Harry and I did not know that Nico Harrison was about to be fired when we invited famed blogger Ock Sportello back on Nothing But Respect this week, but the timing worked out perfectly, as our planned Brooklyn Nets vivisection (yes that is a threat) dovetailed with the Nico ...

The San Jose Sharks have been beneath your notice for years. As this formerly stalwart franchise has missed the playoffs in six straight seasons, they've existed as a total non-competitive nothing that makes every aspect of the game as easy as possible for their opponents. W...

Some NBA games are starting at 11:00 p.m. ET. This is a new development coinciding with the league striking a new broadcast deal with NBC, which aired Tuesday night's Nuggets–Kings game on the Peacock streaming app. I'm an adaptable person who generally accepts change cheerfully, but trying to watch last night's game made me feel like several media executives were spitting directly into my face.

I know NBA games never start at the advertised time, but it was still annoying to turn on the broadcast a few minutes before 11:00 p.m. and see a big "Countdown To Tipoff" graphic on the screen with 20 minutes on it. That's fine. I can read a book for a little bit.

We’re back, baby! And we’re kicking off our ninth season of Normal Gossip by gabbing it up with Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai! 

In this episode, Rachelle and Malala dig into such questions as whether it’s a good idea to let your college roommate plan a “dirt cheap” trip to Europe for you, whether hitchhiking is an important life experience, and whether comparing hand sizes always means you want to bone. 

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today we have drill-less art hanging, an extremely deep closet, and a room with too many jobs.

Mario asks:

America may have invented match fixing back in the first decades of the twentieth century, and we may be bringing it back in this one with new gambling scandals in basketball and baseball, but at some level it is hard to escape the sense that we’re resting on ...

In the winter of 1977, Sports Illustrated reporter Ray Kennedy ventured into the Riverside Table Tennis club at 96th and Broadway. It was a dingy joint with leaky pipes, below street level, beneath a supermarket, inhabited by characters with names like Freddie the Fence, Bet...

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SF GATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about Trump in the booth, floaters, tape nerd, woke travel plans, and more.

Your letters:

Guillermo del Toro has devoted much of his career to sanctifying monsters. In his first feature film, Cronos, an aging antique dealer stumbles into eternal life, becoming a vampire who, rather than being dangerous or terrifying, is filled with pathos and understanding. For P...

Somewhere there's a judge in Louisiana who isn't hooked into a political machine and can't be bought by one—maybe. And that is the judge, should he or she actually exist, who should hear Brian Kelly's lawsuit against his former employers at LSU. To be clear, everyone else sh...

The Dallas Mavericks fired team president Nico Harrison today, a development that was leaked to multiple reporters and then confirmed in an open letter from Mavericks owner Patrick Dumont. This came together very quickly. The team is 3–8 after Monday's home loss to the Milwa...

Buying a ticket to an Edmonton Oilers game does not in itself guarantee you'll see Connor McDavid do something so spectacular you'll remember it for the rest of your life. From my personal experience, it's more likely that he'll semi-quietly rack up a couple of assists. Neve...

The Miami Heat and the Cleveland Cavaliers played one of the best games of this young NBA season on Monday night. You might have missed it while watching one of the other "one of the best games of this young NBA season" that happened during a bonkers night in the league (Wemby! Desmond Bane! The Pistons! Uh, Grayson Allen!), but it's true. The Cavs started out hot in the first quarter before the Heat walloped them in the second, and then the Cavs roared back in the fourth, thanks in part to four straight Sam Merrill three-pointers in the quarter, to force overtime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_i5ysqvHeQ

For decades, paleontologists have been terrorized by the notion of a teenage Tyrannosaurus rex. Starting in the 1940s, excavations unearthed skulls belonging to what appeared to be smaller and more slender tyrannosaurs. But the scientists were sharply divided on what these s...

In 1974, John Cassavetes released A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands as a mother going through a mental breakdown. I can't imagine that people at the time were ready for such an unflinching look at psychological collapse, particularly from a woman who is exp...

In the final hours before the Nov. 1 UFC bout between featherweights Isaac Dulgarian and Yadier Del Valle, the betting odds on Dulgarian, the favorite, abruptly dropped from -250, meaning a bettor would have to bet $250 to make $100 on a wager that Dulgarian would win, to ar...

After dominating a field of her most dangerous peers, and claiming $5.2 million—the largest purse in the history of pro tennis, men's or women's—Elena Rybakina held up the champ's trophy at the WTA Finals. It was the first time she had won that title. Rybakina barely qualif...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — During the break between the first and second quarters, the Sacramento Kings interrupted one anti-competitive spectacle with another. Six babies lined up to race, only to hear the starting gun and refuse to crawl, wriggle, or even squirm, opting ins...

The Greater New York Football Playing Area has enjoyed the invigorating sensation of firing a coach nearly every year for the last decade and change—2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2024—which, for all the other things it suggests about the quality of NFL footba...

After losing to West Virginia on Saturday, the Buffaloes are officially out of contention for the bowl games this year. Despite the 29-22 final score, the game was never really in doubt for West Virginia. The Buffs have been one of the worst teams in the Big 12 this year, a team sprinkled with top talent but not enough for any consistency.

https://youtu.be/maLAGb2HBqA?si=MmUbMnTwCXw0QOaR

It's time to take Sunderland seriously. Coming into the season, I never imagined I'd be saying that, even if I felt that the Black Cats were not going to be easy relegation fodder. That's just the nature of promotion to the Premier League. Moving on up may come with a lot of...

Insofar as there is any small thing in baseball, one pitch is as discrete as it can get. If you are a good pitcher—at one point, say, the best relief pitcher in baseball—you can work around a first-pitch ball, even when trying to close out the ninth inning of a game. If you ...

Our grotesque slob of a president attended the football game Sunday between the Detroit Lions and the Washington Commanders, held at the far-flung hell-hole of a suburban stadium that Commanders owner Josh Harris is in the process of abandoning. The occasion was the team's a...

No crossword’s as sweet as ours. This puzzle was constructed by Ryan Judge, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Ryan is a recent college grad, full-time Trader Joe's crew member, and freelance crossword constructor who lives in Pittsburgh with his girlfriend and tuxedo cat.

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. Note that we're pausing open submissions until Dec. 1.

Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were placed on administrative leave in July while the league investigated them for potentially violating MLB's gambling policies. The league was looking into whether or not Clase and Ortiz had been purposely throwing...

You know the deal with Gus Johnson. He’s the play-by-play guy who cried miracle, the man for whom no third down conversion is insignificant. Tell Gus Johnson that your happy hour special includes dollar oysters and you’d better not be standing next to a windowpane.

There’s great danger in being such an excitable play-by-play guy, because what happens when you ARE calling something remarkable, perhaps even historic? Well, if you’re Gus Johnson, you experience what I can only describe as a kind of late-stage puberty. Listen for yourself:

It wasn't so long ago that the Washington Commanders were named after a racial slur. Thanks to Donald Trump, that slur might end up being the second-most offensive moniker to be associated with the team.

According to ESPN, Trump wants the Commanders to name their new stadium, which will be built on the site of the old RFK Stadium, after him. ESPN's report describes "back-channel communications" between the White House and members of the Commanders ownership group during which Trump's wishes were communicated to the team.

You picked a bad weekend to fly. Over 1,500 flights in the US were cancelled yesterday, and over 1,200 over them have already been cancelled this morning. One of those may have been yours. You’re stuck at airport right now, staring up at the Departures board and seeing nothi...

The focus of the Anti-Defamation League has become entirely warped. Support for Israel was always part of the organization's goals, but typically that was nested within a broader declaration to fight back against hate or discrimination. As seen from the recent removal of the...

The Los Angeles Dodgers had a parade Thursday to celebrate their second straight World Series victory. The Colorado Rockies, working the other end of the baseball alley, knew that they had to respond, if not in kind then in volume. And so they did.

Yes, the Rockies acknowledged the Dodgers' place at the cutting edge of the new baseball with a nod to a 14-year-old movie about a 23-year-old season that ended in a first-round playoff loss. It did not take the worst team in baseball a full week to trump the best team in baseball with an equally jaw-dropping and equally on-brand moment, but you avert your eyes from Rockyball at your own peril. You watch them at your own peril, too, which tells you the strength of their weakness.