man nobody was sure about delivered a city its first title in over half a century.

6/13

One detail I can’t stop thinking about. Brown won the championship on June 13th. Hanging in the rafters of Madison Square Garden is a banner that reads “Holzman 613” — honoring Red Holzman, the legendary coach who won the Knicks their last titles and racked up 613 wins with the franchise.

Brown joins Holzman as the only coaches ever to win a championship in New York. He did it on 6/13. Some things you couldn’t script.

When it was over, he stood at the podium and said it didn’t feel real.

“It’s amazing. It’s surreal. I still can’t believe it’s happened. I’m pinching myself.”

Twenty years. Four firings. Four rings won for other men. And then, finally, his own.

What this is really about

I didn’t write all of this because I love the Knicks. I wrote it because most of us are somewhere in the middle of a story like Brown’s, and we don’t know how it ends yet.

Maybe you got laid off from a job you were good at. Maybe you got passed over for the promotion and watched it go to someone who’d been there half as long. Maybe you’ve poured years into something — a business, a craft, a dream — and the breakthrough you keep being promised stays just out of reach. Maybe you were somebody’s second choice, or sixth choice, or no choice at all.

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The highlight reel only ever shows the confetti. It never shows the twenty years underneath it. It doesn’t show the firings, the wilderness, the early mornings doing the work while someone else got the headline. We see the champagne and assume the person was simply destined for it.

They weren’t.

They just hung around long enough, and worked hard enough, for their season to finally arrive.

That’s the whole secret, and it isn’t glamorous. Success isn’t always about talent. Sometimes it’s about showing up. Doing the work after the door closes. Staying in the game when the game keeps telling you to go home.

So if you’re grinding right now and no one has noticed — if you’ve been rejected, laid off, overlooked, or sent down some detour you never asked for — remember Mike Brown standing in that confetti at 55 years old, pinching himself.

Keep showing up. Keep doing the work. Hang around long enough for your moment to find you.

It might be closer than you think.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

Thanks for reading Strubel on Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

53 Years, and the Lesson in the Fourth Quarter

John Strubel — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:57:59 GMT

The New York Knicks are champions again. Saturday night, in San Antonio, they closed out the Spurs 94–90 to win the series 4–1 — their first title in 53 years. Fifty-three years. There are grandparents who were children the last time this happened, and grandchildren who will now grow up assuming it was always possible.

I watched the whole run, and I want to tell you it was thrilling, because it was. But thrilling is the easy word. What I keep coming back to is something quieter and more useful — the sense that this team, this spring, was teaching a class.

Not in basketball. In how to carry yourself when the thing you want is hard and far away and not yet promised to you.

Here is what they taught me.

Resilience is built in the fourth quarter, not the first

They did not lead that final game wire to wire. They were down after the first quarter — outscored, outshot, looking ordinary. And then they did the thing they did all postseason: they outscored San Antonio by eleven in the fourth and walked off with the trophy.

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That is the whole shape of resilience, isn’t it. It almost never looks like dominance from the opening tip. It looks like being behind, being tired, being doubted, and deciding the game isn’t over because the scoreboard says you’re losing. The lead you build early is a gift. The lead you claw back late is a character.

Most of life’s important quarters are fourth quarters.

The marriage you repair. The career you rebuild at forty. The hard conversation you finally have. Nobody hands you those leads. You earn them down the stretch, when you’re most tired and most tempted to coast.

Determination is boring up close

Jalen Brunson scored 45 to close out the series. From a distance, that’s a highlight reel. Up close, it’s something less glamorous: a man getting to his spots over and over, drawing contact, making the free throws — thirteen of them — long after the legs are gone and the defense knows exactly what’s coming and there’s nothing fun left about it.

Determination is almost never cinematic in the moment. It’s repetition past the point of inspiration. The reason it looks like destiny afterward is that we only see the makes. We forget how many ordinary, unspectacular reps it took to be the person who could make them when it counted.

Whatever you’re chasing, this is the unsexy truth: you will mostly be doing it on days when you don’t feel like it, against resistance that has figured you out. Do it anyway. That’s the whole secret.

“Never give up” is a decision, not a feeling

This team won games by a single point — more than once, in the Finals alone. The kind of games where one bad bounce, one missed box-out, one tired closeout sends you home. They kept finding the next possession. Not because they always believed — believing is a feeling, and feelings come and go — but because they kept deciding to play the next possession as if it mattered. Which it did.

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Never giving up isn’t a mood you’re lucky enough to be in. It’s a choice you make again and again, often while feeling exactly like giving up. The people who finish things aren’t the ones who never want to quit. They’re the ones who quit wanting to quit faster than the rest of us.

Teamwork is letting someone else have the moment

A title team is a study in surrendered ego. Somebody takes fewer shots than he could. Somebody guards the other team’s best player and scores eight points and goes home satisfied. Somebody rebounds and screens and dives for the loose ball that won’t show up in any box score his kids will ever read.

The Knicks won because enough people decided the trophy was worth more than the credit. That is a rarer thing than talent, and harder. Most groups don’t fail for lack of ability. They fail because too many people need the moment to be theirs.

The teams that win — at work, in families, in anything that takes more than one person — are full of people quietly doing the thing that helps and won’t be noticed.

Humility is what you do with the doubt

They were doubted. Plenty of people had reasons the Knicks wouldn’t get here, shouldn’t get here, weren’t built for this. And the answer wasn’t to talk back. It was to keep showing up and let the work make the argument.

There’s a kind of humility that looks like weakness and isn’t. It’s the refusal to spend energy defending yourself when you could spend it improving yourself. The doubters were loud all spring. The Knicks were busy. On Saturday night, only one of those things was still talking.

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So that’s why I love this game, and why I think it earns the grand comparisons we make about it. Sports give us a place to watch these virtues operate in fast-forward, under pressure, in public — resilience and determination and stubbornness and surrender and grace — and then go home and try to live them at the slower, lonelier pace real life actually runs at.

The Knicks won’t be coming over to help with any of that. The trophy is theirs, the lesson is ours. Fifty-three years is a long time to wait for a championship. It is a short time, it turns out, to learn how to play the game — and maybe how to live.

Play the next possession like it matters.

It does.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

Thanks for reading Strubel on Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Open Door

John Strubel — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:40:11 GMT

One year ago this week, the New York Knicks made a decision that looked, depending on the hour, either reckless or visionary. They had just reached the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time since 2000. They had won 51 games. They had a coach who, by any traditional measure, had delivered. And they fired him.

The bet was simple and a little terrifying: The ceiling under Tom Thibodeau was real, and they had hit it.

Twelve months later, the Knicks are up 3-1 in the NBA Finals, one win from a championship the city has not seen since 1973. The gamble didn’t just pay off. It opened a door that had been shut for a generation.

A Different Room

Thibodeau has a reputation, and he earned every bit of it. He runs a tight ship. It’s his way, full stop. That conviction is a strength — it’s why his teams defend, why they compete, why they show up every night. But it also builds a wall.

The voice in the room is one voice. The plan is one plan. And in the postseason, when the margins shrink and the adjustments matter most, one voice can become a ceiling.

The Knicks front office understood that if they wanted to make a serious run at a title, they needed someone with a different operating system — a coach built on collaboration, a willingness to experiment, and the trust to actually hand the keys to his staff and his roster.

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As The Athletic’s James L. Edwards III reported: “The front office went looking for a collaborator, someone willing to bring a different voice into the building.”

They found Mike Brown, and the irony is hard to miss. Brown had been fired by Sacramento in December 2024. He has admitted he wasn’t sure he’d ever be a head coach again.

The Knicks reached for him only after a long list of employed coaches turned them down. The reclamation project and the title contender, it turned out, were the same hire.

What collaboration actually looks like

Part of what got Brown through the early skepticism was his staff — and crucially, several of those voices had been in the building under Thibodeau. Rather than clean house, Brown leaned on his coaches and players. By Edwards’ account, the staff often works decisions as a group, talking through options before landing on one. Brown keeps the final say. But Brown listens.

Watch New York closely and you’ll see it on the floor. There are stretches in nearly every game where it isn’t Brown drawing up the play in the huddle — it’s an assistant, marker in hand, with the head coach standing back and nodding along. Thibodeau rarely handed over that pen. Brown walked in the door intending to.

It sounds small. It is not. As Edwards put it, the staff stopped being a dictatorship.

One of the qualities people around the league keep pointing to is that Brown doesn’t need to be the smartest guy in the room — and doesn’t pretend to be. That humility is the whole thing.

It’s the difference between a room where ideas get filtered through one man and a room where the best idea wins, regardless of whose mouth it came out of.

Flexibility as a system

The open door isn’t just a management style. It’s a basketball philosophy, and you can see it in the way the team is built to bend.

Players stay ready under Brown because the rotation rewards it — there are too many examples of a teammate getting sat down and then getting another shot for anyone to check out. The offense isn’t one identity; it morphs depending on who’s across the floor. The defense, meanwhile, is as connected as it’s been in years.

“He allows himself to be coachable in the sense of listening to other coaches and players. He has our input instilled into what we do. That’s what you want as a coach. He has a real comfort in his role.” – Josh Hart

The numbers tell the same story.

Under Thibodeau, the Knicks were one of the league’s most reluctant three-point shooting teams.

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Under Brown, they reorganized the entire shot diet around spacing, pace, and quality looks — to the point where the staff grades every three by color, green for the open ones they want, red for the ones they don’t.

Brown talks constantly about process over outcome, about whether the shot was right more than whether it went in. That’s not a man chasing a box score. That’s a man building something that holds up in June.

Open Door to Success

For most of Brown’s first season, the collaborative thing was a nice story. Now it’s a résumé.

The Knicks swept Philadelphia. They swept Cleveland in the Conference Finals. And in Game 4 against San Antonio, down 29 points and staring at a series tied 2-2, they authored the largest comeback in NBA Finals history — capped by OG Anunoby crashing the glass for a tip-in with barely a second left.

“It shows the confidence and trust Mike has in us to figure things out. Having the mindset of not being afraid to fail is good for us because it allows us to continue to fight and not worry about the result. We might go out there, play good defense and then they hit a tough shot. We may play a great game all game and then lose at final buzzer. We’re not afraid of failure, and I think it’s a big-time thing about us.” – Jalen Brunson

You don’t mount a 29-point Finals comeback with one voice and one plan. You do it with a roster that trusts the next adjustment, a bench that stayed ready, and a staff empowered to find the answer in real time.

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That game was the philosophy in its purest form — the open door, swinging all the way open at the exact moment it mattered.

One year ago, the Knicks decided their ceiling was a person. They were right. The fix wasn’t a better dictator. It was opening the door, letting more people into the room, and trusting that a team that thinks together can go further than a team that simply obeys.

They’re one win away from finding out just how far.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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Let the work of your hands speak

John Strubel — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:34:29 GMT

3-1.

Jalen Brunson and the New York Knicks are sitting one win away from a championship, and if you listen closely under the roar of Madison Square Garden, you can still hear it. The murmur. The asterisk is being sharpened. The voice that says, Yeah, but …

Yeah, but he’s too small. Yeah, but it’s only the East. Yeah, but they don’t have a real 1A. Yeah, but the better team is sitting in San Antonio.

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This is the part nobody warns you about when you set out to do something hard. You assume the doubt has a finish line. You assume that if you just climb high enough, work long enough, win enough, the noise will finally fall silent and the doubters will finally nod.

So you climb. And you climb. And you get to a place almost no one gets to — a Finals, a 29-point comeback, a 36-point gut-check on the biggest stage basketball has — and you look around, and the doubt is still there. It just changed costumes.

Let that teach you something. Because it’s the most freeing lesson you’ll ever learn.

The doubt was never about the work

Here’s the trap.

We treat doubt like a referee — like it’s an honest official keeping score, and if we play clean enough, it’ll eventually rule in our favor. So we perform for it. We over-explain. We seek the approval of people whose entire identity is built on not giving it.

But the doubt was never about measuring your work.

It was measuring their imagination.

“If your best player is small, you’re not winning. Draymond Green dug the take back up before this Finals and doubled down on it — prove me wrong, he said, prove me wrong.” — Becky Hammon

Brunson did the only thing a person with his head on straight can do. He didn’t tweet. He didn’t hold a press conference to plead his case. He didn’t spend a single ounce of his limited energy trying to win an argument.

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He went and dropped 36 in Game 4 and erased a 29-point hole.

And here’s the part you should tattoo somewhere you’ll see it on a hard morning: Green apologized to his face.

On camera. After the game. The man who said “prove me wrong” got proven wrong, and the proof didn’t come from a clapback. It came from the scoreboard.

That’s the whole sermon right there.

You will never argue your way to belief

You can’t convince a doubter. You can only outwork the conditions that made doubt reasonable in the first place.

Argument is a draw at best — it leaves both people exactly where they started, just louder. Work is the only thing that actually moves the line.

When you spend your energy debating the people who counted you out, you’re letting them set your schedule. Every hour you give to defending yourself is an hour stolen from the only thing that ever actually changes minds: the thing you’re building.

Stop auditioning for the doubters.

They were never your audience.

The people who said you couldn’t do not get a vote on whether you can. They don’t show up at 5 a.m. They don’t carry the weight. They don’t sit in the dark and choose, again, to try. They just narrate. And you do not owe the narrators a rebuttal — you owe yourself the work.

White noise is still noise

Understand what doubt actually costs you. It’s not the insult. You’re tougher than the insult. It’s the bandwidth.

Every doubter you mentally argue with at 2 a.m. is renting space in the one place you can’t afford the clutter — your focus.

The hater isn’t dangerous because they might be right. They’re dangerous because they’re a distraction wearing the mask of a verdict. They pull your eyes off the floor. They get you playing their game — the game of being right in the comments — instead of your game, the one with the actual stakes.

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Brunson’s superpower this postseason hasn’t only been the step-back or the footwork. It’s been quiet. The refusal to be recruited into anyone else’s story about him. He let them talk. He kept his eyes on the rim.

Treat the doubt like weather. You don’t argue with rain. You don’t hold a referendum on the wind. You note it, you adjust your footing, and you keep walking toward the thing you came to do.

Let the work of your hands speak

Whatever you’re chasing — the business, the book, the degree, the comeback, the version of yourself you can barely see yet — you are going to face this. Not might. Will. There will be a Hammon. There will be a Draymond. There will be a chorus that has decided, on the basis of something about you they think they understand, that you are too small for the thing you want.

Good. Let them. A doubter is just proof of how far you came.

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Don’t shrink to fit their forecast, and don’t waste your breath enlarging it. Put your head down and build something so undeniable that the only honest response left for anyone watching is the one Draymond gave: “I was wrong.”

You may never get the apology. That’s fine — the apology was never the prize. The work was the prize. The apology is just the sound the world makes when it finally catches up to what you already knew.

3-1. One win away. Still doubted.

And still, the only thing that’s done a single bit of talking is the work of his hands.

Go, let yours talk.

Green's Apology

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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Thanks for reading Strubel on Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In Whose Head, Exactly?

John Strubel — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:28:41 GMT

He tapped his ear.

Sometime in the first half of Game 4, after a hook over Mitchell Robinson, Victor Wembanyama looked at the Knicks and pointed to his own head. I’m in your head. San Antonio was up nearly thirty. Madison Square Garden was a morgue. For about thirty minutes of basketball, the most popular story in the sport looked airtight.

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The night before, Marcus Thompson II had written it down for The Athletic. Wembanyama, he argued, was winning the physical battle the Knicks had picked with him — pushing back, selling contact, turning New York’s aggression into his own advantage. The alien, getting in their heads.

It was a good column. It was also, by roughly 10:45 p.m. Eastern, completely obsolete.

What the second half actually said

The Knicks were down 29. They were down 95–75 with 9:33 to play, which is the part people will forget, because “down 29” is the number that goes in the record book and “down 20 with nine minutes left” is the number that’s actually supposed to be safe. Neither was.

Jalen Brunson scored 36. OG Anunoby scored 33 and then, with 1.2 seconds left, flew through the lane to tip in a Brunson miss for a 107–106 win.

The largest comeback in the history of the Finals. A 3–1 series lead.

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So here is the honest question, and it’s not a gotcha aimed at one writer: If Wembanyama was the one inside New York’s head, who exactly cracked? Because the team that just stared down a 29-point hole on its home floor, in an elimination-adjacent game, in front of a crowd that had been silent for a half — that team did not look psychologically conquered. It looked like the opposite.

The guy doing the ear-tap missed two free throws down the stretch and picked up a flagrant that now leaves him one foul from a one-game suspension.

That’s not a man living rent-free in anyone’s head. That’s a man whose lease just got revoked.

The trap isn’t being wrong. It’s being certain.

I want to be fair to Thompson, because the easy version of this post is dishonest. Wembanyama did not play badly. Thirty-two points, eight rebounds, six assists, three blocks — he was the only reason the Spurs had a 29-point lead to blow. If he plays that way Friday, San Antonio probably wins. The basketball observation underneath the column was real.

The problem is the frame. “Getting in their heads” is a story about will, not about Xs and Os, and will is the one thing a writer cannot actually see from press row at halftime. We reach for it anyway, because it’s a better story than “the Spurs shot 60% in the first half and that’s hard to sustain.”

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Psychology is the genre’s favorite shortcut: when a team is up big, the leader is a closer and the trailing team is broken. When the comeback happens, we simply hand the same trophy to the other locker room and pretend the first version never ran.

It almost always ages badly, because momentum in basketball is a coin that’s still in the air when we file. The Spurs didn’t lose because Wembanyama failed to dominate New York’s psyche. They lost because shooting variance is undefeated and because Brunson decided the game wasn’t over. Both of those are boring. Neither fits in a tweet.

So — do sports writers regret their stories?

The good ones do, a little, every season. Not because they were stupid, but because the job asks you to render a verdict on a thing that isn’t finished. You write “Wembanyama is in their heads” on Tuesday and the Knicks erase 29 points on Wednesday, and the column doesn’t get a correction — it just sits there, a fossil of a certainty the game didn’t honor.

The writers worth reading are the ones who notice the fossil. Who, next time, write the Spurs are controlling the physical battle instead of the Spurs have won the war — who leave the room the Knicks just walked back into.

Wembanyama tapped his head and told New York he was in there.

By the time the buzzer sounded, the Knicks had the keys.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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The Game Ended. The Violence Didn’t.

John Strubel — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:11:55 GMT

When the final buzzer sounded at Madison Square Garden on Monday night, New York Knicks fans were stunned — and angry — over the 115–111 loss to San Antonio. It was a frustrating loss considering all the expectation and hype leading up to Game 3.

The estimated 7,000 people spilled out of the watch party at Bryant Park and into the streets, and the evening was spoiled by rioting fans. Fights broke out. A crowd took over 42nd Street, blocking traffic and refusing to move. People climbed on top of light poles, scaffolding, and police vehicles. They threw glass bottles at each other and at officers. They ripped bus signs and trees out of the ground — and then swung them at other human beings. Police deployed pepper spray.

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By early Tuesday morning, 21 people had been taken into custody: eight arrested and charged, 13 released with criminal citations, and at least one charged with assaulting a police officer.

The Knicks — the team they came to support —was not on the court in Bryant Park. There was no one to defend, no rival fans to fend off, no injustice on the floor to avenge. The Knicks simply lost a basketball game, and a few thousand people decided that was reason enough to tear up a public park and brawl in the street.

I want to be careful here, because the easy move is to indict an entire fanbase, and that would be both unfair and untrue. By every account, most of the people at that watch party were exactly what you’d hope: loud, hopeful, a little heartbroken, and entirely peaceful. The problem is not Knicks fans.

The problem is a culture that has quietly decided that this is what passion looks like — and that has stopped being shocked by it.

We’ve started calling this “passion.” It isn’t.

There’s a story we tell ourselves about sports violence, and it goes like this: people just care so much. The stakes feel enormous. Emotions run high. Things get out of hand. Boys will be boys, fans will be fans, and a torn-up street sign is just the price of a city that loves its team.

It’s a flattering story, and it’s a lie.

Caring about a team does not make you swing a metal pole at a stranger. Heartbreak over a loss does not require you to throw a bottle at a cop’s face or mob a taxi with a terrified driver still inside it. Those are not the involuntary overflow of deep feeling. They are choices — made by people who have correctly calculated that, in a large enough crowd, they can do almost anything and disappear back into it.

That’s the part we keep refusing to say out loud. Most of this isn’t really about the game at all. The game is the permission slip. It’s the excuse that lets a certain kind of person do what they already wanted to do — destroy something, hit someone, be seen doing it — inside a crowd big enough to launder the responsibility.

The team is incidental. If it weren’t basketball, it would be something else.

The people who actually pay for it

The fan who flips a car and posts the clip gets a few thousand likes and goes to work the next morning.

Here’s who doesn’t get off that easy: The taxi driver who was just trying to finish a shift and instead got swarmed by a mob. The small-business owner whose window got smashed for no reason connected to anything. The officer who took a bottle to the head doing a job that, on this particular night, consisted of protecting people from sports fans. The peaceful fans — the overwhelming majority — who came to enjoy a shared moment in their city and instead got pepper-sprayed and herded because the worst people in the crowd set the terms for everyone.

And the city itself, which has to clean up the trees, replace the signs, absorb the cost, and brace for the next game. Because there’s always a next game. In fact, Game 4 is tomorrow.

We have built a strange permission structure around this. We would never accept a stranger walking up and punching someone on a Tuesday afternoon. Wrap that same punch in a jersey and a final score and somehow it becomes “the scene got rowdy.” It’s the same punch. It lands on the same face.

What “loving your team” should actually mean

Here is the thing that should be obvious and apparently isn’t: the people who tear up Bryant Park after a loss are not the biggest fans. They’re the smallest.

A real fan wants their city to be a place people are proud to celebrate in. A real fan doesn’t want the watch party canceled next year, the barricades higher, the police line thicker, the whole experience strangled by security because a few hundred people couldn’t behave like adults.

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Every torn-up tree makes the next celebration smaller, sadder, and more locked-down. The vandals aren’t defending the culture of fandom. They’re killing it.

None of this requires us to become humorless about sports. Talk trash. Paint your face. Lose your voice screaming at a screen in a public park with seven thousand strangers — that’s one of the genuinely good things a city can offer. The line isn’t between passion and restraint. The line is between people who can hold their disappointment like adults and people who use a crowd as cover to commit assault.

We should stop pretending that line is blurry. We should stop grading this on a curve because a ball was involved. And we should stop reaching for the word “passion” when the honest word is “violence.”

The only real question is whether we’ll show up as fans — or as a mob waiting for an excuse.

I am rooting for a redemption story tomorrow night. It’s a story of loud, passionate fans, trash talking, chanting M-V-P when Brunson hits a three-pointer, waving thunder sticks and foam fingers — and a Knicks win.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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The Velvet Rope at the Garden

John Strubel — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:24:12 GMT

Tonight the Knicks play their first NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden since 1999, and within roughly 90 seconds of tip-off, the broadcast will cut away from the basketball to do what it always does now: pan the front row. Chalamet. Spike. Stiller. A rapper. A pop star. Someone you half-recognize from a streaming show, leaning into the camera with the studied casualness of a person who knows exactly where the lens is. The announcers will coo. A graphics package will appear. And somewhere, an outlet has already filed the story we will all read by morning — The Athletic, the Post, take your pick — cataloging the boldface names as if their attendance were itself the news.

I want to talk about that story.

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Two of them, actually, because I read both this morning and they’ve been gnawing at me all day. Not because celebrities at a basketball game are novel — it is the oldest sight in New York sports — but because of what we’ve decided to call these people, and what the calling conveniently leaves out.

The word doing all the work

The word is “superfan.” It’s a generous little noun. It implies devotion, history, suffering — the long ledger of bad seasons paid off in one glorious spring. And for a precious few, it’s even true. Spike Lee has heckled from those seats through three decades of mediocrity; you do not get to question a man who showed up for the Isiah Thomas years. That’s a fan. Fair enough.

But “superfan” has quietly expanded to cover a much larger and much newer category: a famous person who can afford the seat. The label launders money into loyalty. It takes the single most exclusive purchase in American sports and reframes it as an act of the heart — as if what put Timothée Chalamet on the floor was passion rather than a price tag most of the arena could never approach.

We’re not celebrating fandom. We’re celebrating access and dressing it up as virtue, so nobody has to notice the difference.

And the people we’re celebrating know it.

There is a specific genre of celebrity who materializes precisely when a team becomes a national story — when the cameras are guaranteed, and the relevance is free. They were not at the Tuesday game against Charlotte in January.

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They are here now, in June, when the whole country is watching, performing fandom for an audience that has nothing to do with the score. The Garden has become, as one outlet put it this spring, less an arena than a photo shoot. The game is the backdrop. They are the content.

Who’s actually in the room?

Here’s the part that should bother you more than the vanity, because the vanity is at least entertaining.

The cheapest way into Game 3 tonight runs somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000. The average paid seat is hovering around $9,000. A spot on the floor — the row the broadcast loves — has been listed for north of $89,000.

CNN ran the math and found that the cheapest single Finals ticket costs roughly as much as attending every remaining home game of the regular season combined. For one night. In the nosebleeds.

So when the camera finds celebrity row, understand what you are looking at. You are not looking at the fanbase. You are looking at the only people on earth for whom these numbers are a rounding error, plus a handful of corporate buyers, plus whoever a sponsor flew in. The actual Knicks fan — the one who suffered through Charles Smith and Allan Houston’s contract and twenty-five years of nothing — is not in that building tonight. He can’t be. He’s been priced out of his own celebration.

You want proof of how badly the math has broken? The diehards left town. Reporting on the resale market found that roughly one in five tickets purchased for the Finals games in San Antonio came from New York zip codes. Read that again. New York fans calculated that it was cheaper to book a flight to Texas, pay for a hotel, and buy a Finals ticket there than to sit in their own arena. The Garden has made itself too expensive for the people who fill it with noise. “As much as I love the Knicks,” one fan told CNN, “I can’t afford those prices.” That sentence is the whole story.

The press as concierge

Which brings me to my real complaint — not the rich people, who will always be rich, but the coverage that frames their presence as the celebration itself.

When an outlet runs the celebrity-row slideshow, it is making an editorial decision about whose experience of this team matters. It is taking a moment that belongs, emotionally, to a city of millions and handing the microphone to the dozen who could afford the floor. It treats exclusion as glamour. It turns a story about a market failure — a beloved public-facing team becoming physically unreachable to its public — into a red carpet. The puff piece and the price surge are the same phenomenon wearing two outfits. One celebrates the velvet rope; the other is the rope.

I don’t blame Chalamet for loving the Knicks if he does. I don’t even fully blame the team; scarcity, season-ticket holders, and resale markets are a tangle no single villain controls.

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What I’m tired of is the applause — the reflexive media instinct to look at a room almost no one can enter and report back, breathlessly, on how wonderful the guest list is.

The Knicks belong to the people who can’t get in.

The story tonight isn’t who’s on celebrity row. The story is everyone who isn’t — watching from a bar in Queens, or a couch in Charleston, or a cheaper seat eighteen hundred miles away in San Antonio — and how thoroughly we’ve been trained to find that normal.

Go Knicks. Genuinely. I just wish the celebration still had room for the people who earned it.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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The Knicks are seeing through Rose-colored glasses

John Strubel — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:38:35 GMT

There was a moment that tells you everything about these New York Knicks. Before a recent game, the media captured Karl-Anthony Towns standing alone at center court, head bowed, lips moving in quiet prayer. He wasn’t visualizing the pick-and-roll or mentally rehearsing his post moves. He was talking to his mother, Jacqueline, who passed away in April 2020.

“I felt calm and at peace. In a way, I felt like I was seeing her in the stands.”

That single image says more about why the Knicks are in the NBA Finals than any box score ever could.

When team president Leon Rose orchestrated the trade to bring Towns to New York, the analytics were compelling. Towns could score from every level of the floor, had played in every regular season game in multiple seasons, and anchored a defense with intelligence and timing. The basketball case was airtight.

But Rose wasn’t just acquiring a center. He was making a statement about what kind of organization the Knicks were becoming. Towns carried with him not just skill, but sorrow shaped into strength — a story of a son who lost his mother to a pandemic that took far too many, and chose to carry her memory forward rather than let it hollow him out.

That kind of character doesn’t show up in a scouting report. But it shows up every night on the court.

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The Culture is No Accident

Look around the Knicks’ locker room, and you find a roster assembled with an almost deliberate intentionality. These are players who came up hard, who were doubted, who have known loss. Jalen Brunson was told he was too slow, too small, too limited to lead a contender. He responded by becoming one of the most clutch players in basketball. OG Anunoby absorbed years of quiet, productive professionalism in Toronto before coming to New York and quietly becoming one of the league’s most complete two-way wings. The list goes on: Josh Hart, Landry Shamet, etc.

Their stories are different, but the throughline is the same: these are men who understand that basketball — and life — demand more than talent. They demand character.

That’s not an accident. It’s a philosophy.

Respect. Trust. Friendship.

Three words come up again and again when this Knicks team is described — by the players themselves, by their coaches, and by the people who’ve watched them grow into a legitimate title contender. Respect. Trust. Friendship.

They are not buzzwords.

They are load-bearing structures.

“The team that respects each other doesn’t fracture under pressure. The team that trusts each other makes the extra pass. The team that genuinely likes each other fights through adversity.”

The team that respects each other doesn’t fracture when a shot doesn’t fall or a defensive breakdown leads to a basket. The team that trusts each other makes the extra pass, the extra rotation, the extra sacrifice. And the team that genuinely likes each other — that has built real bonds, not just professional courtesies — fights through adversity in a way that talent alone never could manufacture.

Watch the Knicks’ bench during a close game. Watch how they rise as one when a teammate hits a big shot. Watch how they console and encourage after a turnover. That cohesion was built over meals and practice repetitions and shared losses and shared prayers — the slow, invisible work that never makes a highlight reel but shows up in every fourth quarter.

Two More Wins

The Knicks are two wins away from an NBA championship that the city of New York has waited decades to celebrate. But even if the trophy ends up elsewhere, this team has already accomplished something significant: it has reminded us of what sports can be at their best.

Not a transaction. Not a collection of individual performances. A community. A team that carries its losses — personal and professional — not as weight, but as fuel. A team where Karl-Anthony Towns can stand at center court, feel his late mother in the stands, and then go out and play the game of his life.

Leon Rose didn’t just build a contender. He built something worth rooting for.

And that, ultimately, is why the whole city is standing.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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What the Knicks Can Teach Us About Pressure, Scrutiny, and Staying the Course

John Strubel — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:04:52 GMT

There is a certain irony in the fact that the noisiest city in America is being represented, in the 2026 NBA Finals, by its quietest team.

The New York Knicks are three wins away from their first championship since the 1972-73 season — a 53-year drought so long it has outlasted entire careers, entire coaching trees, entire eras of the league itself. They are playing on the biggest stage in professional basketball, in front of the most famously demanding fan base in sports, under a media microscope that never sleeps. And yet, somehow, they are the calmest people in the room.

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Watch them long enough, and you start to notice something different. Something that, in today’s sports and media landscape, feels almost radical.

They just don’t take the bait.

The Information Diet of a Champion

Jalen Brunson has been refreshingly direct about his approach to media and social commentary: he doesn’t read it. Not the beat reports. Not the hot takes. Not the Twitter threads dissecting his shooting percentages or debating whether he’s “the guy.”

He has made a conscious decision to protect his attention — to treat his mental bandwidth as a finite resource and guard it accordingly.

This is not ignorance. This is discipline.

In an age where athletes are more connected to public opinion than ever — where a viral post can reach a player’s phone within minutes of publication — Brunson’s media abstinence is a deliberate competitive strategy. Every minute spent reacting to a columnist’s opinion is a minute not spent in the film room. Every ounce of emotional energy burned on a perceived slight is energy unavailable for a fourth-quarter possession that actually matters.

There’s a growing body of research in sports psychology that supports exactly this approach. The concept of “attention control” — the ability to direct focus toward task-relevant cues and away from distractions — is one of the strongest predictors of performance under pressure.

Elite athletes don’t ignore the noise because they’re oblivious to it. They ignore it because they’ve decided, consciously and deliberately, that it doesn’t serve them.

Brunson has decided. And his teammates have followed.

No Sniping. No Excuses. No Deflection.

Spend any time watching Knicks press conferences this postseason, and you’ll notice what’s absent as much as what’s present.

No jabs at the officiating. After a brutal Game 2 loss to the Atlanta Hawks in the first round — a one-point defeat that could have unraveled a lesser group — the Knicks talked about what they needed to do better. Not what the refs cost them. After facing a physical Philadelphia 76ers team in the second round, there were no public complaints about dirty play or lack of calls. The team swept Philly in four games and kept it moving.

No sniping at opponents. No bulletin-board material. No “we’re going to come back and handle this” declarations designed to generate headlines.

The Knicks seem to understand something that many athletes and organizations have forgotten: talking about what you’re going to do is a substitute for actually doing it.

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No grievance-airing about the narrative. The Knicks entered these playoffs as a No. 3 seed, seeded below teams with bigger names and louder champions. They were not given respect. They earned it by sweeping Cleveland in the Conference Finals and winning Game 1 of the NBA Finals in San Antonio. The response to being overlooked was not a press conference. It was a performance.

This is harder than it sounds. The media environment around the NBA actively incentivizes conflict. Inflammatory quotes get clicks. Feuds generate coverage. Athletes who speak with fire become personalities. The gravitational pull toward drama is constant and powerful. The Knicks have resisted it at every turn — and they have done so as a unit, not just as a collection of individuals who happen to avoid controversy.

Accountability Without Blame

Perhaps the most quietly remarkable thing about this Knicks team is the way they hold each other accountable — internally, honestly, and without the dysfunction that typically follows when a team is losing or under pressure.

When the Knicks dropped Games 2 and 3 against Atlanta early in the postseason and found themselves in a precarious 2-1 series deficit, there was no visible finger-pointing. No anonymous sources leaking frustrations to reporters. No star player subtweeting cryptic messages about effort or sacrifice. The accountability happened in the locker room, in film sessions, in the honest conversations that teams who trust each other are capable of having.

They won the next three games and closed out the series in six.

This internal accountability culture — what organizational psychologists might call “psychological safety with high standards” — is extraordinarily difficult to build and even more difficult to maintain under the weight of postseason pressure. It requires trust. It requires humility. It requires leaders, both coaches and players, who are more committed to winning than to being right.

Tom Thibodeau, the Knicks’ head coach, has built this over years of relentless, unglamorous work. His reputation as a demanding, detail-obsessed coach is well-established.

Less discussed is the culture of mutual investment he has cultivated — one where players police each other’s effort because they genuinely believe in what they’re building together, not because they fear the coach.

The Work As the Statement

There is a phrase that keeps coming to mind while watching this Knicks team: let the work speak.

Not “let the work speak for itself” — because that implies passivity, a hope that someone will notice. Rather, an active choice to make the work the statement. To compete at the highest level with such focus and such clarity that the performance becomes the commentary.

The box score becomes the press release. The scoreboard becomes the response.

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In an era of personal brands, social media platforms, and 24/7 media cycles that reward controversy over substance, this feels almost countercultural. And yet, here are the Knicks — a team playing in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 — seemingly unbothered by the magnitude of the moment.

Not because the moment doesn’t matter, but because they have trained themselves to compete within it rather than be consumed by it.

Consider the playoff résumé they’ve quietly assembled: a 4-2 series win over Atlanta, a 4-0 sweep of Philadelphia, a 4-0 sweep of Cleveland, and a Game 1 road win to open the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs. Twelve wins, two losses. All while the city held its breath and the media swirled around them.

They just kept playing.

A Case Study for All of Us

What makes the Knicks’ story worth telling beyond the box scores is its applicability to anyone who works under pressure and public scrutiny — which, in an age of social media, is increasingly all of us.

The Knicks are demonstrating, at the highest level, several principles that translate far beyond basketball:

Information is not neutral. Consuming negative press, social criticism, or irrelevant noise has real cognitive and emotional costs. Choosing what you let into your head is a form of discipline, not avoidance.
Accountability belongs inside the room. Teams and organizations that air their grievances publicly and assign blame outward when things go wrong rarely recover their cohesion. The best teams find ways to be honest with each other privately so they can be unified publicly.
The work is the response. There is almost nothing you can say in a press conference or post on social media that is as powerful as an excellent performance. The Knicks have understood that the most devastating reply to their critics is a three-point play in the fourth quarter.
Silence is a choice, not a weakness. There is a cultural assumption — especially in competitive environments — that not responding is the same as conceding. The Knicks have demonstrated that restraint is a form of strength. Every time they decline to engage with a controversy, they are not surrendering ground. They are choosing where to spend their energy.
Culture compounds. None of this happened overnight. The Knicks’ composure under pressure is the result of years of deliberate culture-building, of coaches and veteran players modeling the right behaviors until they became norms. Culture is not a mission statement. It’s what happens when no one is watching — and what shows up when everyone is.

Three More Wins

As Game 2 of the NBA Finals tips off tonight in San Antonio, the New York Knicks are three wins away from ending one of the longest championship droughts in professional sports. The Spurs, led by a young and talented core, are favored on their home floor. The series is far from decided.

But however it ends, the Knicks have already given us something worth studying: a master class in competing with intention, leading with accountability, and refusing to let the noise of the outside world determine the quality of the work happening inside.

In a world that profits from our distraction and rewards our reactions, that’s not just a basketball story.

That’s a lesson.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

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Mike Breen, the Knicks, and the emotional connection

John Strubel — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:24:00 GMT

“Does bias live in the heart, the voice, or only in the ears of the listener? With Breen, we may be about to find out.”

When the NBA Finals tip off Wednesday night, Mike Breen will take his seat courtside — as he has every year for the past two decades — and say something like: “Welcome to Game One of the NBA Finals.” His voice will be even. His cadence will be measured. The call will be professional.

What it won’t be, at least not in the way you and I experience sporting events, is emotionally neutral.

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Breen is a New York native. He has called Knicks games locally for over 30 years. He is, by every account, a lifelong Knicks fan. And for the first time in his remarkable career — 21 consecutive Finals, a record — the team he grew up rooting for is playing for the championship.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say there are emotions.” — Mike Breen

So here’s the real question: Does any of that matter?

The myth of the perfectly neutral voice

Every broadcaster carries something when they approach the microphone. A hometown. The home team they watched as kids. A player they admire too much, a franchise they never quite trusted.

The pretense of total neutrality — the idea that a human being can watch 48 minutes of high-stakes sport and feel absolutely nothing — is not a standard. It’s a fiction we maintain because it’s convenient.

What we actually ask of broadcasters is not the absence of feeling but the discipline not to act on it. The feeling is permitted. The lean in the voice is not.

Breen, to his credit, has been admirably direct about where he draws that line. During a recent radio interview, he insisted the job itself creates the discipline:

“When you’re concentrating on the game, and you’ve got so many things to do during the course of a game — interaction with your analysts, your producer and director, the statistician, watching the game, making the calls — you don’t really have time. You just kind of react to what’s happening.”

That’s not a dodge. That’s a craft description. The mechanics of the job crowd out the sentiment.

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He’s also been around long enough to understand the fan psychology at play. At every Finals he’s called, both fan bases come away convinced he was secretly rooting for the other team. Knicks fans think he’s compensating. The opponent’s fans think he’s doing them dirty. The fact that he gets accused from both sides simultaneously isn’t damning evidence of bias — it’s actually the strongest evidence that he’s threading the needle correctly.

The Joe Buck cautionary tale

“The audience tuning into the NBA Finals doesn’t need Breen to become someone different. They need him to be exactly who he is.”

There is a real trap Breen should watch out for. Its name is overcorrection — and it has a famous victim.

Joe Buck grew up in St. Louis, the son of legendary Cardinals broadcaster Jack Buck. In 2006, when the Cardinals went to the World Series for the first time in over two decades, Buck was calling the Series on Fox.

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Sensing the scrutiny, he went so far out of his way to avoid any appearance of hometown favoritism that — by his own admission — he neutered the call.

“I’m sad that it did, because it was the Cardinals’ first World Series in over two decades and the guy calling it on TV who grew up rooting for the Cardinals went so far the other way that it’s just not a good call.” — Joe Buck

That’s the paradox at the center of this conversation: the attempt to eliminate bias can itself become a kind of bias — a bias toward flatness, toward muting the very emotional authenticity that makes a great broadcast great. Breen overcorrecting on the Knicks call out of fear would be a disservice not just to Knicks fans, but to the sport.

What this really asks of any broadcaster

The Breen situation clarifies something broader about the role of the sports broadcaster that we rarely articulate clearly: the job is not journalism, exactly. It’s not punditry. It’s a kind of elevated narration — emotional cartography in real time, mapping the terrain of a game for an audience with wildly divergent loyalties.

The best broadcasters — Vin Scully, Al Michaels, Mike Breen — don’t achieve greatness by being blank. They achieve it by being precise.

They know which emotions to express (the awe of a great play, the tension of a close finish) and which to suppress (rooting interest, the wince when their team turns it over). The discipline is not suppressing all feelings. It’s suppressing the parochial ones.

Any scrutiny of Breen is actually a tribute. Nobody is asking whether he can stay objective. They’re asking whether Breen can — because the assumption underneath the question is that what he does matters.

That his voice carries weight.

That a Knicks title called by Mike Breen, if it happens, will sound different from a Knicks title called by someone with no skin in the game.

The triple bang question

There’s one moment that crystallizes everything. For years, Breen’s “Bang!” call on big shots has become an institution. The double bang is reserved for the enormous moments. And Breen has long hinted that a triple bang — never yet deployed — would require something truly historic.

Are the Knicks the missing element for a triple-bang? Or is it the perfect broadcaster, in the perfect moment, with the perfect call? Is it a man who let his fandom corrupt his professionalism, or a man who spent three decades earning the right to feel something that loudly?

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That’s the question that makes this NBA Finals appointment genuinely fascinating — and genuinely unresolvable in advance. We’ll only know the answer when we hear it.

Breen has spent 21 Finals building the credibility to be trusted with this one. The smart money says he spends the next two weeks proving why that trust was warranted. But the real reason to watch isn’t to audit him for lapses. It’s to witness what happens when a lifetime of professional restraint meets a lifetime of personal longing — and to see, in the voice of one broadcaster, how those two things can coexist.

That's a more human story than anything that will happen on the court.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

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Tulsa Drillers Bench Their Bat Dog

John Strubel — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:53:58 GMT

Tulsa Drillers outfielder Kendall George scored a run, jogged toward the dugout, and had an unfortunate encounter with a very enthusiastic coworker.

Achilles, the Drillers’ bat dog, shot out of the dugout to retrieve a bat near home plate, coming close enough to George that the prospect felt compelled to leap out of the way. George landed awkwardly and twisted his knee, limping back to the bench.

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It was the kind of thing that happens in baseball — a sport played outdoors, on dirt and grass, full of collisions, bad hops, and freak occurrences every single night.

The Drillers suspended their bat dog program for the immediate future. In a game defined by runs, hits and errors and, in this case, the Drillers made an error.

A freak accident

The Drillers have used bat dogs over the last five seasons and, until Monday, nothing like this had ever happened. It was a freak accident and the first of its kind.

Minor league baseball lives and dies by the fan experience. Ticket prices are low, rosters are in constant flux, and the on-field product is uneven by design — these are prospects learning the game. What draws fans in droves is the family atmosphere: the promotions, the gimmicks, the genuine weirdness fun go watch. Bat dogs are a perfect embodiment of that spirit.

Bat dogs aren’t a novel idea, either. The Trenton Thunder are well-known for using a bat dog. Last year, the Washington Nationals even called up their bat dog, Bruce, from Triple-A to make his MLB debut. Across years of bat dog programs at various levels of baseball, freak injuries involving players could best be described as an outlier, not a pattern.

The good news that few are reporting

Before we go any further, let’s include this very important fact: An initial MRI revealed that George did not sustain ligament damage —painful and worth monitoring, but not the catastrophic ACL tear everyone feared.

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That context matters. The severity of the reaction — suspending a five-year fan tradition — doesn’t fit the actual outcome.

Achilles did exactly what he was trained to do: retrieve a bat. His enthusiasm was impeccable. His timing was unfortunate.

The Drillers should take a breath, review the protocol, and reinstate Achilles.

Baseball is better with him.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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The Locker Room We Broke

John Strubel — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:42:00 GMT

New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart walked onto a stage at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York, and introduced the President of the United States.

That’s it. That’s what happened.

He didn’t throw a punch. He didn’t break a law. He didn’t hurt anyone. He introduced the President of the United States — the same thing citizens do at rallies across this country every single day. He even tried to bring his team along for the moment, opening with “Go Big Blue!” before he ever said a word about politics.

Within hours, his teammate Abdul Carter — the Giants’ No. 3 overall pick, a player counted on to help lead this franchise back to relevance — fired off a tweet:

“Thought this s** was AI. What are we doing, man?”

It went viral, predictably. Twitter took sides, predictably. And a locker room that had been one of the most promising stories of the 2026 offseason — new head coach John Harbaugh, a franchise-altering draft, real hope — suddenly had to hold a team meeting just to survive the week.

Let that sink in.

A team meeting. To manage the fallout of one player expressing his political beliefs.

I Don’t Care About Their Politics. You Shouldn’t Either.

Let me be direct: I don’t know Jaxson Dart’s worldview. I don’t know Abdul Carter’s. And frankly, I don’t need to. Neither do you.

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This is not about whether Dart was right to stand on that stage or whether Carter was right to react the way he did. Reasonable people can land anywhere on both of those questions.

Carter later deleted his tweet and posted that he and “JD6 are good” — that they “spoke earlier as Men.” That detail matters. Two young professionals had a disagreement, handled it like adults, and tried to move on.

The rest of us wouldn’t let them.

That’s the disease. Not the disagreement itself — the inability to allow disagreement to exist without turning it into a cultural war crime.

How Did We Get Here?

Not long ago, a locker room was one of the last places in American life where ideological diversity didn’t just survive — it thrived. You had players from rural Mississippi and players from inner-city Philadelphia. Players who went to church every Sunday and players who never set foot inside one. Players who voted one way, players who voted the other, and players who never voted at all. And they blocked for each other. They covered for each other. They won — and lost — together.

That world didn’t disappear because people started disagreeing more. Human beings have always disagreed. What changed is the cost of disagreement.

Social media didn’t create our political tribalism, but it industrialized it. Every opinion is now a broadcast. Every broadcast invites a verdict. Every verdict is amplified by an algorithm whose sole job is to keep you angry enough to stay on the platform.

The result is a culture where expressing a belief — any belief — is no longer a personal act.

It’s a provocation.

And sports, which once served as one of the few arenas where Americans from every corner of the country could cheer for the same thing, have been swallowed whole.

We’ve seen it at the stadium level — brawls in the stands over team rivalries that feel less like sporting passion and more like political warfare. We’ve seen it in the sports media ecosystem, where commentary on a player’s athletic performance now comes packaged alongside commentary on their politics, social media following, and Instagram likes.

According to reports, some outlets began digging into Dart’s past Instagram activity to surface pro-Trump likes as evidence of something. Evidence of what, exactly? That he has opinions?

We’ve seen it tear apart families at tailgates. We’ve seen it end friendships that survived decades.

The Thing Nobody Wants to Say

Here’s what’s actually happening: we have confused disagreement with disrespect.

When Carter tweeted “what we doing, man?” — whether he meant it as a private moment of surprise that escaped publicly or as a genuine rebuke — the internet read it as an indictment. And when Dart stood on that stage, millions of people read it as a rebuke of everyone who doesn’t share his politics. Neither of those readings is fair. Neither produces anything useful.

Disagreement is not betrayal.

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Holding a different political view from your teammate, your neighbor, your brother-in-law — that is not a moral failure. It is the condition of living in a pluralistic society. The question has never been whether Americans would disagree with each other. The question has always been how we handle it when we do.

For most of American history — imperfectly, fitfully, but genuinely — the answer was: we argue, we debate, we vote, we live side by side anyway. The locker room was a microcosm of that. So was the neighborhood bar. So were the stands at the stadium.

That answer is being replaced by a new one: you are either with us or you are the enemy.

What the Giants Actually Did Right

Give credit where it’s due.

Carter deleted the tweets. Then he posted that he and Dart had talked it out “as Men.” That phrase is doing more work than it looks like. It means: we didn’t let the internet fight our battle. We sat down, face to face, and handled it.

Then the Giants held a meeting. Burns spoke. Thibodeaux spoke. Jameis Winston — a veteran quarterback who has seen everything — spoke. The team reportedly discussed keeping frustrations internal, not airing them publicly.

In other words, they behaved like a team.

John Harbaugh hasn’t commented, and that restraint is probably wise. But the lesson his players are modeling — without being asked to — is one the rest of us could stand to learn.

You can disagree with someone and still respect them. You can think your quarterback made a questionable decision and still show up to block for him on Sunday. You can have completely different politics from the man lined up next to you and still want him to succeed, because his success is your success.

That is not weakness. That is civilization.

A Final Thought

America has been through far worse than political disagreement. We’ve survived wars, depressions, assassinations, and genuine periods of social rupture that make our current moment look, in some ways, like noise.

But the noise is getting louder. And the stakes of the noise keep getting raised. What used to end with a heated argument now ends with someone being “canceled,” or with a fight in a parking lot, or with a locker room that needs to hold a crisis meeting because a 23-year-old quarterback shook the president’s hand.

Jaxson Dart and Abdul Carter will be fine. They’re young, talented, and apparently mature enough to talk things through without needing the internet’s permission. The New York Giants are “moving forward,” as they should be.

But the culture that turned this into a five-day national story? That’s not moving forward.

That’s the part worth worrying about.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

Thanks for reading Strubel on Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Talk Is Cheap, Cleveland: Why the Cavaliers’ “We’re the Better Team” Comments Were a Mistake

John Strubel — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:28:18 GMT

Following the New York Knicks four-game bludgeoning of the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals, somehow, the Cavs continued to insist they are “the better team.”

At least that’s what James Harden’s narrative was after Game 4 last night. Honestly, it has become a running joke.

After Game 3, you know, the game the Cavs felt certain they would rebound at home, Donovan Mitchell said he didn’t “feel like we [the Cavs] were overmatched.”

Head coach Kenny Atkinson assured the media, despite the third straight loss, “analytically … we’ve [the Cavs] won two out of three.”

With all due respect to the Cavaliers’ pride, the numbers simply don’t support that claim. Not even a little bit.

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First, the Scoreboard

Let’s start with the most basic fact: the Knicks won every single game of this series.

Game 1: Knicks 115, Cavaliers 104
Game 2: Knicks 109, Cavaliers 93
Game 3: Knicks 121, Cavaliers 108
Game 4: Knicks 130, Cavaliers 93

That’s a combined margin of +77 points across the four games. The Cavaliers never led a series that they claim to have been better in. Not once did they have a chance to prove it in a Game 5. New York controlled this head-to-head matchup.

Game 4 Was a Statement

If there was any doubt after three games, Game 4 erased it. The Knicks visited Cleveland — the Cavs’ home floor — and put on a clinic, winning by 37 points. Their biggest lead in the game was 45 points.

Here’s how dominant New York was in the closeout:

Rebounds: Knicks 67, Cavs 38. That’s not a typo.
Offensive rebounds: Knicks 20, Cavs 6, leading to 32 second-chance points for New York versus just 5 for Cleveland.
Fast break points: Knicks 33, Cavs 9. The Knicks were running Cleveland out of the building.
Points off turnovers: Knicks 34, Cavs 18.
Three-point shooting: Knicks 44.2% vs. Cavs 27.5%
Bench scoring: Knicks bench dropped 58 points. Cleveland’s bench managed just 24.

When your bench outscores the opposing bench by 34 points in a closeout game, you are not losing to the better team. You are the better team.

The Paint and the Glass Told the Story All Series

The Knicks didn’t just win — they dominated the areas that define physical superiority in basketball. In Game 1, New York racked up 60 points in the paint compared to Cleveland’s 38. Jalen Brunson was virtually unstoppable, dropping 38 points on 51.7% shooting, including 24 of those points right in the lane. Karl-Anthony Towns pulled down 13 rebounds and controlled the glass all night.

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Donovan Mitchell was excellent and battled hard throughout. He scored 29 in Game 1 and 31 in Game 4. But even his personal heroics couldn’t prevent his team from getting swept, and more importantly, they couldn’t offset what the rest of his team couldn’t do against a Knicks unit that simply refused to be outworked.

A Sweep Is a Sweep

“Yeah, it was 4-0, but I don’t think we had a chance as far as our best shot from the standpoint of circumstances. Obviously, they dominated us 4-0 … but genuinely, I do feel like we are the better team.” — James Harden

It’s worth noting how the Cavaliers even got to this point. They were the No. 4 seed, while the Knicks were the No. 3 seed. Cleveland won their previous rounds against Toronto and Detroit — no small feat. They’re a talented team. Mitchell is a genuine star, Evan Mobley is a versatile defender, and they had every reason to believe they could compete.

But competing and winning are different things. Being talented and being the better team are different things. The Cavaliers did not win a single game. The Knicks outrebounded them in every matchup that mattered, outscored them from beyond the arc, blew them out in their own building, and advanced to the NBA Finals.

What the Comments Really Say

When a team gets swept — especially in a series this one-sided — and then insists publicly that they were actually the better team, it says more about the discomfort with the result than it does about the reality of the series. It’s a psychological defense mechanism, and it’s an understandable one. Losing stings, and losing badly stings worse.

But it’s also a miscalculation. They don’t rewrite the box scores or change the series record. What Cleveland has done is hand the Knicks a bulletin board item they’ll remember heading into the Finals — and give New York fans another reason to believe in this team.

The truth is, the Knicks were the better team. That’s not an opinion dressed up as analysis. It’s four games of statistical evidence, scored and settled on the court.

The scoreboard doesn’t lie, even when post-game press conferences do.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

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He Snapped. Can You Blame Him?

John Strubel — Sat, 23 May 2026 04:00:02 GMT

By now you’ve probably seen the video of Pete Crow-Armstrong, one of baseball’s young stars, slamming into the outfield wall at Rate Field trying to make a spectacular catch. He collapses to the ground. The ball rolls away.

A few feet away, a female fan heckles him. PCA fires back with a string of profanities and minutes later — boom — it is viral on social media.

MLB fined Crow-Armstrong $5,000, and he apologized in response saying:

“I regret my choice of words the most and who that affects in my life. I’m just bummed out about the word choice and that a bunch of little kids probably find their way to social media and see that as well.” - Pete Crow-Armstrong

That was the right thing to say. It was also, by all appearances, genuine.

But here’s what came out later — the detail that changes the whole story: it wasn’t just the one fan.

According to Crow-Armstrong, he had been standing in the on-deck circle for five straight at-bats while other fans screamed that his mother was a whore.

“It wasn’t just her. It was her and a compilation of… And then I popped.” - PCA

And then I popped.

That phrase is doing a lot of work. It’s also the most honest thing an athlete has said about fan abuse in recent memory — and it opens a conversation the sports world tends to avoid.

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Unwritten Rules

There’s an unwritten rule in professional sports: athletes are expected to absorb whatever fans say to them, without reacting, without cracking, without anything other than professional composure. The logic goes that it comes with the territory — the fame, the salary, the privilege of playing a game for a living.

The rules in today's culture have shifted dramatically since those up unwritten rules were understood and, increasingly, athletes have become more resistant to history.

What we ask elite athletes to do emotionally is genuinely extraordinary. Not only must they perform at the highest possible level in front of tens of thousands of people — they must do so while being subjected to a running commentary of personal insults, targeted taunts, and sometimes outright abuse.

We marvel at the ones who channel it into greatness. We condemn the ones who don’t. We rarely stop to ask whether the standard itself is reasonable.

The Great Ones

We witnessed when watching Michael Jordan, who fed off hostility in road arenas like it was oxygen. In Serena Williams, who repeatedly delivered her most dominant performances in venues where the crowd wanted her to fail.

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Sports psychologists point to a concept called “arousal optimization” — the ability to use emotional stimulation, including hostility, to enter a heightened competitive state.

The boo becomes a cue. The taunt becomes fuel.

It has been described through research that “elite athletes describe entering a tunnel during competition where crowd noise becomes undifferentiated texture — sound without language, volume without meaning. The insult reaches the ear but doesn’t reach the brain the same way. It takes years to build.”

Sports psychologists believe that the ability to redirect verbal taunts from hostile fans is perhaps the most powerful tool in an athletes mental toolbox. One example I read suggested, If thousands of people dislike you enough to scream it, they care about you. And in sports, caring is a form of power.

What PCA’s Moment Actually Tells Us

Here’s the thing about Crow-Armstrong’s outburst: it’s not a story about a player who lacks emotional discipline. I believe, after reading the full description of what took place during that game — Five at-bats. Five innings of abuse about his mother. The missed catch. —followed by a fan in his face, was a breaking point. Enough was enough for PCA. He hit the tolerance threshold and it was a triggering effect.

Crow-Armstrong’s own framing is instructive: he didn’t deny snapping. He didn’t claim the fan deserved what he said. He called it a “poor choice of words,” apologized specifically for the effect it might have on kids who saw it, and acknowledged he “let it get away from him.”

That’s not defensiveness — that’s a person accurately describing what happens when the cumulative weight of abuse finally exceeds a human being’s capacity to absorb it.

The Part We Don’t Talk About

We celebrate athletes who use crowd hostility as fuel. We turn their composure into mythology — Jordan’s cold fury, Kobe’s mamba mentality, the image of a singular competitor rising above the noise.

What we talk about less is the cost.

There’s a version of the Pete Crow-Armstrong conversation that’s entirely about his word choice and whether it was appropriate. That conversation isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s incomplete. The more interesting question is what it reveals about a system where fans are largely unaccountable for what they say to players, and where players are expected to absorb everything with perfect grace — or face the consequences when they don’t.

Crow-Armstrong got fined. The fans who spent five innings making comments about his mother faced no consequence at all.

What “I Popped” Means

The phrase stays with me. Not because it’s an excuse — PCA himself didn’t offer it as one — but because it’s a rare moment of unvarnished honesty about what it actually feels like to be inside the pressure of professional sport.

Most athletes find a way to channel it, redirect it, absorb it, or wall it off — most of the time. Jordan made that capacity look superhuman. But the PCA moment is a reminder that it isn’t — that underneath the composure and the rituals and the mental training, there are human beings doing something genuinely hard, in conditions that are genuinely demanding, for audiences that sometimes forget that distinction.

He snapped. He apologized. He said he learned from it.

That’s about as much as you can ask of anyone.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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A Self-ish Decision

John Strubel — Sun, 17 May 2026 20:01:00 GMT

Kansas head coach Bill Self loves to coach. He loves the long hours and the minutiae; the entire process brings him joy.

That’s why we’ll see Self working the sidelines again this fall, his 24th season as the Jayhawks head coach. If you are a Jayhawks fan, you probably exhaled when you read that news.

But if you’re someone who has watched Self in recent years — the hospitalizations, the procedures, the PICC lines, the AFib episodes — you might have felt something else alongside that relief. Something that sounds less like celebration and more like worry.

Self has been taken to the hospital three times with heart-related issues. He has undergone an aortic valve replacement. He has had a PICC line in place while coaching games. He has had two stents inserted in his chest.

Which brings me to the question no one seems to be asking loudly enough: Is one doctor’s opinion — even a good one — enough?

Is basketball worth the risk?

This is about … a 63-year-old man who has had his chest splayed open and his arteries stented multiple times.
This is about … a coach who will be responsible for one of the most pressure-saturated jobs in American sports.

All due respect, Self’s love of the game is genuine and beautiful. If nothing else, his passion deserves respect.

But it is not a substitute for due diligence.

Self’s doctors clearly know his case deeply. They presumably understand the specifics of his condition better than any outside observer. That matters enormously. A cardiologist who has treated a patient through multiple interventions has context that no commentator, columnist, or concerned fan could replicate.

The doctor assured him that he’s in excellent health and that coaching should not be a concern. So, Self took that advice and got a second opinion. Same answer: You are medically cleared and healthy to continue coaching.

But Self’s situation is unique compared to that of a typical patient, weighing whether to return to work after a cardiac procedure: his job is to coach a blue-blood basketball program. That means a lot more than just attending games and rubbing shoulders with alumni.

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It means recruiting battles that stretch year-round, often involving late nights, constant travel, and the emotional weight of relationships with teenagers and their families. It means practice intensity, game-day adrenaline, and the particular psychological pressure of a fanbase that treats second-round NCAA exits as small tragedies.

Self himself has said that the job involves “endless travel, ever-odd hours, always being on call, and surely insufficient sleep.”

Coaching a storied college basketball program in the vaunted Big 12 Conference requires thick skin, tons of energy, and a heaping helping of confidence to manage the stress-filled environment. The expectations are enormous.

I am not suggesting Self should retire. No one — not his family, not his fans, not even his harshest critics — wants to see him coached off a sideline against his will. His players love him. His former players text him, call him, and fill social channels publicly begging him to stay.

But the ask is this: Before he steps back on the court at Allen Fieldhouse, before the first fall practice, before the first recruiting trip of the summer — ask for one more opinion from a heart specialist. Find a cardiologist outside his current treatment team. Show them the full history. Ask them the hard question directly: Given the demands of this job, what does the risk profile actually look like?

Maybe they say the same thing his current doctors have said. Maybe the answer is still: keep going, you love it, go coach basketball.

But maybe they say something different. Maybe they identify something that warrants a conversation that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe they give Self — and his family — information that changes how he thinks about the next two years.

Either way, he deserves to make this decision with the most complete picture available. Not because the game owes him caution. But because of everything he’s given to it, he owes it to himself.

16 Big 12 regular season championships (including an NCAA record-tying 13 consecutive Big 12 regular season championships)
3 NCAA Final Four appearances (2008, 2012, 2018*, 2022; *vacated due to recruiting violations)
2017: Inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
2 NCAA Championships in 2008 and 2022

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

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You Now Need Six Subscriptions to Watch Football. Here’s How We Got Here.

John Strubel — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:37:59 GMT

When the NFL announced its 2026 regular season schedule this week, I went hunting to check out the New York Giants’ schedule.

Since moving to Charleston, South Carolina, I’ve been struggling to watch the G-Men. Being an NFL fan today is nothing like it was when I grew up in New York, when watching the Giants was as simple as turning on the TV and — boom — there they were in living color.

That era is over.

After seeing the Giants’ 2026 schedule, I found a more curious story: How to watch the NFL in 2026: Full guide to streaming, cable, and TV schedule.

The Athletic reported:

NFL games will be broadcast across 10 networks and streaming platforms — Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN/ABC, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock, YouTube, NFL Network, and Paramount+. Fans who want to watch every game their team plays could easily spend close to $1,000 per year when you stack up cable or satellite, multiple streaming subscriptions, and broadband internet.

How did we get here? After reviewing decades of research, it appears this was a strategic NFL initiative; the NFL planned it, and questions were not raised until now.

The Deal That Started Everything

It began more than half a century ago, when President John F. Kennedy signed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 into law. The document grants the league a specific antitrust exemption, allowing all 32 teams to negotiate television rights as a single block rather than individually. The idea was to protect competitive balance. Small-market teams like Green Bay couldn’t compete for TV money with the New York Giants, so pooling the rights and splitting the revenue evenly leveled the playing field.

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It worked brilliantly — for decades. The NFL’s shared revenue model helped produce dynasties and kept the league’s product consistently more competitive. But the 1961 act was written for an era of three broadcast networks. Courts have since ruled it doesn’t cover cable, satellite, or streaming. And that’s where the NFL found its loophole.

The $110 Billion Land Grab

In 2021, the NFL signed a media rights package worth an estimated $111 billion over 11 years. The deal locked in traditional broadcast partners (CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN/ABC) while simultaneously bringing in the streamers.

The deal would eventually expand to include Amazon (exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football for over $1 billion annually), and YouTube paid $14 billion for NFL Sunday Ticket. Netflix now has Christmas Day games, and Peacock swooped in and signed a deal for exclusive playoff games.

Rather than selling a single big package, the league sliced its inventory into standalone moments: Christmas games, Thanksgiving matchups, Black Friday games, international games, playoff wildcards. Each exclusive window justified a separate deal with a separate platform. Each platform charges you its own monthly fee.

Cha-ching.

The NFL had just created a massive new revenue stream — and fans were gobbling it up.

The Math Gets Ugly

Here’s what a complete NFL fan faces heading into 2026:

Amazon Prime: Thursday Night Football and a Wild Card playoff game
Netflix: Is expanding to Christmas and select international games
Peacock: Exclusive prime-time games and postseason content
YouTube TV/Sunday Ticket — for out-of-market games
ESPN+: Select simulcast and standalone content
Cable/Network: CBS, NBC, Fox, and ESPN

The NFL crunched the numbers and started spinning them in their favor, stating that “over 87% of its games air on over-the-air broadcast television, and that the 2025 season was its most-watched since 1989. Both of those things can be true simultaneously: the majority of games are technically “free” on local affiliates while the league’s premium inventory — playoffs, holiday showcases, exclusive matchups — has steadily migrated behind paywalls.

Now the Government Is Paying Attention

The DOJ’s investigation, confirmed in April 2026, is focused on two specific questions:

Affordability for consumers
Whether the NFL’s exclusive streaming arrangements create an uneven playing field for competitors.

There is a twist to consider: The antitrust exemption applies only to broadcast TV, and courts have previously ruled it doesn’t extend to satellite or streaming. That’s precisely the tension the DOJ is probing: the league uses a federally granted monopoly to pool and sell its rights, but then sells portions of those rights to paywalled platforms in ways that arguably weren’t what Congress intended in 1961.

The New Media Rights Renegotiation

The NFL had reportedly set out to renegotiate its current deals with all five of its primary broadcast partners before this season kicks off. Whatever comes next will be shaped, in part, by whether the investigation produces actual consequences. If the league is forced to restructure how it sells streaming rights — or revisits the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act to explicitly address streaming — the math changes. If the investigation quietly fades, expect the next round of deals to cost fans even more.

The Bigger Picture

The NFL’s fragmentation story isn’t unique — MLB, NHL, and the NBA have all followed similar paths. But the NFL is both the most extreme case and the most politically exposed because its antitrust exemption is a government grant that Congress could theoretically modify. That makes it a test case for the entire sports streaming industry.

For fans, the immediate reality is already here: watching every game your team plays this fall will require a spreadsheet, a credit card, and a tolerance for juggling multiple apps. The sport hasn’t gotten worse. The access has.

The league built a $110 billion media empire on the back of America’s most loyal fanbase. The question the DOJ is now asking — and that Congress may eventually answer — is whether that fanbase was the engine of that empire, or the fuel.

You can read a primer of my new book, The Price of Winning: The Rise and Fall of a National Champion, and a sample chapter to help you get familiar with the story’s key characters.

I hope you will consider subscribing to my newsletter to receive the latest updates and special features available exclusively in digital format.

Thanks for reading Strubel on Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.