The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.

Good morning! Refuse that intentional walk today.

While You Were Sleeping: Playoff hockey, man

We can quibble with quantitative analyses and details later. But watching Game 1 of both the Stanley Cup Final and the Women’s College World Series championship last night left me with the best eye test result you can hope for in these situations: It feels like the two best teams are playing each other at the end. 

Truly a wonderful thing. No flukes. Best-on-best, and last night’s winners were decided on singular moments: 

We must start with a scintillating hockey game in Edmonton, where the Oilers — losers of last year’s Stanley Cup Final against this same Panthers team — took a 1-0 series lead with a 4-3 overtime win. Florida was up 3-1 early in the second in this one, too. Here’s the game winner from Leon Draisaitl with just 31 seconds left in the overtime period:

LEON DRAISAITL IS EDMONTON’S HERO 🔥

The Oilers rally back from a 3-1 deficit to take Game 1 in OT!

🎥 @Sportsnet pic.twitter.com/iRUX1ikCHO

— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) June 5, 2025

Avoid a 3-0 deficit this year? ✅

On the diamond, we saw an intentional walk gone awry win the game for Texas. It was wild. Texas Tech, fueled by star pitcher NiJaree Canady, had a 1-0 lead in the sixth inning when the Red Raiders decided to give Reese Atwood a free bag with two runners on base. 

The problem was that Atwood refused the offer:

After review, this pitch was obstructed by @atwood_reese bat. #HookEm | 📺: ESPN pic.twitter.com/UUGgsJxVsY

— Texas Softball (@TexasSoftball) June 5, 2025

That was essentially the game. Longhorns up 1-0 in the series. Let’s keep moving:

Hi, My Name Is: An overnight French superstar

Just a few weeks ago, Loïs Boisson was mostly known for a deodorant incident. 

Boisson, the 22-year-old French tennis revelation, began this year’s French Open ranked No. 361 in the world. She had been aching for this opportunity to play in front of French fans, one year after a brutal injury forced her to forgo a wild-card spot in the tournament.

This morning, Boisson is a phenomenon. The last remaining French player in the tournament, facing world No. 2 Coco Gauff for a spot in the final. A quick introduction: 

• In April, Boisson faced British tennis player Harriet Dart at the Rouen Open, and a hot mic caught Dart asking the umpire to tell Boisson to wear deodorant because “she smells really bad.” Boisson, who won the match in straight sets, shrugged it off. Dart apologized … and has not won a match since.
  
  
• After missing last year’s Open, Boisson has shown the aptitude real tennis nerds have known about for a couple of years now. She breezed through the lower levels of tennis last year and is considered one of the sport’s best young talents. Five wins at Roland Garros have proven it.
  
  
• Her fourth-round win over world No. 3 Jessica Pegula is her pièce de résistance thus far. With a forceful French crowd frothing behind her, Boisson overcame dropping the first set 6-3 and won the next two, 6-4, 6-4. She rode that wave through her quarterfinal match against Mirra Andreeva, and as Matthew Futterman wrote from the court, Boisson is already a French hero. 

Victory is a great cologne, and Boisson is much more than the victim of some petty routine. Today’s match against Gauff is a must-watch. 

More on that later, but I recommend listening to “The Tennis Podcast” on Boisson before she takes the court. Catch that here.

News to Know

Former IU players file sexual assault suit
More than a dozen former Indiana men’s basketball players have accused former team physician Dr. Bradford Bomba of sexual assault during his decades of work at the school. Two former Hoosiers, Haris Mujezinovic and Charlie Miller, filed suit in October against the university and head trainer Tim Garl, alleging both had knowledge of Bomba’s actions and the school “acted with deliberate indifference” toward his behavior. Two other players joined the suit in April, and yesterday an attorney told The Athletic at least 10 more players plan to come forward. Bomba died in May, and some players have said legendary Hoosiers coach Bob Knight was aware of Bomba’s alleged impropriety. More details in our full report.

Manfred regrets ESPN opt-out
The messy breakup between MLB and ESPN has moved past the anger stage and into nostalgia, as commissioner Rob Manfred said yesterday he regrets the move. Sources told The Athletic’s Evan Drellich and Andrew Marchand that the league is in negotiations with multiple networks over the rights ESPN once had, and the packages are nowhere near the value of ESPN’s offering. Manfred hopes to have a rights deal finalized soon. See his full comments.

More news

• C.J. Gardner-Johnson disputed the notion that the Eagles traded him for salary cap reasons. Hm.
  
• FIFA slashed ticket prices for the upcoming Club World Cup. 👀
  
• Manchester United has made its first bid for Brentford’s Bryan Mbeumo. See the details.
  
• The Suns will hire Cavaliers assistant Jordan Ott as their next head coach. Read our scouting report
  
• Pacers coach Rick Carlisle thought the news of Tom Thibodeau’s firing was “fake AI.” Me too, man.
  
• Sure enough, women’s hockey legend Hilary Knight signed with the PWHL’s new Seattle franchise after going unprotected from expansion.

📫 Love The Pulse? Check out our other newsletters.

What to Watch

📺 French Open: Women’s Semifinals
9 a.m. ET on TNT/Max
If you’re able, throw this on this morning. First up is top-seeded Aryna Sabalenka against Iga Świątek for a spot in the final. Boisson-Coco Gauff follows. Both should be great.

📺 WCWS: Texas vs. Texas Tech, Game 2
8 p.m. ET on ESPN
Texas can win its first title here. Easy call to watch. 

📺 NBA: Pacers at Thunder
8:30 p.m. ET on ABC
Finally, after nearly a week of waiting, the finals are here. We’ve talked about it plenty. I expect this game to be fast — Indiana’s pace-driven offense against Oklahoma City’s swarming defense that gorges on fast-break points. As Zach Harper said yesterday, the basketball itself will be good.

Get tickets to games like these here.

Pulse Picks

For all of the angles in this NBA Finals, I think it comes down to one guy: Tyrese Haliburton. Shakeia Taylor has a great story today on the league’s new premier antagonist, a player who loves his haters. 

Former Seahawks wide receiver Doug Baldwin was against “shrink dudes.” Then he worked with one. 

Max Muncy is mashing for the Dodgers again. His redemption arc is nearly complete. 

Fun story: Jeff Hoffman doesn’t play for the Phillies anymore, but he’ll always have a piece of Philly. No, literally. 

Most-clicked in the newsletter yesterday: Our story on the Steelers writing a letter to fans angry about players showing up to a Donald Trump rally. Read it here. 

Most-read on the website yesterday: Andrew Marchand’s column on how ESPN messed up its announcer trio for the NBA Finals.

Ticketing links in this article are provided by partners of The Athletic. Restrictions may apply. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.

(Top photo: Walter Tychnowicz / Imagn Images)

Johnathan Gooch did a lot of wishful thinking throughout this legislative session. Most recently, he’s been wishing for soundproof walls. 

“The worst thing about being queer in Texas right now is having neighbors, because I just want to scream all the time,” said Gooch, the communications director for Equality Texas, an LGBTQ+ rights advocacy group.  

This session, the group identified and tracked over 200 anti-LGTBQ+ bills, more than any other state in any point in history, Gooch said. A dozen of those bills were ultimately passed by the Legislature and have made it to Governor Greg Abbott’s desk or already been signed into law. Those various bills could threaten to negatively impact queer Texans with restrictions targeting public schools and healthcare and new legal standards that could create unsafe environments for LGBTQ+ people, particularly children. 

Though the deluge of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation isn’t anything new (in 2023, legislators filed 160 such bills), Gooch said that this session, the bills that gained the most traction tended to seem less overtly harmful. “[The harmful provisions are] sometimes buried in other bills or deal with complicated policy areas that might not be immediately evident to queer people or allies across the state who are concerned about what’s going on,” Gooch said. 

One such bill is Senate Bill 1257, which will require insurance providers to cover any adverse consequences relating to gender-affirming healthcare, including procedures to reverse or recover from a gender transition. These procedures are uncommon: According to a 2021 study, about 1 percent of trans people regret gender-affirming surgeries. The bill may cause risk-averse health insurers to stop covering gender-affirming healthcare, Gooch said, making it more difficult for adults to access or afford. Abbott signed SB 1257 into law on May 24 and it will go into effect on September 1. This bill follows the state’s 2023 ban on gender-affirming care for minors. 

Other bills, like House Bill 1106, enact seemingly innocuous changes in legal language that could have devastating impacts. HB 1106 amends the Texas family code’s definition of child abuse to explicitly exclude a parent who refuses to affirm a child’s gender identify or sexual orientation. “This exception, unfortunately, could enable a lot of harmful behavior,” Gooch said. “There’s a long history of using a variety of violent, physically abusive tactics to ‘reform’ young queer people. … If a parent is so aggressively opposed to their child’s orientation or gender identity … where is the limit? What are they allowed to do to force them not to be queer?”

Senate Bill 412, which the governor signed on May 19, similarly tweaks language, removing a legal protection that previously exempted parents, teachers, and librarians from prosecution for providing kids with material that could be considered “harmful” if it was done with an educational intent. 

Emily Witt, a communications strategist for the Texas Freedom Network, said bills that put more power in the hands of parents are part of a larger project of “weaponizing parental rights.”

“Parents love their kids and want what’s best for their kids, and if they’re being told that there is this harmful agenda, or that there is something wrong with their kid being trans or LGBTQ+ … I think that parents are a lot more likely to go along with that.” 

This weaponization extends into schools, particularly with Senate Bill 12 and Senate Bill 13, two of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s priority bills. Witt said going after public schools is the first way to change the overall mindset of a population. “It has to do with how foundational our schools are,” Witt said. “Making our public schools places where kids can’t be fully accepted or don’t feel like they can talk to their teachers or be who they are is just another piece of how Republicans are attacking our public education system and changing it from what it’s supposed to do, which is serve our kids.” 

Senate Bill 12, dubbed the “parental bill of rights,” would prohibit teachers from teaching LGBTQ+ topics and from helping students “socially transition” by using a name or pronouns that don’t align with their biological sex. The final version, which passed over the weekend, also clarifies that school districts may not authorize or sponsor clubs based on sexual orientation or gender identity. It also allows parents to have access to their child’s mental health records, which Gooch of Equality Texas said could pose serious risks to queer children. 

“If a young queer person fears that their parents might not be affirming, they need an outlet to process that,” Gooch said. “Having access to counselors at school can be a lifeline to young queer people who are trying to make sense of how they fit in the world and also trying to maintain a healthy relationship with their parents.” 

SB 13 would allow parents to access student library records and prevent their children from checking out certain books. It would also establish procedures to remove books with “indecent or profane” content. According to PEN America, of the most commonly banned books in the 2023-2024 school year, 39 percent featured LGBTQ+ people and characters. SB 13 was approved by both chambers over the weekend. 

House Bill 229, one of several proposed bills seeking to classify people along binary definitions of biological sex, would codify the terms “male” and “female” and require government agencies to abide by these definitions in sex-based data collection. Witt said this bill could pose problems for trans Texans whose gender identity does not align with their biological sex and intersex Texans who do not fit into binary definitions of biological sex. “That’s just another way that we’re seeing lawmakers try to erase Texans and try to really attack freedoms,” Witt said. “They’re trying to control every aspect of trans and queer Texans’ lives. This kind of legislation really just feels like a way to push people out of the state and make them feel like they don’t belong here.” 

Senate Bill 1188 similarly relies on the idea of biological sex, requiring health agencies to create a new field in medical records for sex assigned at birth. It doesn’t, however, prohibit health agencies from including gender identity information. 

Still, the majority of anti-LGBTQ+ bills died during the legislative process, including Senate Bill 18, one of Patrick’s priorities, which made it to the House calendar but didn’t get a reading before the May 27 deadline. SB 18 would have prohibited public libraries from hosting “drag queen storytime” events, and Senate Bill 2920, which would have classified gender-affirming hormone treatment as prohibited steroid use for athletic competitions in the University Interscholastic League, met the same fate. 

Though not much about the session surprised Witt—she said the amount of anti-LGBTQ+ bills was to be expected—she said lawmakers seemed less interested in listening to the testimony of Texans during hearings. “I think they are aware that they’re wasting time attacking a small community instead of passing meaningful legislation that actually affects most Texans,” Witt said. “They just think that they’re in charge and they don’t have to listen to the public anymore, and I think that they’re going to see that that’s a big mistake when it comes election time.” 

Despite the onslaught of bad bills, Texans continued to show up, even at the end of the session: Witt said over 100 people came to a “read-in” protest of SB 13 over Memorial Day weekend. 

“This is a minority of people who are extremists and have been given millions of dollars to push forth this anti-trans legislation, but they don’t actually reflect Texas,” Witt said. “We still have so many people who are willing to show up for each other and keep each other safe, and I saw that throughout the entire session.” 

For the third time in four years, the Texas Longhorns will play for a national championship at the Women’s College World Series, finally taking on a new opponent, the Texas Tech Red Raiders.
The last two times the Longhorns were in the championship series, they’ve run into the Oklahoma Sooners dynasty that has won four straight national championships, with the Longhorns being defeated twice in that stretch, with series sweeps in both 2022 and 2024.

This time, the Longhorns will avoid the dynasty in the championship series, but for graduate Joley Mitchell, getting the chance to beat OU for their first national championship would have made the win a whole lot better.

“Personally, I wanted it to be OU,” said Mitchell in a media availability. “If you want to be the man, you’ve got to beat the man, so I’m happy regardless and I want to win this thing and I’m ready to go…wish it would’ve been OU but it’s not, so we just have to focus on what’s in front of us.”

Oklahoma Sooners head coach Patty Gasso has had a dominant hold on the softball world; her accolades read like a laundry list, with eight national championships, 16 conference Coach of the Year awards, appearing in every championship series since 2019, and since 2016, winning six out of their seven national championship appearances.

Putting an end to Oklahoma’s streak was first a loss to Texas in the second game of the WCWS, where Mitchell hit a dagger solo home run in the sixth inning, which moved the Sooners to the other side of the bracket, forcing them to come out of the losers’ bracket.

And after defeating the Oregon Ducks, the Sooners needed to win twice against the Texas Tech Red Raiders to reach the championship series. The Red Raiders delivered the final blow to Oklahoma, defeating them in the first game in walk-off fashion, 3-2.

Finally, the Texas Longhorns will avoid Oklahoma in the championship series, but are still facing a challenge with old Big 12 foe Texas Tech. Led by superstar ace junior Nijaree Canady, who on the season is 33-5 with a .90 ERA and 304 strikeouts, and has pitched the entirety of the WCWS for Tech.

Game one of the championship series begins on Wednesday, June 4, at 7 p.m. C.T. on ESPN