Bernie Parent was already a Flyers legend when he retired from the NHL in 1979. It's the rest of his life made him a Philadelphia legend.
The Hall of Fame goaltender, who won consecutive Stanley Cups with the Flyers in 1974 and '75, died Sunday at age 80. The Montreal native spent a decade with the Flyers, then stuck around the Philadelphia area for the rest of his life; he was a ubiquitous presence at Flyers events, on local TV, at charity auctions, down the shore, et cetera. Shoot a hockey puck anywhere in the Philadelphia area over the last 45 years and you might’ve hit Bernie Parent.
This should come as little surprise to those who have studied the broader American condition, but we often hate the very things that we should find most comforting and beneficial. No, we are not discussing vegetables. Those are objectively wrong no matter how they are prepar...
Don't miss your solving window! This week's puzzle was constructed by Hanh Huynh and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hanh is a bankruptcy attorney who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife and two kids.
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.
Six news outlets—Defector Media, the Miami Herald, Scripps Media, CBS4 (WFOR-TV), NBC6 (WTVJ-TV), and Telemundo 51(WSCV-TV)—all asked for permission to intervene in Tyreek Hill's divorce case on Friday, making the request so they could argue in court that documents labeled c...
Victor Robles is back. He's been back, technically, for a while: Robles, who missed most of five months after nuking his shoulder on an incredible catch back in Seattle's 10th game of the season, returned to the Mariners outfield for the end of August. However! I would argue...
The Washington Commanders have a deal with Washington D.C. to build a new 65,000-seat stadium in Ward 7, on the site of the crumbling old bones of RFK Stadium. The D.C. city council passed a funding bill late Wednesday, by a vote of 11–2; with that settled, the Commanders ex...
Even peripheral attention is finite, and you would have been forgiven, on or about the morning of July 9, for tucking away the AL Central in your mental "pay no mind" file. On that date, the Detroit Tigers were incandescent and had carved out a seemingly intractable lead in ...
Election day in Ireland is a month away. So the major presidential candidates appeared this week at the National Ploughing Championships, the equivalent of going to the Iowa State Fair to bolster bumpkin bona fides. Jim Gavin, who parlayed his role as the manager of Dublin’s...
Kelsey Mitchell was drafted to the Indiana Fever in 2018. She left Ohio State as the Big Ten conference’s all-time leading scorer and the NCAA leader in career made threes, records that stood until a certain future teammate showed up. In the WNBA, Mitchell's scoring numbers ...
There are a number of reasons why I will not reveal how many Hallmark movies I've seen, and only one of them is that I myself have tried very hard to avoid knowing the precise number. Whatever it is, that number is surely more than I could bear to look in the face. Even acco...
If you would’ve told me at the summer break that the Utah Royals, Chicago Stars, and Houston Dash would each earn more points in next the seven matchweeks than the Orlando Pride or the San Diego Wave—hell, even if you told me they’d earn more points combined than either team...
What I like about watching A'ja Wilson operate is how simple she makes the game look. Not easy, but simple, as she applies basic principles of footwork and positioning at the highest possible level to shred elite defenses, never really needing to do anything more complicated...
Two weeks ago, in partnership with our pals over at Immaculate Grid by Sports Reference, we announced Some Guys I Remember From The 21st Century. Between then and now, we remembered not just some but a whole lot of Guys. Many of you did the same: As of last week, 24,455 distinct athletes had been remembered across more than 36,000 submitted grids. That is quite a bit of remembering, even if you strip out David Roth’s [number redacted] entries.
Across all sports, the most-frequently remembered players comprise a nonet of MLB legends:
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: Brent Pry was technically the second coach to be fired this year (UCLA's canning of DeSh...
Back on Sept. 5, facing the Miami Marlins in the top of the fourth inning, Philadelphia's Harrison Bader socked a Lake Bachar slider deep into the left-field stands to give the Phillies a 5-1 lead. The now-infamous part happened at the far end of the ball's flight.
As caug...
The team didn’t win, but everyone stayed. It wasn’t even their building. And still, most of the Golden State Valkyries fans who’d schlepped to an alternate arena in San Jose for the team’s first-ever home playoff game stuck around to cheer when the season was over. The WNBA’...
"Um ... there we go ... uh-oh," said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stage as he attempted to answer a video call through a combination of movements between a wristband and a pair of glasses. "Well, I ... let's see what happened there ... that's too bad," he continued, shortly before cutting short the live demo. The video call went unanswered.
It is strange how normal it has been to work with Dan McQuade during the illness that he wrote about at Defector a few weeks ago. There are some times when he's not available or just not feeling his best, and occasionally he will mention in passing that he is "radioactive," but also he is still around and doing good blogs and getting upset about the Eagles and describing specific episodes of Baywatch Nights and Pacific Blue as the spirit moves him. If he hadn't written about his experience with neuroendocrine cancer over the last year and change, I doubt any reader would have known about it. So it fits that while we talked about his illness and recovery on the podcast this week, we mostly just talked about the stuff we talk about when Dan McQuade is on the podcast.
When I read that Robert Redford died on Tuesday, I did a double take. I didn't realize he was 89, but even if he was, he had that air of immortality that attaches to all true movie stars. The double take seemed appropriate—Robert Redford, over his many decades on screen, had...
Through five matches of the 2025-26 season—four in the Premier League, plus Wednesday's Champions League opener against Atlético Madrid—Liverpool has gotten out to and subsequently blown three 2-0 leads (lovers of the "most dangerous lead in soccer!" cliche are in heaven right now). The Reds have also struggled to score against Arsenal and Burnley, two well-drilled sides in defense. And yet, thanks to a fifth-straight late winner, Liverpool has had a perfect start to the season: five matches, five wins, five go-ahead goals scored in the 80th minute or later. What the hell are we supposed to take from this?
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.
Before we get to the other ...
Training camps are opening across the NHL, which means it's time to motivate the fellas. Never mind that pro athletes have been hyper-competitive from birth, or that the tangible reward for performance is to be financially set for life—they need slogans! Nothing gets a hockey player going like slogans.*
*I don't know that this is true. But I know that the people who come up with the slogans believe it is true.
It's become clear that Charlie Kirk is worth more to Trumpworld dead than he ever was alive. His fatal shooting last week in Utah has been used as a cudgel in an attempted purge of wrong-thinking liberals and leftists, anyone who dare not treat a hateful YouTuber's death wit...
A good crowd can smudge the chalk. A fired-up team might erase it. There were only two games in Tuesday night’s WNBA first-round playoff slate, but a third winner emerged nonetheless. The league’s new playoff format is a lot of fun.
With a new charter travel program and som...
President Donald Trump is in the United Kingdom, meeting with the British royal family. Here we see him with the King and Queen of the U.K., plus a British functionary of some sort, and also Kung Lao of Mortal Kombat fame, presumably representing the peoples of Earthrealm.
Anyone with a paltry two arms is probably familiar with handedness, our predisposition to use either the left or right hand for particular tasks. (No ambidexterity erasure intended; you are valid!) But if you have the privilege of owning eight arms, how do you decide which a...
Baseball tends to present the first men to crack the sport’s shameful racial barrier through a gauzy lens, their caps topped with a halo. There is the sanctified Jackie Robinson, and his Brooklyn teammates Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella; there’s Larry Doby, the first black ...
The virgins on my screen are in their 20s and 30s. The pilot opens with seven women and eight men. Two are Texans, one is a late-blooming comedian, two went to Brigham Young University, and two wear cross necklaces. What unites them is they’ve all—up to now—made the choice t...
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.
