THE WARMUP

Welcome to Volume I, Edition VII of The Sunday Back Page.

This is your Sunday morning sports section — built for the inbox and made for independent creators. Every week, the best sports writing, podcasting, and storytelling from people who own what they build. No institutions. No legacy outlets. No algorithms deciding what you see. Just great work. Every Sunday morning.

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THE LEAD

I remember the car ride home, but not where it was from.

It was the Saturday night before Easter, 1987, and my father and I searched for something to listen to on the radio. The New York Islanders and the Washington Capitals were playing a Game 7 in the Patrick Division semifinals of the NHL playoffs, so that sufficed.

The game went to overtime and reached the intermission before the second OT by the time he pulled the car into the driveway, and my father agreed to let me stay up and watch until it ended.

My father wasn’t a big hockey fan. Before I was born, my father joined a group of coworkers to attend a New York Rangers game at Madison Square Garden.

The puck dropped at 7:30, but my father returned home to the apartment he shared with my mother before 9.

My mother asked him, "Why are you home so soon?"

He replied, "There was too much fighting."

Mom retorted, "Don't the players always fight?"

He answered, "No, the fans were fighting."

They call that ’87 Islanders-Capitals game "The Easter Epic." Pat LaFontaine scored the series-clinching goal for the Isles 8 minutes, 47 seconds into the fourth overtime at 2 in the morning.

At the time, it was the fifth-longest game in NHL history. They played more overtime hockey than regulation hockey. More than 74 minutes passed between goals. Islanders goalie Kelly Hrudey made 73 saves!

The game didn't make my father a bigger hockey fan, but it got me hooked. Hooked on overtime playoff hockey, that is.

In hockey games that go that deep into OT, no one wants to make a mistake that leads to a power play or odd-man rush. Goalies are required to stand on their heads.

I later became a Rangers fan, and for years, if a non-Rangers NHL hockey playoff game went to a second overtime, I turned it on. If it made the third OT, I called my friends. In college dorms, we started knocking on doors because you knew the others would be pissed if you let them sleep through it.

Don't even get me started on the advent of social media chatter and smartphone alerts.

The rebuilding Rangers didn't make the playoffs, but that hasn't stopped me from praying to the hockey gods for at least one game worth a late-night text to my buddies.

— Ian Powers

THE QUESTION

Who made the first 3-point basket in NBA history?

See answer below 👇

THE READS

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our take: Rodger Sherman does what he does best: takes a sprawling sports story and bullet-points it into submission. The Saudi government is pulling its funding from LIV Golf, and Sherman walks through the whole expensive disaster — the hundred-million-dollar contracts, the $590 million in losses in 2025 alone, the TV ratings that lost to a Hallmark movie, and the golfers who somehow got worse after joining. Sharp, funny, and thorough. Worth your time even if you haven't thought about LIV since Brooks Koepka won a major.

Our take: Neil Paine has been one of the sharpest statistical voices in sports media for years, and he brings that to his Substack. Here he makes the case that the play-in tournament — the kind of Adam Silver initiative you're supposed to reflexively dismiss — has actually done what it was supposed to do. More teams competing deeper into the regular season. The right amount of Cinderella stories without too many undeserving teams advancing. Better results in the first round for the teams that come through it. He backs all of it with data. Worth your time before the bracket gets going..

Our take: Bob McGinn has been talking to NFL scouts for 42 years, and the result is always the same: unfiltered, unattributed, occasionally brutal. This piece pulls the most divided prospects from his full draft series — Jordyn Tyson, Ty Simpson, Kadyn Proctor, Rueben Bain — and lets scouts argue with each other in print. One evaluator on Tyson: a starter, has it all. Another: nothing exceptional about him, not a first-rounder. That gap is the whole story of draft season. Start here.

Our take: I don't know that I agree with where this lands, but I read the whole thing, and that's the job. Shubi Arun uses Salah's Liverpool departure and the backlash to the new Harry Potter trailer as entry points into a piece about nostalgia as a closed door — the reason Gary Neville and company wouldn't even entertain the idea that Salah might belong above Thierry Henry, despite the numbers being nearly identical. The argument isn't airtight, but the hook is irresistible, and the connective tissue between Salah and Harry Potter holds together better than it has any right to. Side note: I’m a Liverpool fan, and I’m currently reading Prisoner of Azkaban with my 8-year-old twins.

Our take: Molly Knight is one of the better baseball writers on Substack, and this is her at her most enjoyable — equal parts reporting and therapy session. The hook is Roman Anthony's throwing suddenly going sideways in ways that don't quite match the mechanical explanation the Red Sox are offering publicly. Knight works through the yip possibility, the offense that lost Bregman and Devers and didn't adequately replace either, and a starting rotation that is 24th in ERA through the first two weeks. She's not panicking. She's not not-panicking. That tension is what makes it worth reading even if you couldn't care less about Boston. As a Mets fan, Molly’s take on the Mess of a season thus far was published too late for consideration this week. Darn.

THE LISTEN

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our take: Self-described as "100% Independent, 100% Organic." Goldy and Adam react to Rory McIlroy's back-to-back Masters win with the kind of fan-first, unfiltered golf energy no broadcast outlet can replicate. No hot takes dressed up as analysis — just three people who love the game processing one of the best stories in recent major championship history. A nice contrast to the more analytical reads on the golf story this week.

THE WATCHES

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our take: Marc Sessler and Dan Hanzus helped build Around the NFL into one of the defining pro football podcasts of its era before the NFL Network quietly ended it. Both are founders of Heed the Call, though Hanzus doesn't appear in this episode. Sessler is here with Conor Orr for draft crushes and the bit where they try to leave voicemails for NFL figures — which is exactly the kind of thing that made Around the NFL worth listening to in the first place.

Our take: Bob Sturm has been one of the more respected independent sports voices in the country for years, and he now publishes entirely on Substack. This April 11 live session is draft prep from the inside out — how teams talk to each other in the weeks before the draft, how agents work the process, and Sturm's own film evaluations on the prospects he's been watching. If you want to understand what's actually happening behind the combine numbers and mock drafts, this is worth an hour of your time.

THE PRESSROOM

Two-time World Cup champion. Olympic gold medalist. Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. Megan Rapinoe built one of the most visible careers in American sports history on the principle that what happens off the field matters as much as what happens on it. Now she's on Substack — her newsletter, With Love and Curiosity, asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to live in the same world, but differently? She has 540 subscribers as of this writing and has barely started. The floor on where this goes is high. Worth following now, before it's obvious ... Cole Nevins works in sports creator partnerships at Yahoo Sports! and spends considerable time doing something most people in that world don't bother with — actually studying how sports content creation works. His Substack, Sports Creator Economy, deconstructs the creator side of sports media from the inside out. He's been at it for a while, quietly, and the work shows. If you want to understand where sports media money and attention are moving and why, he's one of the sharper observers doing it in public. Follow him.

THE ROSTER

We want to celebrate as many independent creators on The Sunday Back Page as possible. Here are all the people who either submitted their work for consideration or were considered independently this week. Many of these creators deserved a place in this newsletter, and we hope they continue to submit their work. Please keep them on your radar.

Andrew M. Werners | Kwame Twumasi-Ankrah | Four Banners | Jeremy Miller | Jeshal | Joseph Ferraiola | Michael Broughton | Dominic Butler | Mitch Woods | Adam Firebaugh | T.J. Highley

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

THE ANSWER

1) Chris Ford. Ford of the Boston Celtics, on October 12, 1979. Ford had a 10-year NBA playing career and won the 1981 title with Boston. He is probably better known today for his coaching career, which included head coaching stints with the Celtics, the Milwaukee Bucks, the Los Angeles Clippers, and an interim role with the Philadelphia 76ers.