I called Wednesday night's NHL slate "Momentum Wednesday." Look, I'm sure one of you wise guys could have come up with a better name. But I was too focused on the action. There were three questions that hung over the trio of games on tap: "Can the Devils keep winning?", "Can...

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. Analytics have made NFL foo...

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.

It feels like every few years Tyler, the Creator does something that leads to everyone re-litigating his past as an angry 4-Chan-adjacent troll who used to rap a bunch of murder and rape lyrics and tweet racist shock humor. It's almost a tradition at this point when people who only know Tyler from his post-edgelord pivot are confronted with the raps that made him famous in the first place. Rarely does Tyler show any remorse for his early stuff. It's usually the opposite. Tyler tends to treat his past trolling and ugly jokes as just that, jokes, and you're the idiot for taking it so seriously.

If you don’t work at a university or have college-age kids, you may have missed the flurry of news stories and social media banter about AI adoption in higher ed, stories which have snowballed into the early Fall semester. I don’t mean the fear that AI-based cheating is goin...

In our big NBA preview, I asked what it might look like if Victor Wembanyama adjusted his shot diet in order to replace a good chunk of his three-point attempts with shots taken closer to the rim. The Spurs' first game of the season, a 125-92 win over the Mavericks, gave us ...

On Tuesday night, the Houston Rockets started the tallest quintet of players an NBA opening night has ever seen, with three arguably power forward-sized payers occupying the nominal backcourt and the twin mashers of Alperen Sengun and Steven Adams playing under the basket. A...

At the end of Baby Boom, the 1987 film starring Diane Keaton as a career woman who suddenly becomes a mother after "inheriting" a baby, she stands before a board room full of the very men who decided that motherhood was distracting her from her high-flying corporate career. ...

Could this be the year that Arsenal puts it all together? It's only October, and the Gunners aren't perfect, but Mikel Arteta's side is better than it has ever been under the Spaniard. Even with a loss to Liverpool in the Premier League and a late draw against Manchester City, Arsenal has looked every bit the side that it dreamed of being after spending big this summer get over the hump. The club didn't exactly need a singular game to announce itself as one of the big contenders for trophies this year, but Tuesday's Champions League match against Atlético Madrid served that purpose, as the Gunners shook off a languid first half to wallop the Spanish side 4-0, leaving no doubt that this Arsenal is ready to compete for everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrY4OMudDoI

October in the NHL is a spooky season of jump-scares. The Tampa Bay Lightning, for example, have won just one game out of six. Eek! The Calgary Flames, after taking their opener, have since gone down a six-game house of horrors. HELP! The Red Wings have ripped off five strai...

The man that my wife and I found ourselves talking to at the bar of a restaurant in Rockland, Me. in the summer of 2019 had arrived in town as your fancier visitors do, which is by boat. He told us that he worked in Democratic politics, and because my wife and I care about b...

These two facts are indisputable: The New York Jets are an extremely bad football team, and Justin Fields is an extremely bad quarterback. Everyone in the organization shares responsibility for the team's 0-7 start to the season, but a big a chunk of it belongs to Fields, who has played miserably and passed for a combined 91 yards in his last two starts (one of which saw him benched after halftime). Just about anyone can get away with slagging Fields right now, but it's a bit much to see the guy who signs his paychecks try to get in on the action.

That's what Jets owner Woody Johnson did when he took some time out of the NFL's fall meetings to talk to reporters about his team. While letting everyone know that first-year head coach Aaron Glenn still has his full support, Johnson managed to call Fields essentially useless.

Friday is Presidential Election Day in Ireland. What was a ho-hum electoral season got overheated when the campaign of Jim Gavin, a Gaelic football legend turned political neanderfuck and one of only three candidates on the ballot, imploded at the 11th hour over news that he'd screwed a former tenant out of overpaid rent 16 years ago.

Irish campaigns are a whole lot shorter than we’re used to stateside: The presidential ballot wasn't finalized until late September. But that still left time for Gavin to commit a passel of gaffes.

PITTSBURGH — Baseball is one of those sports where most fans head into Opening Day at least with a hint of hope. How else do you explain 48,000 showing up for the Rockies’ home opener? This year, the Pirates’ first game in Pittsburgh started with angry fans flying a pla...

Of all the NFL teams currently residing in the dumpster, the Miami Dolphins might be the most pungent. The quarterback, the offense, the defense—it all reeks. When things go badly, the head coach's job is to sniff out what stinks and address it. Mike McDaniel is just kind of spraying it down with Febreze and hoping it goes away.

On Sunday, quarterback Tua Tagovailoa went 12-for-23 with 100 passing yards and three interceptions, achieving a career-low single-game passer rating of 24.1, as Miami got thumped 31-6 by the Cleveland Browns. The Browns! The only nice thing you could say about that Dolphins game is that the Raiders were worse. The Fins are now 1-6, with their only victory coming over the winless Jets.

This week's Nothing But Respect was a special one, not only because we got to talk to a musician who has been awarded Best New Music by Pitchfork three times, but also because we got to get the story behind the story of Anthony Edwards giving Timothee Chalamet the White Boy Of The Year Award. What more could you ask for on the eve of the NBA season?

In Part 1, Harry and I were joined by Tim Krell of How To Dress Well. Tim is a thoughtful person and dedicated Nuggets fan, and he had a lot to say about Hunter Tyson getting the final Nuggets roster spot over Kessler Edwards. We got into a lot of Nuggets chatter, the Thunder as agentic basketball team, and the hilarious, busted Sacramento Kings. As I was in the process of asking Tim if he was aware of Devin Carter's hairline situation, his internet suffered a catastrophic failure. What are they hiding from us?

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 college coaches, Muppets, overpriced herbs, and more.

Your letters:

Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals is the site of the most infamous conspiracy theory in recent NBA history. The Sacramento Kings were playing the Lakers for a trip to the Finals down in L.A., and despite losing on a revolting, miraculous Robert Horry buzzer-beater...

On Friday morning, when the barista at my local coffee shop leaned over the counter, wrinkled his face into a hideous demonic leer, and hissed "Ennnnnn ... Beeeeee ... Ayyyyyy" at me, I will confess, dear Reader, that I had no idea what the hell he was getting at (and my tip...

After the Hunt, the latest film from Luca Guadagnino, is ostensibly about a great many things. It is a film about campus politics, generational divide, the slippery nature of power dynamics, fantasy kitchen apartments, and whether you can be too much of a wife guy. But ...

BONK!

TMZ broke the news Sunday that former NFL running back Doug Martin had died in Oakland, Calif. at the age of 36. Though the precise circumstances of his death remain unclear, one thing we do know is that Martin died while in police custody.

Through a statement, the Oakland Police Department has offered its version of events leading up to Martin's death. According to the cops, officers were responding to a call about a break-in at 4:15 a.m. on Saturday morning. After encountering Martin in the house they were called to, "a brief struggle occurred" and Martin "became unresponsive" after being taken into custody. The police department's statement goes on to say that paramedics were called to the scene, and that Martin later died in the hospital.

The Toronto Blue Jays are worthy champions by any measure, whether that be Vladimir Guerrero's outsized gifts or George Springer's uncanny sense of the moment or Alejandro Kirk's combination of improbable results and very civilian silhouette. They earned their way to this World Series by reducing the Seattle Mariners to Julio Rodriguez, Cal Raleigh, and a bunch of other employees, and more power to them for that.

They're going to need all that power and more given what awaits them, and what we all would like to see—a fully scheduled, extended drama playing out across a World Series that lasts until November. The alternative is the Los Angeles Dodgers administering one final beatdown to an overmatched challenger and a winter of people wallowing in the time-suck that is the salary cap debate.

The Las Vegas Raiders played the Chiefs on Sunday, or at least appeared on the same field as the Chiefs on Sunday. They were certainly there, in their spiffy white uniforms, in Kansas City, but with Brock Bowers and Jakobi Meyers both injured and inactive, “played” may have been asking too much.

Vegas never entered the red zone. Only once did the offense cross midfield. On that occasion, they gazed longingly at the end zone from the Chiefs’ 46. In seven attempts, they did not convert a single third down. They totaled 95 yards—70 passing, 25 rushing—to Kansas City's 434. Vegas lost, 31-0.

Perhaps it should not have been surprising that a matchup between the fourth- and sixth-placed teams in the Premier League produced an absolute firecracker of a match. Perhaps Bournemouth and Crystal Palace are two really good and, maybe more importantly for the purposes of a neutral, really fun sides, and their Saturday showdown at Selhurst Park was just a perfect clash at a perfect time. Whatever the reasoning, the 3-3 classic was the best game of this young season—and yes, I am including all of the Liverpool last-minute nonsense, including the two matches against these very teams—and a thrilling look England's upper-midtable, a place where everyone is a tough out and no lead is safe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dm3zj7cUGQ

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.

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The National Football League has a firings gap. Though still the worldwide leader in commercial interruptions and enormous American flags, the NFL has fallen shamefully behind its college cousin at the vital measure of in-season coach firings; that figure is currently eight,...

After all the debate about fair application of Papaya Rules and which of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri is really McLaren's number one driver, the answer, as it is turning out, is neither of them. One race is a fluke, two is coincidence, three is when you really start consid...

The first sign that fight night in Brooklyn on Saturday might not be a big success was the disparity between the line at the front entrance, which was nonexistent, and the line at the side door where you picked up credentials, which was long. This indicated that while there ...

Who among us doesn't have musical trauma of some sort? If you didn't cry through piano lessons as a child, maybe you stared longingly at the student band at high school football games, wishing your parents could have paid for a clarinet rental so you could be out there too. ...

It was a lovely, balmy late-fall afternoon. The low sun betrayed the warmth's incongruence for the time of year, and warned of the inevitable approach of winter. It was a lovely day to be alive; a lovely day to be outside and not watching your two-win football team. It was a...