A rough start to the weekend

There were a lot of sports yesterday, but almost none of them went right for those of us in Southern California. Let's chat about it and then I'll give y'all a quick update.

Charlotte 3, San Diego FC 0

For the first time in the team's existence, the SDFC players really seemed to lose their cool during this one.

Mikey Varas went with a very different look on the turf in Charlotte, including our first look at 25-year old defensive back Andrés Reyes. Unfortunately, Reyes picked up a yellow card 32 minutes in and then another about 10 minutes later (although, much of the time in between was spent sitting around and waiting for a replacement Charlotte player to get warm after an injury).

You won't find me calling the second yellow a bad call, but it's probably not as black-and-white as you might imagine. In fact, it was a red card that got downgraded after replay (VAR), but it still meant the end of Reyes' debut with SDFC and the team playing down a man for the rest of the match.

A 1-0 Charlotte lead became a 2-0 Charlotte lead about two minutes after Reyes' exit and the rest is history. SDFC, which had been one of the better teams at avoiding penalties so far this season, showed some frustration late and ended the game with 4 yellows.

San Diego FC has now lost two road games in a row and return home to play Real Salt Lake next Saturday. I think that will be their first afternoon game at Snapdragon Stadium, which has historically been a brutal place to play (and watch) when the sun is shining.

Padres looking to avoid sweep

The once red-hot Padres are starting to feel the impact of injuries now that they're on the road, having lost on Friday and Saturday in Houston to the Astros.

Kyle Hart, who might eventually be replaced in the rotation by a healthy Yu Darvish, got beat up a bit again on Friday night.

On Saturday, the team really felt the absences of Jackson Merrill, Jake Cronenworth and Jason Heyward in the lineup. Connor Joe and Tirso Ornelas (making his MLB debut!) combined to go 0-3 in Merrill's CF spot while Oscar Gonzalez went 0-4 trying to fill the LF spot left behind by Heyward.

Michael King, as he seems to do regularly, pitched a masterpiece of a game before giving up a 2-run HR on his 90th pitch of the game. From there, it was a battle of the bullpens that Houston managed to win.

Dylan Cease, who has been wildly inconsistent this season, will be asked to pitch good enough today for the Padres to avoid being swept before the team hops on a plane for a game in Detroit on Tuesday.

San Diego Wave FC 4, Racing Louisville FC 1

San Diego Wave FC did what good teams do, adjusting their gameplan at halftime and blowing the doors off of a bad team (Racing Louisville FC) on their way to a 4-1 victory.

San Diego sits squarely in the middle of the standings five matches into a season that they're still getting a hold of. A lot changed for them in the offseason, but they might finally be figuring out how to play the way they want to.

Timberwolves 117, Lakers 95

Game 1 of an NBA Playoffs series shouldn't mean much but it always feels a certain way, and the Timberwolves took this one from the Lakers in a way that felt complete.

Just glancing at the team stats for this one, the Timberwolves were better than the Lakers at...

deep breath

• FG percentage (on higher volume)
• 3pt percentage (on higher volume)
• rebounds
• assists
• steals
• turnovers
• fast break points
• points in the paint

Ever since the Mark Williams trade was reversed, sending him back to the Hornets after the trade deadline (and leaving the Lakers without anything resembling a starting-caliber center), it felt like the Lakers' Achilles' heel was going to be a lack of size.

And now, unfortunately, they're playing a team that is bigger than them (shout out to Rudy Gobert and Naz Reid) and faster than them (hello, Anthony Edwards and Jaden McDaniels), not to mention much much better on the defensive side of the ball.

The Lakers put their scrubs in about halfway through the 4th quarter, in what was JJ Redick's first playoff game as an NBA coach. I'm sure we'll see something different from him and LeBron and Luka the next time these teams meet.

Nuggets 112, Clippers 110 (OT)

I watched this entire game and still can't really tell you if the Clippers ran out of gas because of the altitude (they held a 15-point lead at one point!) or if the Nuggets were able to ride the excitement of the home crowd or if this was just a coaching clinic by David Adelman. It's probably a mix of all three.

I can tell you that the biggest issue for LA was Kawhi Leonard, who finished the game with 7 turnovers. Not only did he throw a couple of very-bad passes to Ben Simmons that went flying out of bounds, but he also had the ball stolen from him in the final seconds of regulation when he was going for the game-winning score. It was very unlike Kawhi.

This is the series that I was most excited for and probably the one that I most envision being a great, and long, first round series this season. I'll be excited to see how Kawhi responds in game 2 and if the Clippers look different when they eventually get back to sea level in Los Angeles.

Section 1904

You guys are awesome. I teased a Discord server last week, we even talked about it on the podcast a little bit, and since then I've gotten probably a dozen messages from people wanting to make sure that they didn't miss the launch of the Section 1904 Discord server.

You haven't, I promised. It's coming today or tomorrow, I think. A programmer smarter than me is trying to figure out how to tie a couple of things together, but that's only part of what delayed the launch here.

In my rush to get things up, sometimes I forget to actually take some time and think about it. Darren is good about calling me out on that. So, one of the things Darren and I did this week was spend some time talking about why Discord and not WhatsApp or some other messaging platform. We talked through benefits and risks for the community of each platform and, luckily for me, landed back on Discord being the right one. If that ever changes, we'll change with it.

As we have said, we're building this plane while flying it. Sometimes that means things are going to go a little slower than we want them to because we need to be careful and thoughtful about whatever we build. As much as we appreciate you subscribing to Section 1904, assuming you have, we also very much appreciate your patience and understanding with us as we learn how to do this in real-time.

Have a great Easter Sunday, everyone!