It is to our sorrow that even though the magnificent and manic Timberwolves-Nuggets hoop orgy started later and had a 50-point(!) overtime to sustain its value as post-holiday entertainment, the news of the day was earlier, far more mundane, and could not even cover you thro...

Game Of The Year is a designation that inevitably gets handed out several times a year, and not always with good reason. Recency bias can be a malign influence, it can be hard to stay objective in the moment, and the season moves so fast that it's difficult to remember what ...

I wasn’t sure, at first, that I wanted to read Heated Rivalry, or the rest of the novels in Rachel Reid’s best-selling “Game Changers” series. I had thoroughly enjoyed the first of Reid’s two standalone hockey romances, Time to Shine, which takes place in an imaginary world ...

For the third time this December, the San Antonio Spurs have beaten the otherwise barely beatable Oklahoma City Thunder. Each win showed off a different Spurs strength, with the first two being headlined by Victor Wembanyama's vertical pressure and the team's scoring depth, ...

This is what the Defector staff listened to and enjoyed this year.

From the Pyre, by The Last Dinner Party

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it.

I am no longer a full-time writer primarily because I work too slowly and the pay sucks. But a secondary reason is that my brain does not carve out hardline stances that make for good takes. For example: I don’t particularly like Christmas! But even with my humbug sliders maxed out, I could never reach the level of contempt that ur-crank Albert Burneko doled out for Santa Claus:

This is the time of year to be grateful for not having things stuck in our asses, and to think of those less fortunate than us. So spare a thought for those Americans who misjudged the capacity of their own orifices.

All reports are taken from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's database of emergency room visits, all descriptions are verbatim, and all the people involved had a very bad time.

Happy holidays, pals! The site will be in low-power mode for the next couple of days, so feel free to entertain yourselves here while we warm our feet by the fire.

Onward!

Longtime elite gymnastics coach Al Fong has been suspended for physical and emotional misconduct by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, the organization created by Congress to investigate reports of sexual abuse and misconduct across dozens of Olympic sports. The suspension will last for five years, per the USA Gymnastics database of suspended and restricted people.

Fong's wife, Armine Barutyan, who also coaches gymnastics, has been suspended by SafeSport for physical and emotional misconduct. Her suspension, per USAG, is for one year.

You would think a miserable year would be inspirational for a true hater. In actuality, it was hard to hold onto petty grievances and curmudgeonly grudges when the world has tilted into disarray. There is no respite from our constant toiling in a dystopian nightmare. Who rea...

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 comparing and contrasting highway rest stops and malls and discussing NFL quarterback busts, plus knives, best-movie lists, and more.

Hello! Drew is off. I am your Funbaggist today. All hail the Funbaggist!

The Golden State Warriors have been positively meh-tastic this season, as if it has finally dawned on them that they really are old after all these years. Even if the game has not fully passed them by, the NBA's talent dynamics surely have. They are not yet awful in the way ...

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have messy boys, an awkward living room layout, and advice on shopping for a couch. As a special holiday bonus, I will show you my extremely ugly bathroom sink.

Joe asks:

This is what the Defector staff saw and enjoyed this year.

Eephus

The NFL has announced that Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver DK Metcalf will be suspended for two games for an altercation with a Lions fan during Sunday's game. In the middle of the game, Metcalf walked over to where a fan in a blue wig was yelling things at him, grabbed the fan by his collar, and then bopped him on the face.

https://bsky.app/profile/nickbaumgardner.bsky.social/post/3majrrdk3uc26

Sabrina: Well, well, well. It’s the final Christmas movie Defector has decided to watch this year, and I simply can’t think of a less thrilling choice than Merv. What is Merv about? Technically speaking, Merv is about Merv, a dog whose human parents have just split up. The movie opens with Merv being transported between the homes of Russ (Charlie Cox) and Anna (Zooey Deschanel). Have any of you ever shared custody of a pet before?

Kelsey: I have not shared custody of a pet, no. And after watching Merv, I probably never would. 

The Detroit Pistons are the toast of the NBA (positive) two short years after being made into toast by the NBA. Not only are they on top of the Eastern Conference with the fifth-best net rating in the NBA, they are extremely fun and cool to watch. This week, we brought on Pistons expert and returning champion NBR guest Maitreyi Anantharaman to talk Pistons as well as the WNBA labor battle. She will be familiar to listeners and readers, though I must once again recommend her recent story on Ken Belson's book and the state of sports labor.

One of the less-invoked-but-still-annoying features of following sports is the idea that the future can be foretold based on a typically stunted review of the recent past. For the Kansas City Chiefs, it had been a debate among our louder pundit-o-blatherers about the state of their dynasty—specifically whether their bay window of glory had been reduced to a peephole.

Then the gods weighed in with the answer, with the subtlety of a sash window being slammed down on Andy Reid's tongue. And yes, we cleaned up that image in deference to the season.

Jake Paul has been begging to get his teeth knocked in for a long time. Anthony Joshua finally did just that to the boxing gadfly in the sixth round of Friday’s fiasco of a fight from Miami.

Actually, along with breaking a jaw and ending the bout, Joshua’s massive overhand right might have saved two careers. Before it landed, both he and Paul had spent the night damaging themselves reputationally to the point that their ring runs were likely on the ropes. 

Can you ask someone to “close your eyes and watch” something? Just how private does a conversation need to be in order to upgrade from speaking “privately” to “very privately”? What does it mean for a wild pigeon to be “essentially on life support”? These are some of the man...

The North Carolina Tar Heels, fresh off of the cataclysmic first season of the Bill Belichick era, have decided that what this program really needs is more notable old horndogs who used to be great at coaching football. In that spirit, the school has turned to Bobby Petrino.

Petrino is expected to be the new offensive coordinator for Belichick's Tar Heels, according to reports from ESPN and On3. This comes after the firing of Freddy Kitchens and other lackeys Belichick has thrown under the bus to make it seem like he is planning to change things around. Petrino spent most of the past season as interim head coach for Arkansas, a return to glory after his infamous horndoggery-related 2012 firing from the school. The glory was short-lived, though, as the team went winless the rest of the season.

Bari Weiss, the little smirking suck-up that is presently editor-in-chief of CBS News, intervened at the last minute Sunday to spike a completed story, titled "Inside CECOT," that was scheduled to air on that evening's edition of 60 Minutes. The story, exposing conditions at...

Since we’ve no place to go, let’s solve the Monday crossword. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Rebecca Goldstein and Rachel Fabi, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Rebecca is a research scientist in Albany, Calif. Rachel is a bioethicist in Syracuse, N.Y. Together, they are the Fall 2025 Boswords Themeless League Champions, Stormy Division, Pairs.

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.

These are the sports moments from 2025 that the Defector staff enjoyed.

A’ja Wilson Hits A Game-Winner In Phoenix

With only three goals in his first 14 games, Connor McDavid looked like he might be having one of those years where he focuses more on setting up his teammates than scoring himself. He has these seasons from time to time, and there's nothing wrong with them—in '23–'24 he tallied a round 100 assists and finished third in MVP voting—but as McDavid's finite prime rolls on, it'd be pleasant to see him decide to take over games, like he used to when he was scoring 40 (or 64).

Well. About that. Since scoring three in 14, McDavid has scored 20 goals in his last 23 games, and 12 in his last 10. He is metaphorically turning on the jets, often by (also metaphorically) turning on the jets.

In Defector's 2025 annual report, our business guy Jasper Wang wrote, "When we started the company, a big chunk of our staffers were in their 20s, bestowing large portions of our editorial output with the imprimatur of youth, but it turns out that every 28-year-old becomes 3...

Watch sports for long enough, and you will come to learn an ironclad yet vague rule: There are some things that a man simply cannot say to another man.

This law of dudehood is most often invoked by a player following a game in which there was a particularly spirited bout of shit-talking. One party will sometimes end up more aggrieved than the other in these circumstances, and it is when they are asked to explain their ire after the game that you can expect to encounter this particular talk about guy talk.

How much you will or won't enjoy the Caleb Williams experience depends almost entirely on the timing of your dosage. Catch him during one of those quarters when the Bears can't buy a first down and all Williams seems capable of doing is avoiding pressure and throwing the bal...

While the rest of the NBA's elite have distinguished themselves in a series of showcase games this month, Giannis Antetokounmpo has spent his December in a prison of his own making. The fourth-best player in the NBA has reached a dead end with the Milwaukee Bucks, yet neithe...

I was able to hold it together until I was alone, but I cried when I learned that the Mets had traded Mookie Wilson. This was at summer camp, so the news might have been days old by the time it finally made its way to me and alone time was decently hard to come by. I was 11,...