In the May 16 newsletter, Jonathan Tjarks sizes up the superstar battle brewing in the Western Conference finals, Alison Herman breaks down big moves by the women of Game of Thrones, and Rob Harvilla considers Meghan Trainor’s relatability in his Ringer debut. Getty Images Steph Curry vs. Kevin Durant Is the Western Conference Finals Duel We Deserve By Jonathan Tjarks It looked improbable for much of the season, but it’s here and it’s happening: The Thunder and Warriors are meeting in the Western Conference finals. All season, Stephen Curry has been in the process of rewriting the way we understand basketball. There seemingly has never been a player who can dribble, shoot, and pass quite like him, and there isn’t a defense in the NBA capable of preventing Curry from getting good looks for himself and his teammates. But that’s what makes this matchup so intriguing. Oklahoma City just might have the one player in the world who can go point for point with Steph, if only because that player essentially is Steph, reimagined as a near 7-footer. If all goes according to plan, this series will be a ballad of Curry and Kevin Durant. To defeat the Warriors, the Thunder will have to harness every ounce of their second-ranked offense in the regular season. Only twice this season did Golden State lose to a team that failed to reach at least 108 points. In their nine regular-season losses, the Warriors allowed opponents to score 109.3 points per 100 possessions, more than eight points higher than their defensive rating on the season. Durant is coming off a demolition of the Spurs in the second round, when he set fire to two-time defensive player of the year Kawhi Leonard and tore through one of the best defenses in NBA history. The Warriors might not have an answer for him, either. Durant averaged 36.3 points on 52.9 percent shooting in the three regular-season meetings, and those are the kinds of numbers he’ll have to put up if the Thunder are going to have any chance of pulling off their second consecutive upset. The most interesting dynamic of the series might be seen in the Warriors’ pick-and-roll game, where the Durant-Curry duel will find itself intersecting on defense. Billy Donovan often had Durant guarding Draymond Green in their regular-season matchups, leaving Durant on Curry when the Thunder switched screens. On those possessions, Durant was able to use his length to force Curry into a few turnovers, but the more reps Steph got against KD, the more comfortable he became creating space with the dribble to get his shot up over Durant’s ridiculous length. It’s hard to overstate the challenge facing Durant. Not only will he have to outscore the league MVP, he will have to do so playing on an inferior team while being forced to carry a much bigger load than his counterpart on defense. Curry’s return from injury with an overtime explosion in Game 4 of Golden State’s second-round series against the Blazers has been the defining moment of the playoffs, but we’re due for something iconic in this round. The pressure is tangible. Durant’s impending free agency (and the very real chance that he’ll sign with the Warriors) looms as large as Curry’s bid for immortality. With a dominant performance in the Western Conference finals, the Warriors will have a chance to deliver the deathblow to the team perhaps best suited to challenge them in the near future. This is the series we’ve waited all season for, and the ramifications are widespread. This is what the playoffs are all about. Podcasts Are Coming ... New episodes of The Watch and ShackHouse are dropping later today. Subscribe to all of our feeds on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play Music, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on all things from The Ringer.

OKC-GSW With Travon Free

Bill Simmons welcomes comedian and Any Given Wednesday writer Travon Free to break down how the Thunder upset the Spurs and will take on the Warriors.

Kevin Clark and Andrew Luck

Colts QB Andrew Luck discusses starting his own book club and bridging the gap between his nerd status and being a top-flight NFL quarterback. HBO Game of Thrones’ Baptisms by Fire By Alison Herman Leave it to Ramsay Bolton to demonstrate the best thing about a Game of Thrones episode by doing his worst. Before Daenerys had her second baptism by fire, and after Cersei finally found a place to put her anger (that isn’t a wine glass), and Sansa and Yara and Margaery all whipped their comparatively fragile brothers into shape, Ramsay got to use yet another woman like a proverbial chew toy. Rest in peace, Osha. You died so your compatriots could roast their oppressors alive. Game of Thrones, of course, has come under more scrutiny than anything else on television for what it puts its female characters through. Some of these arguments are fair; others are not. Mostly, the hot takes pour in because this show is a case study in both the grotesque lows and unmatched highs of depicting trauma, much of it (though not all) experienced by women. Most of the lows come courtesy of Mr. Bolton: Theon’s torture, Sansa’s rape, and now, Osha’s murder. The highs were on full display in “Book of the Stranger,” an action-packed hour of Women Getting Shit Done not in spite but because of what they’ve endured. Every single female character who made her move last night was motivated by indignities she had suffered at the hands of men. Some of this we’ve witnessed at length: Daenerys started the show as a captive of the people she’d eventually force to kneel before her, and Sansa has spent her adult life in the hands of the most monstrous men in Westeros. Some we’ve heard about only secondhand, like the Dothraki widow whom Dany recognizes as a kindred spirit. All of it comes to a head in “Book of the Stranger,” in which the Mother of Dragons takes her revenge while a humiliated Cersei, imprisoned Margaery, and deeply scarred Sansa begin to plot theirs. This is what productive (fictional) trauma looks like: characters seizing control only after we’ve seen how elusive — and how necessary — that control is. Was everything that came before “Book of the Stranger” necessary to achieving its payoff? Does the episode excuse the nasty flourishes, like Osha’s death, that show no sign of payoff at all? These are questions without easy answers. But “Book of the Stranger” gives the women of Game of Thrones something that torture porn — a label that this show has come dangerously close to earning — doesn’t. It gives them a path forward. Getty Images On Meghan Trainor and the Limits of #Flawlessness By Rob Harvilla When disaster strikes, some of us run away from the chaos, and some of us run toward it. Meghan Trainor’s new album is called Thank You. Let’s not do the obvious thing. Trainor, the crack songwriter turned wildly unlikely pop star, has been an object of easy derision and uneasy fascination since her debut single — the cheerfully hokey, Sir Mix-a-Lot–baiting opus “All About That Bass” — achieved “Macarena” levels of wincing ubiquity in 2014. Freed now from its playlist-clogging shackles, it’s a spry, winsome, even lovely song; not so the more wayward jams on Trainor’s 2015 full-length, Title, a stampede of randy sock-hop debacles that suggest Karmin-esque YouTube covers of Beyoncé songs that mercifully do not exist. Recall the Stepford Wife fantasia “Dear Future Husband,” which attempts to do to modern feminism what the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 did to Chicago; if Zack Snyder ever does a gritty Archie reboot, “DFH” will blare from the soda-fountain jukebox. At least she didn’t rap on that one. Let’s not do the obvious thing, starting now. Meghan Trainor has one effective muse, which is herself; as a once and future hitmaker — in February, she won the Grammy for Best New Artist, though that’s historically the music-biz equivalent of being handed a live wasp’s nest — she has one viable lane, which is songs about how much she loves herself that might inspire you to love yourself, too. Thank You, which largely swaps the poodle-skirt bullshit for Bruno Marsian spin-class electro funk, is fine when it hews to this theme. (“I Love Me” is catchy, for example.) Here’s a lyrical word for you: breasteses. Here’s a chorus for you: “If I was you / I’d v’wanna be me too,” ad nauseam. It was statistically far more likely that Trainor would accidentally hit Memphis street rapper Yo Gotti with her car than that he would join her in the studio, but there he is, mildly enlivening the Caribbean-lilt snoozer “Better.” She’s useless on ballads, and “Dance Like Yo Daddy” is Macklemore without the white guilt. But don’t be surprised if you become involuntarily obsessed with “NO.” “NO” is Trainor’s current, insidious hit single about shooting down lusty chumps in the club; the video is a delight. (Suggested college application essay question: What does that factory produce?) It’s vaguely reminiscent of Taylor Swift’s clip for “Shake It Off,” whereupon Swift flaunts her adorable awkwardness amid various social groups (ballerinas, black people) that intimidate her, but in a plainly contrived way. Whereas the nervous clunkiness of “NO” — the sense of a nearly visible thought bubble over Trainor’s head in which she’s picturing the next dance move right before she does it — is awfully endearing, and viscerally real, and way more believable. Trainor may be our one truly relatable pop star, and she takes her perfect imperfections seriously: Last week she briefly deep-sixed her new video for “Me Too” because someone Photoshopped the bejesus out of her. Best-case scenario: She’s an undercover FBI agent, trying her best and improbably succeeding, and one day soon she’ll crack the case and arrest, like, Rita Ora or whomever onstage, on live television. Until then, we get to enjoy pratfalls like this. There is much on Thank You to shake off, but no one shakes it off with more aplomb.