I've always wondered what it must feel like for injured players who are forced to sit at home and watch their crappy teams. Do they suffer as much as the rest of us? Do they get mad and pissed? Do they look out their window at the sunny day they could be enjoying and ask themselves, "What the hell am I doing with my life?"
Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers, currently laid up with a torn ACL, brought us an answer to those questions on Sunday: Yeah, kinda. Shortly after the Giants' 34-27 overtime loss to the Lions, Nabers posted and then deleted the following thoughts:
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jaedyn Shaw set the tone. Rose Lavelle tapped the ball at kickoff, and Shaw booted it toward the Washington Spirit’s net, which keeper Aubrey Kingsbury was helplessly far from. The shot was just off-target, but the message was clear: Gotham FC intended to score by whatever means necessary.
A second warning came shortly after, when Esther González put a slipped ball by Shaw into the back of the net, only an offside ruling saving Washington from an immediate deficit. The attempts seemed to spook the Spirit, whose nerves showed for the first 20 minutes. Gotham’s freewheeling attack ran rampant over Washington. The Spirit had no choice but to batten down the hatches and defend for their lives.
Ja Morant's season—even when he has been healthy or between suspensions—has been nothing to write home about. The Memphis Grizzlies' highest-paid player has been one of the most disappointing performers in the NBA this season, averaging just 17.9 points per game (lowest sinc...
When I went to bed on Saturday night, I wasn't planning to write about the 2025 Las Vegas Grand Prix. After a surprisingly successful opening race in 2023, and Max Verstappen's fourth coronation in a row in 2024, this year's edition of the most Americanized race in an increa...
Losers of five straight headed into a tilt with the Maple Leafs in Montreal on Saturday, the Canadiens, it feels safe to say, were not calling up Florian Xhekaj for his goalscoring. The 21-year-old, 6-foot-4, 204-pound winger has two goals and two assists in 16 games in the AHL this season, and 44 penalty minutes. They were looking for a shot in the ass—metaphorically—of the kind often brought by older brother and Habs defenseman Arber Xhekaj. If one Xhekaj provides a boost in energy and isn't above dropping the gloves to keep opponents honest, what might two Xhekajes produce?
A 5-2 win, to end your suspense. But more relevant for blog purposes, Xhekaj, after picking up his first NHL point, picked up his first NHL fight, going toe to toe with Dakota Mermis (really good names all around).
Soft tissues are having a moment. Warriors head coach Steve Kerr rang the bell on the tissue issue this week when he told ESPN's Anthony Slater that he is "very concerned" about the dangers inherent to the NBA's ascendant style of play. Shooting has warped the floor. Active,...
At this juncture of the baseball offseason, trade rumors are broadly wishful fantasies for Yankees fans. I know this because yesterday, Barry Petchesky dropped a tweet in Slack from a Yankees fan account that read, "Would you rather trade for Paul Skenes or Tarik Skubal?" Ac...
On Thursday afternoon, the WorldTour cycling team formerly known as Israel–Premier Tech unveiled its new form: NSN Cycling Team, which will be licensed out of Switzerland and based in Spain. A few short months after its presence at the Vuelta a España incited fierce protests...
I started running when I was 14. After many years of playing recreational soccer, I realized that I did not have the skills to compete on the high school level against girls who had played on club teams their whole lives. The older kids in my neighborhood ran cross country a...
Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about.
Ray: Not to keep both of you in suspense, but Oberlin finished its season 0-10, losing t...
On Nov. 19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a name that feels increasingly misleading, given Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s track record of sowing outbreaks of infectious diseases—quietly updated a webpage in order to suggest a link between vaccines and autism. To say it up top, this is patently false. Scientists have known for a long time that vaccines do not cause autism, there is no evidence to suggest that they do, and just in case you were wondering, there is also no new evidence to suggest that they do. If you would like to read more about this true fact, I recommend STAT News's explainer, "Here is how we know that vaccines do not cause autism."
Now that we are in agreement, let's move on. The CDC page, titled "Autism and Vaccines," now lists the following "Key Points":
There's no way to know exactly what goes on during a CBA negotiation between a sports league and it's players' union. All we have to rely on is information that gets strategically shared to plugged-in reporters, and our own ability to read meaning into what kind of informati...
My wife and I have been planning a trip for around five years. The idea was that it would be a big one for our 10th anniversary; we celebrated our 16th in August. There were deferrals due to family tragedies, work-related upheavals, a global pandemic, and more work-related upheavals, and there have been other small trips mixed in, but there has always been planning, albeit at the lowest possible simmer. A bubble slowly rises to the surface; a spreadsheet is updated to no obvious end; a Friday night conversation turns, inevitably, to whether it might be nice to go to Greece, or someplace like that. For various reasons, my relationship with the fun, big, enriching kind of travel is almost entirely abstract.
The economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers was one of many high-status figures hitting up sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for advice, as revealed in a dump of Epstein's emails last week by the House Oversight Committee. That correspondence has finally caught...
Elyse Myers is famous for being normal—32-year-old brunette, married with two kids, lives in Nebraska kind of normal. Her press often refers to her as “The Internet’s Best Friend.” In her four years in the spotlight, her content has evolved from straight-to-cam self-narrativ...
Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Today we are turning the column over to esteemed guest and past Defector contributor Sarah York.
They handed me the keys to Drew’s Jamboroo, so I get to bitch and moan about something that’s driving me insane about being a sports fan right now: I can’t stand sports betting, and how quickly seemingly every man in mainstream sports media became such an insufferable loser about it, and how their incessant shilling for this shit has ushered in a crisis that I’m afraid we have no way of mitigating.
The Anaheim Ducks are a Defector-certified Fun Team, despite our firmly entrenched traditionalist bias against the idea of two hockey franchises in the Los Angeles market. The Ducks have spent the last seven years in complete irrelevancy after crashing out of a solid but har...
When seeking optimism, one wouldn't typically look to a backup goaltender for the Calgary Flames. The Wet Logs are bringing up the league's rear, and they've contractually and metaphorically hitched their wagon firmly to Dustin Wolf for the next eight seasons. A No. 2 netminder is not going to get much playing time, and what time he does get will statistically involve giving up a lot more goals than ones viewed from 200 feet away.
Devin Cooley, of all goaltenders out there, probably needs optimism more than most. The 28-year-old's road to the NHL was long and winding and filled with crappy teams, bouncing around the minor-league affiliates of the Predators, Sabres, and Sharks before getting the call-up for all of six games in San Jose in 2023–24. Without optimism, a guy with that career path probably still isn't playing professional hockey.
Louise is some kind of shepherd, a combination of shepherds, a Malinois, Groenendael, something. Belgian, Dutch, German. She came from a rescue in Tennessee; some damn fool bred a litter of puppies to sell and then found he could not sell them and then dumped them on a rescu...
When the National Women’s Soccer League settled with three separate attorneys general earlier this year—following investigations by all three into the league’s years of failure to prevent or adequately respond to player reports of harassment and sexual misconduct—the agreement came with several requirements. One was that the league would pay $5 million to players who…
On Tuesday night, Deandre Ayton received his second-ever alley-oop from LeBron James. The first, Ayton said in press after the Lakers' 140-126 win over the Utah Jazz, occurred when he was in eighth grade, at James's youth camp in Las Vegas. "He was court-hopping, playing wit...
As of publication, residents of San Francisco's District 4, comprising most of the Sunset from 7th Avenue out to the Pacific Ocean, do not have a representative on the city's Board of Supervisors; the 29-year-old former pet shop owner whom the mayor appointed to the position...
Coach John Beam's murder has been a national story, which seems like something that John Beam would find simultaneously hilarious and troublesome. His adult life was dedicated to teaching, and to comforting and confronting students and athletes for three decades at various p...
Entering Tuesday's final World Cup qualifier, Scotland was desperate for a win. Though even a loss would have kept Scottish hope alive via a possible playoff, a win would guarantee that Scotland would be making its return to the World Cup for the first time since 1998. (Big week for the not-since-98ers, it seems.) Tuesday's showdown in Glasgow against Denmark, the group leaders heading in, was essentially a playoff-to-avoid-the-playoff, and it delivered on the excitement implied by those stakes. Thanks to a late Kiernan Tierney winner, and a Kenny McLean exclamation point, Scotland survived 90-plus grueling and dramatic minutes to win 4-2 and book its ticket for the tournament next summer.
The eyes got me. Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger isn't the brightest, or the largest painting in its room—it might be the smallest—but it's easily the most striking. It called to me from the next room over at the Frick Collection in New York, where it's hung sinc...
As I finally got to work on writing Defector’s fifth Annual Report, I found myself noodling on some broader thoughts about the worker-owned media landscape. Tom said some sections would work as a standalone blog, and who am I to disagree with Defector’s Editor-in-Chief? You can find the full version of the Year 5 Annual…
Thomas Pynchon's reputation precedes him. He is literature's ur-diagnostician of the post-war psyche, the author of difficult doorstopper novels, and a sort of prophet of paranoia—someone ahead of his time in seeing the outlines of various malevolent forces lurking beyond th...
True lovers of gossip also appreciate humanity’s fondness for fantasizing, since there’s nothing like a fantasy to fuel speculation or move the plot forward. Someone has a bit of a thing for velvet? Someone’s got a crush? Excellent, yes, we love an appetizer almost as much as we love a meal.
We’re going all the way back to the 90s and all the way down to New Orleans for today’s gossip, which features a pair of goths, a dashing stranger, and the Anne Rice Vampire Ball. I’m sure you can imagine what might be going on here. You should embrace that speculative feeling before you press play, because even if you were to live a hundred lifetimes, you’ll never get this moment back.
John Fetterman’s just-released memoir, Unfettered, argues that he’s turned a corner and has everything under control. Fetterman was a “stubborn asshole” (his words), he was clinically depressed, he was in poor health, but that is, according to the book, all in the past...
