The Los Angeles Angels, to the extent they are discussed at all, have mostly been shamed for having the last two best players in the game over the past decade and doing nothing of substance with either. This has in large part been because they have produced, acquired, and re...

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.

This week, Albert offers advice on how to handle one of your kids complaining about the other.

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Former NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones this week became the first person to plead guilty in the far-reaching federal gambling case that has engulfed several former pro basketball players. The plea came a day after prosecutors announced their intention to file addi...

This week on the show, we were once again joined by TrueHoop's Henry Abbott. Henry is an era-defining basketblogger, the author of Ballistic, and probably the only NBA media-corps journalist who has dug into the numerous connections between the NBA's rich and powerful and Je...

Though recently one of the best players in the NBA, and perhaps one of the best two-way bigs the sport has ever seen, Joel Embiid was an obscure character in this past regular season. That's because the main agenda for the Philadelphia 76ers was his long-term preservation. N...

In soccer, great offense does not necessarily imply terrible defense. It's a hard truth to retain in the face of a scoreline like 5-4, but what Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich did in the first leg of their Champions League semifinal was one of the purest distillations ...

Ever since the people who run college football crushed the NCAA and replaced it with an unworkable new economy based entirely on fraud-coated banditry, the old mall cops in Indianapolis have not really known what to do with themselves. There's still plenty of money in big-ti...

Jesper Wallstedt is earning the first half of his surname. The 23-year-old Swede stopped another 20 shots, more than half of those in the third period against an increasingly frantic and frustrated Dallas offense in Tuesday's 4-2 win over the Stars that put the Wild up 3-2 i...

ROCKFORD, Ill. — Every April, more than 250 athletes representing over 50 schools descend on a third-tier city to play the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association (NCTTA) National Championships. This year, Nationals took place in Rockford's UW Health Sports Factory...

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking chopsticks, dated nicknames, robots, and more.

Your letters:

Joe:

With the institution of replay review and ABS, it can sometimes feel like baseball is a little too normal these days, that it lacks whimsy or esoterica, or that games can no longer be decided by vestigial rules that were codified during the Hayes administration. This impress...

On their very first offensive possession of Game 4 on Monday night, the Detroit Pistons did what every big man–turned-commentator suggests every team do on its first possession: They ran a play to get their center a post-up. In this case, Duncan Robinson backscreened Wendell...

Michael is a bad movie. Let’s just get that out of the way now. It is a movie designed less to tell a story than to recreate moments, ones you are probably already familiar with. It is a movie designed to give you a karaoke experience in a theater setting with other like-min...

Smart money says that sports gambling scandals will be more dog-licks-man than man-bites-dog real soon. But for now, this rates as big college football news: Texas Tech announced on Monday that quarterback Brendan Sorsby has left the program to get treated for a gambling addiction.

The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported that Sorsby, who transferred to the Red Raiders in January after two years at Cincinnati, will enter a residential rehab facility. According to the school, the length of his stay at the treatment center is “indefinite.”

“We love Brendan and support his decision to seek professional help,” Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire said, in a statement released by the school. “Taking this step requires courage, and our primary focus is on him as a person.”

Steve Javie can’t recall much from the actual game itself, but he’ll always remember what happened later that night.

It was Javie’s first NBA Finals game in 1995, always a huge deal for an up-and-coming referee. Several of his family members were in the crowd. Finals games back then started at 9:00 p.m. Eastern; Javie and his fellow refs didn’t leave the arena until the wee hours of the morning. When they returned to their hotel, crew chief Joey Crawford had a room set up with food and drinks for the crew and their families to enjoy.

After a couple hours of celebrating his achievement, Javie couldn’t sleep. He was wired from the rush of his first time on the NBA’s biggest stage. A 7:00 a.m. flight the next morning loomed large. He mentioned it to Crawford, his longtime mentor.

The Boston Red Sox are owned by the same people who own Liverpool FC and are therefore acutely aware of the crucial soccer rubric that managers should be fired every few months in order to keep the job tender and supple on the grill. And yet, despite that, they hadn't fired ...

Baseball managers have very little say in whether or not their teams score 17 runs in a game, and only marginally more in whether or not their teams only allow one. Nevertheless, the optics of firing a coach—amendment: six coaches—right after a 17-1 victory are at the very l...

Down 58-41 at halftime on Sunday, the San Antonio Spurs were facing the most pressure they had in the brief but spectacular Victor Wembanyama playoff era. That said more about the team's inexperience with this kind of pressure than it did about needing to avoid a 2-2 first-r...

Connor McDavid is a hair away from being branded the worst greatest player in hockey history because, fans being raging nitwits on things like this, that's how it works in the legacy game. "You're only as good as the last thing I remember,” is the creed, “and I drink during games."

Nevertheless, them's the rules, Pookie, and right now McDavid, the best player of his generation, is a game away from being ushered out of the postseason by the weird but plucky Anaheim Ducks, because of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGtTMKPMPC0

By pulling off a 115-96 rout in Game 4 on Sunday, the Houston Rockets avoided what would have been a comical sweep at the hands of a Los Angeles Lakers squad that has played the entire series without its two best players under the age of 41. Luka Doncic (hamstring) and Aus...

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Rachel Fabi, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Rachel (she/her) is the creator and co-editor of the crossword puzzle fundraiser "These Puzzles Fund Abortion," which raises money for five abortion funds across the country. If you like crossword puzzles with a progressive bent and helping people afford necessary healthcare, you can donate here through the end of May to receive the puzzle pack!

Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. Please note that submissions are closed from April 1 to May 1. 

What will it take to be fulfilled by life? Love, perhaps, or community, power, or professional success. At different points in my life I believed that having my work published would make me happy, or leaving the country, going back to school, getting a literary agent. I thou...

Can you save the world by playing on green clay, staving off climate catastrophe? Probably not, but if all tennis courts in the world were made of green clay, we’d at least be better off, according to a new study in Applied Geochemistry. The paper, co-authored by Frankie Pav...

It is of course nice to get the calls correct, but baseball is an entertainment product foremost, and a most delightful side effect of the new automated ball-strike challenge system is the few seconds of drama between a challenge and its resolution. Who will be vindicated? W...

Victor Wembanyama, who sustained a concussion in Tuesday night's Game 3 between his San Antonio Spurs and the Portland Trailblazers, has been cleared by medical personnel to return to action in Sunday's Game 4, according to a report by ESPN's Shams Charania and Malika Andrew...

No one was shot and killed at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday night at Washington D.C.'s Hilton Hotel. President Donald Trump—who is presently waging an illegal war of aggression against the nation of Iran and aiding and abetting a genoc...

The top-seeded Detroit Pistons are quietly in a lot of trouble. Not just because they are down 2-1 in their series against the eighth-seeded Orlando Magic, but because in those two losses Orlando has looked like the superior team. The Magic have looked faster, tougher, and l...

Picture it: You're the Minnesota Timberwolves and two of your starters have just gone down with severe injuries in the first half of Game 4, including your best player Anthony Edwards. You're up 2-1 in the series but the Denver Nuggets have momentum going into the half. Well...

Basketball is a sport where five teammates work together to dribble and pass the ball up the court and ultimately toss it into the hoop. Certain exceptions exist. For instance, the final possessions of a close New York Knicks playoff game. Here basketball is a sport where a ...

Chances are you haven't seen or thought of Tony Dokoupil in a while, and you wouldn't be alone. Dokoupil's CBS Evening News is lagging well behind ABC and NBC's nightly news programs, recently dropping under 4 million viewers per night. But TV ratings aren't necessary for wh...