Lu Dort is often finding new ways to do some bullshit just on the edge of the accepted rules of basketball. The difference this weekend was that the Oklahoma City Thunder wing went too far and got caught for it, even though that didn't stop his team from playing the victim.
In the fourth quarter of Friday's game, Dort stuck out his leg to trip Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic after the inbound pass. An official called a foul on the play, but while Dort acted like he was wrongly accused, an incensed Jokic popped up and got in his face. Dort's teammate Jaylin Williams stepped in, and he and a still-fuming Jokic grappled as players and coaches attempted to separate them. Isaiah Joe was there, too.
Kristaps Porzingis is out indefinitely due to illness, according to Golden State's injury report. What illness? That question is the subject of some controversy.
Porzingis has been broadly unwell since the spring of 2025, when he was with the Boston Celtics and found himsel...
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Los Angeles courtroom and testified for five hours that he and his company, Meta, are not culpable in claims that they have deliberately made the platform addictive and harmful for young users.
The testimony was part of a bellwether...
A couple months ago, some friends and I made plans to see the San Antonio Spurs when they were in town to play the Brooklyn Nets. Obviously, we weren't going for the opportunity to see the Nets' youths develop around the dubious veteran presence of Michael Porter Jr.; the dr...
In early December, Paramount seemed to have lost to Netflix in a bidding war to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), but 10 weeks and roughly $20 billion later, the conglomerate reportedly will get its way after all. On Thursday, as The Wrap reports, Netflix announced it w...
I’m currently reading The Power Broker. Are you impressed? You should be. I am big-boy writer who reads big-boy books. A thousand-page investigation into the life of a powerful bureaucrat is nothing to me. I’m gonna finish The Power Broker, and then you will regard me as one...
The NFL owners, like everyone else, show who they actually are and what they really care about through what they choose to get upset about. And those owners (and yes, this is going where you think it's going) fought hard to keep their top-secret training facility behaviors a...
On Thursday night, in the season finale of The Traitors, two former Love Island contestants locked eyes across the round table. In the face of Maura Higgins you could see a dangerous hope growing—as if, for the first time, she could imagine what winning would be like. Here s...
If you walked down Colorado Boulevard in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles at some point in the past three years, you might have noticed a modest, pueblo-style beige building with “PHOTO” painted above its door. And if you had decided to go in, there was a decent ch...
When I first heard rumblings that the world had assembled a conclave to elect a new celebrity zoo animal, I felt preemptively wary, partly due to world events and partly because we still don't know the long-term psychological consequences of fame for child stars like Moo Den...
You know the thing that the truly great rim protectors do, in basketball, where they learn they can alter shots by aura alone? The area under the basket becomes a Sarlacc pit, the remote and terrifying domain of a very large, patient, and hungry creature. The great ones are ...
The biggest business story related to the NBA has nothing to do with tanking, Kawhi Leonard, nor the NBA's new national broadcast partners. We are only a little more than a year away from the launch of NBA Europe, a new basketball league across the Atlantic that proposes to ...
Five of the eight Champions League playoff ties went roughly as expected. Paris Saint-Germain had a bit more trouble separating itself from its Ligue 1 rival Monaco than predicted, but rode a 3-2 first leg win to a 5-4 aggregate victory. Newcastle demolished Qarabag, 9-3. At...
Take one look at the NBA standings lately and you’ll discover that teams like the Jazz, Kings, Wizards, and Nets are slacking off even more than they have in previous seasons. It’s made for some pretty dire television. Last week, NBA commissioner and Tim Burton character Ada...
The Tom Thibodeau–era Chicago Bulls were a special team, a rockpile collection of asskickers dedicated to playing a rapidly obsolescing style that nonetheless proved extremely effective. Thibs surrounded a young Derrick Rose with a bunch of incredible defenders, most notably...
The Athletic, your new home for the Washington Post's former sports section, delivered 2,600 words on Connecticut head coach Dan Hurley Wednesday morning, largely on the theme of Mellowing Madman. Hurley's history as the man who smuggles wasp hives in his gym shorts and then...
Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
Having a severe chronic illness has made me intimately familiar with the American healthcare system and its hospitals. Hospitals here are terrifying and full of excruciati...
Anyone with a shred of common sense could immediately tell that Kash Patel's trip to the Winter Olympics was a Batkid-style situation. Still, it is satisfying to have what was obvious to everyone confirmed by the FBI's own internal scheduling documents.
The New York Times ...
Conventional wisdom states that no one really cares about another person's dreams unless they're been paid to care, but humor me. Over the last year or so, I have had a recurring dream in which I am a player on Survivor. It's not always the same dream, exactly, but the forma...
It has been five days since Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno made the claim that his team's fans view winning baseball as a low priority, and the reaction has been, well, fairly low priority. It could hardly be any other way, because "low priority" is the Angels in a nut...
This week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I intended to talk to the show's lawyer Ock Sportello about his recent story on Kevin Durant, as well as Harry's Defector blogging debut on Rich Paul's stupid podcast.
We did do that, but we also welcomed Sam Sheehan from You Kno...
There's nothing quite like a returnee season of Survivor. Wednesday night's Season 50 premiere will begin the sixth season in the show's history featuring a cast entirely of returning players: 24 veterans of Survivor, split into three tribes of eight, will compete over 26 da...
Earlier this month I received an email that, for a moment, made my heart skip. The email came from someone named Elena Ferrante, at "elenaferrante800@gmail.com," and I feel no remorse leaking Elena's email here because, of course, whoever or whatever was emailing me is not t...
To be a U.S. Olympian is to represent the best that your country has to offer. That sounds extremely lofty when it's written out like that, but I think that's really how it works, ideally, if you're taking in the best possible message from NBC's explicitly patriotic broadcas...
Wuthering Heights is always a stranger book than you remember. This holds true whether you last read it in high school, or a month ago. There is always some weird detail, some brutality, some incomprehensible human interaction that you overlooked. Everyone remembers the ghos...
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 rug spills, shitty Chinese takeout mainstays, college visits, and more.
My academic funding was running out and my patience with the delirious pace of start-up culture had run thin. You might say I got fired; I might reply that I was never really hired in the first place. But the point was, I needed to go back on the job hunt. So I logged into L...
Industry has always been a show with a lot of "too online" energy. A cocaine tornado of culturally in-vogue reference points, from Euphoria to Safdie brothers' movies to Tik Tok vids about finance bros. So it shouldn't be too surprising that, while the internet is conspiracy...
One dreary weekend this past December, I decided to fight back the winter gray with the color and vibrancy of musical theater. I routed myself not to Times Square but to the closest AMC, which was screening the recorded live performance of the 2023 revival of Merrily We Roll...
