Of all the trade deadlines, the NHL's is the best because it is the most active and most chaotic. How chaotic, you ask? Try this. The St. Louis Blues traded defenseman Colton Parayko to the Buffalo Sabres, a big deal given the fact that, in a reversal of traditional fortunes...

I remember individual seasons of Survivor by and for their "mood." This is a nebulous bit of recall, because "mood" (or "vibe," if you will) is both subjective and insufficient; distilling roughly twelve hours of programming into one word is inevitably going to leave a lot o...

When old guys who played for Lou Holtz talk about him, from my experience, they don’t bring up schemes or Xs and O’s. They bring up speeches from the crusty but legendary coach, TV pundit, and rah-rah guy who died Wednesday at 89 years old. No, not loathsome political speeches. Football speeches.

“That guy could talk,” says Bruce Hanson. He played for Holtz at William & Mary from 1969 through 1971, his first three seasons as a college head college coach. Hanson remembers that Holtz, even as a 32-year-old rookie who’d previously held only assistant jobs at W&M, Iowa, Connecticut, South Carolina and Ohio State, was already as great a motivator as the game had ever seen.  

“When he was done with his pregame speech you woulda wanted to go beat the Chicago Bears,” Hanson said. 

Last Thursday, the Kansas State legislature passed SB 244, overriding a veto by Governor Laura Kelly and enshrining anti-trans law as unhinged in its fury as it is disheveled in structure. Here at Defector, we are committed to explaining incredibly stupid shit so that it can...

The animal kingdom is ruled by open sexual relationships. Bats, beetles, and bonobos all have multiple partners over a season or a lifetime. Barnacles and barracudas don't even get to pick their partners, simply spewing their eggs and sperm into milky clouds underwater. But ...

CALGARY, Alberta — The Germans are famous for squishing words together to form useful new compounds. But Calgarians perfected the art when they came up with "Saddledome." You look at it, and you say, Yup, that's a Saddledome. The building occupied by the Flames since 1983 i...

The trick with every Formula 1 season is to believe, at the start, that it will be exciting. Fortunately, if last year's preview was any indication, sports fans tend to be quite good about doing this. But this year, this year really, there is a lot to be excited for. There'...

President Donald Trump did not fire multiply radioactive Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday, a day after members of Congress grilled her over agents of her department murdering American citizens, her having viciously slandered those murdered Am...

You think about difficult things when you're stranded: dark thoughts of vanishing horizons, daunting ifs and thens, promises made to yourself on sleepless nights. And so it was for me last week, when a blizzard delayed our return home from a vacation long enough for me to miss recording the podcast. "If I ever make it home to my podcasting setup again," I swore to myself from the extremely comfortable hotel room that my wife and I wound up staying in for two delightful nights longer than expected, "I pledge that we'll have Spencer Hall on the podcast."

These are the sorts of promises you make when you don't know if you're good for it, at moments when you don't know what a promise is worth. But look:

A tenant in a Brooklyn building owned by Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo has not had heat in his apartment since Feb. 23, when a blizzard dropped over 19 inches of snow on New York City. Between the months of October through May, when the outside temperature drops...

We may be witnessing the final days of Antoine Griezmann at Atlético Madrid. French by birth, Spanish by formation, and Uruguayan by choice, the culturally omnivorous superstar is apparently on the cusp of a long-gestating move to America, where he will be able to indulge an...

Three days before the first race of the Formula 1 season, it is impossible to overstate just how badly the Aston Martin team, newly headed by racecar guru Adrian Newey, have managed to botch it. Any attempt to summarize from an outsider's perspective will mostly boil down to...

Before I went to Melbourne in January to cover the Australian Open for Defector and a couple other publications, I spent some time in New Zealand with my family. We lived there for five years when I was a child, and ever since we moved back to the United States, where I was ...

Nobody in the NBA has done nondescript quite like the Charlotte Hornets, and nobody has done it for as long. By long in this context we mean "forever." They have been the quintessential (and quit-essential, if truth be told) member of the league's ultra-forgettable Southeast...

In collective bargaining, "things tend to get done at the 11th hour," Adam Silver said in February, answering questions about the status of the WNBA’s ongoing CBA negotiations. "We are awfully close to the 11th now." The NBA commissioner wasn’t then ready to set a "drop...

In 1991, Spin magazine took the Compton rap collective N.W.A out to eat for a profile at the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan. The white author presents gangsta rap as a cynical enterprise, no different than escapist, violent popcorn blockbusters. “They’re not stupid, even thou...

The scheduled fight that no boxing fans asked for but all of us would have watched, Mike Tyson/Floyd Mayweather, ain’t gonna happen. For now, at least. Veteran boxing insider Dan Rafael reported last night that this latest melding of sports and circus "definitely" will not t...

Jess McClain was cruising to her first U.S. half-marathon championship this past weekend in Atlanta when the lead vehicle in charge of driving the course ahead of her made a wrong turn with less than two miles to go, sending her and the other would-be top-three runners off t...

This week on the show, we were thrilled to be joined by Will Menaker. You probably know Will from his work on the Chapo Trap House podcast, but he is also a ball-knower extraordinaire and hardcore New York Knicks fan, and it was a treat to have him.

We talked about what makes the Knicks uniquely infuriating; the Luke Kornet Medium blog post about the Atlanta Hawks' Magic City Night; and why rooting for a bad team makes you a good person. We also spent the last half-hour or so talking about the state of NBA player activism and the ways that sports fandom is and is not a vector into learning about the world or developing a political consciousness. It was a fun one!

If the 2026 World Baseball Classic is suffering from anything, it is expectation. Three years ago, the WBC ended on a note near-impossible to surpass: two teammates and future Hall of Famers facing each other in a deciding at-bat, and victory cinched by the most exciting bas...

Kyler Murray will be released by the Arizona Cardinals next week. This isn’t surprising news. In fact, the only reason that Murray’s release is noteworthy is because the NFL offseason has been, to this point, so utterly inert. The 2026 draft class is underwhelming, and the U...

More than a century ago, the Chinese paleontologist and archaeologist Pei Wenzhong found an unusual trove in the same cave near Beijing where he found the skulls of the early hominin Peking Man. Along with the remains of a 700,000-year-old Homo erectus, Wenzhong unearthed a ...

The end of the 1970s seemed to be a moment of uncertainty for Don DeLillo, creatively speaking. The previous decade had seen him become a rather important American author, enough so that he had left his job producing advertising copy for Ogilvy & Mather. Writing was his ...

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 about romantic sandwiches, Todds, bad luck, choosing your own death, and more.

Your letters:

Doug:

Nikola Jokic had a rough time Monday night. The Nuggets rolled out a new starting lineup, one featuring Jonas Valanciunas as Jokic's front-court partner. Denver's opponent, the Utah Jazz, responded by sticking their own pasty big guy, Kyle Filipowski, onto Valanciunas, and l...

There's always a song to sing, but first a silence must be created for the song to be born in. — Yoko Tawada, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel

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The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.

Trae Young has spent his professional career working within the unenviable anonymity of Atlanta Hawks basketball, known mostly for a high usage rate that has not necessarily corresponded to team success. Young made the career mistake of helping his team make a conference fin...

It was a busy week for FBI Director and special little guy Kash Patel. On Sunday he was slamming Michelob Ultras in Team USA's locker room. Midweek he was firing a dozen veteran agents in retaliation for their role investigating Donald Trump's mishandling of classified docum...

From the man who brought you questionable journalistic focus on a player accused of rape, comes an outright #ad for Saudi Arabia. https://twitter.com/FabrizioRomano/status/2028818183923147039 That's soccer scoopster Fabrizio Romano, taking a break from many (many) bettin...

In less than two weeks, a new season of the NWSL kicks off. If that causes you to do a double-take—Didn’t Rose Lavelle just score the championship game-winner, like, last week?—you’re not alone. The championship match was followed immediately by a December full of the NWSL’s...