At Defector, in our staff Slack, we have a slogan: Root For Your Guys (RFYG). It's an ethic, and also very often an exhortation. As an upstanding sports fan, your only true calling is to root for those guys down there, wearing your team's colors. However much grumping you mi...

The Toronto Blue Jays laid down a pretty good template right from the start of their victory Friday night in Game 1 of the World Series. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. worked a first-inning seven-pitch walk, then Alejandro Kirk worked a nine-pitch walk, and even though Dodgers starte...

Rick Mathews has spent most recent weekends driving thousands of miles. Sometimes he flies somewhere and then drives. Sometimes he has several flights in a weekend between all that driving. This was what was required during the home stretch of his years-long quest to ride ev...

On Thursday, Donald Trump announced a presidential pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Zhao, better known as CZ, pleaded guilty to money laundering charges in November 2023, then spent most of the summer of 2024 in a U.S. prison before his September 2024 release. Binan...

Thursday's federal arrests of Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier came with a large and surprising information dump. It took me several hours, some press conference footage, and the help of a few colleagues to convey the relevant f...

“It just uhh … didn’t go our way.” That was how Mariners manager Dan Wilson responded to a reporter asking if he regretted not bringing in Andrés Muñoz during the seventh inning of Game 7 of the ALCS. That’s certainly an unsatisfying explanation for a decision that will live...

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: Does Alabama (9) still hate Kalen DeBoer? Has enough time passed since the opening weeke...

To get this out of the way: I find it still a little cruel when the Carolina Hurricanes and Colorado Avalanche celebrate their respective descents from the Hartford Whalers and Quebec Nordiques. Yes, it's been 30 years, but as long as fans of relocated teams are still alive,...

It's one thing to open your season with a 40-point, 15-rebound masterwork, but it is quite another to discover in short order that such deeds are in fact "the least you can do." This is the situation in which Victor Wembanyama now finds himself three days into his third seas...

Donald Trump bulldozed the East Wing of the White House this week, so that he can build a ballroom with a footprint nearly twice the size of the existing White House, financed by blatant graft. The White House is not Trump's property, and his proposed ballroom will undoubted...

There is no real sense in getting upset about the Los Angeles Dodgers, for more or less the same reasons that there is no real sense in getting upset about the weather. Both are awe-inspiring and annoying in about equal measure, but there is only so much that can really be done about either. In this case, I guess, "reasonable expectations about how much fun the World Series might be" are the equivalent of carrying an umbrella. In both cases, there is nothing to do but talk about it, and this week, returning champion guest Justin Halpern took a break from making award-winning television programs to do just that.

Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were arrested Thursday morning as part of an ongoing federal investigation into two separate gambling schemes. In a press conference afterward, officials from multiple enforcement agencies d...

In a sense, every manager is year-to-year. Baseball is extremely hard and extraordinarily rich in ways for things to go wrong, and firing a manager when things go wrong is the simplest way for an organization to signal to fans that it is addressing those things. It doesn't w...

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.

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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...