May has been a busy month in the world of sports. Chelsea wrapped up its fifth English Premier League title, the finals for both the NBA and NHL playoffs have been set, and the Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball seasons are in full swing. There has also been plenty of news outside the stadiums. In this edition of Play-by-Play, I take a look at some of those stories.

A Center Without a Country

Over the past year, more than 150,000 Turks have been fired from their jobs or imprisoned in purges ordered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Last week, Enes Kanter, a Turkish citizen who plays center for the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder, joined the country's list of personae non grata. 

Kanter's status was revealed to him after he arrived in Bucharest, where Romanian officials informed him that his passport was no longer valid. After a several-hour detention, he eventually was allowed to return to the United States after U.S. diplomatic intervention. The superstar athlete has long been unpopular with the Turkish government for his support of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan holds responsible for last summer's failed coup attempt.

The Turkish government has refused to comment on Kanter's situation. For his part, the athlete has been quick to appear on U.S. media, calling Erdogan "this century's Hitler" and claiming that the incident in Romania followed harassment by Indonesian security forces acting at Turkey's behest (he had been in Indonesia as part of a post-season goodwill tour and claims that he had to essentially "escape" the country).

In the insistently apolitical world of U.S. professional sports, Kanter's ordeal came as a shock to many fans. He suddenly finds himself thrust into a different spotlight than the one he's accustomed to for his on-court feats. The passport kerfuffle has made him the most recognizable U.S.-based critic of Erdogan's Turkey. In a wistful piece on the website The Players' Tribune, he writes, "I play basketball for a job. I'm not a politician or a journalist. But I have a voice and I want to use it for the innocent people in Turkey who are being punished for expressing their ideas and beliefs." By railing against the government, Kanter has essentially blacklisted himself from his homeland and further distanced himself from his friends and family in the country, who have cut off contact to protect themselves from reprisals for his political views.

While it seems that Kanter is safe to pursue his career in the United States, his story may prove a notable litmus test for Erdogan's attempts to flex his ideological muscle beyond Turkish borders — and a cautionary tale to other vocal Turkish expatriates, especially those who don't have the wealth and status to draw attention to their plight.

This Month's Dose

The cat-and-mouse games of athletic doping might be the closest thing to a constant in the geopolitics of sports. The board of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) met in Montreal earlier this month, with some mildly interesting (if not predictable) outcomes. The long shadow of the largely unresolved 2016 Russian doping scandal continues to loom; there is a sense that the anti-doping watchdog is still smarting from the International Olympic Committee's dismissal of the agency's recommendation to ban every member of the Russian Olympic team from last year's Rio Olympics. 

The anti-doping agency surprised some observers by announcing the removal of Yelena Isinbayeva as the chair of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency. Isinbayeva, a pole vault champion, has been heavily critical of WADA's Russia-related investigations, leading most in the anti-doping world to question the appropriateness of her appointment. Isinbayeva's dismissal is part of a broader effort to bring Russia into compliance, including an expansion of the Russian testing program and increased international oversight of anti-doping efforts within the country. Cynics with a view of recent history may be forgiven for wondering if these moves will amount to anything.

Catalyzed by the Russian scandal, WADA also used the meeting to push for systemic changes in global sport governance. The most significant proposal would give the body supreme sanctioning power, requiring all WADA signatories, including the International Olympic Committee, to accept its rulings, subject to appeals. Such an agreement — at least hypothetically — could have kept the entire Russian team out of Rio, as opposed to devolving the decision to the governing bodies of the individual sports.

Other proposed changes include a push for greater independent testing of samples from athletes and measures to reduce the influence of figures in the hierarchies of national sporting bodies and government in WADA's administration. Of course, at the glacial pace of sport governance, these measures will not be voted on until WADA's November meeting and wouldn't be implemented until after the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Those games will be big for the Russian hockey team, as the gold medal favorite in a field weakened by the absence of NHL players. In any case, no matter what the results of the vote, it's hard to imagine the International Olympic Committee ceding much power to the agency, even though it is ostensibly independent. In the world of global sport fealty, the Olympics' feudal lords tend to get what they want.

All That Doesn't Glitter

Between Brazil's lingering environmental concerns and facilities that are already deteriorating, the legacy of last year's Rio Olympic Games is looking less than favorable. That legacy has been further tarnished — quite literally — by reports that more than 100 Olympic winners have sent their medals back to the games' organizers for repairs, citing flaking, rusting, black spots and other damage.

Apparently, a certain amount of defects among Olympic medals are to be expected. But Brazilian officials are estimating that 6 to 7 percent of the more than 2,000 medals awarded at the Olympics and the Paralympic Games that followed have had some issues. For their part, the Brazilians are refurbishing and replacing the damaged medals, but they are doing so with the tone of unaccountability that characterized their delivery of the games, blaming athletes for dropping the medals or simply handling them too much. I've never handled an Olympic medal, but I figure if my 1989 T-ball participation trophy is still holding up, year-old gold should probably be in better shape.