Covering WNBA games in person is a strange experience. Enriching, for sure: It's cool to hear directly from players and coaches, to be able to pepper them with whatever questions I'd like. Recently, I was able to cobble their insights into an Olivia Miles profile that received, I suspect, fewer comments than this post will. Sometimes you luck into great color: It was funny, at Wednesday night's Fire-Sky game, to hear Portland head coach Alex Sarama directing his players to hunt Rachel Banham...
about 15 hours ago
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The parents of former NFL running back Doug Martin— who died eight months ago while in Oakland police custody —are suing the city of Oakland, five of its police officers, and an ambulance company in federal court. In the lawsuit filed earlier this week, Martin's parents say their son, who was 36 years old at the time, died from restraint asphyxia caused by police officers. This was compounded, the lawsuit says, by the paramedics failing to arrive until more than 15 minutes after the call for s...
about 17 hours ago
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If you went back in time to New York in the early '90s, not a soul would believe you if you told them Jay-Z would end up where he is today. Well, maybe one person would: Jay himself.
Jay-Z's relatively delayed breakthrough made him something of a late bloomer, even in an era when stars weren't minted as quickly and early as they are now. It took him a while to figure out how to be himself on wax. It was his big homie Jaz-O who put him on, and the two of them had a Das EFX, Fu-Schnickens fas...
about 18 hours ago
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The Ernie Clement Voting Scandal shoved all the rest of the news this week into the street—the World Cup, the NBA draft, the NHL draft, the NBA trades, the NHL trades, the Mets firing their manager for the sin of managing the Mets, the latest sports media meltdown around but not quite about Caitlin Clark, all of it.
Or maybe you didn't notice that Ernie Clement was the highest vote-getter among American League players for the upcoming All-Star Game in Philadelphia. It's quite possible that ...
about 20 hours ago
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Now that New York state and Erie County have spent $850 million in taxpayer dollars, the largest public contribution for any NFL facility in history, it's time for the next important step in the process of opening the Buffalo Bills' new stadium: kissing owner Terry Pegula's ass. While Pegula, for once in his life, did not say something incredibly fucking stupid at this week's ribbon-cutting ceremony, every other person in attendance seemed to bend over backward to make sure that no one watchin...
about 20 hours ago
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This post originally appeared on June 24 in the Oakland Review of Books , which is worth a subscription even if you don’t live in Oakland or read books.
Carl must slay the naga princess! If he doesn’t, his best friend—the talking cat-wizard Princess Donut—will die instead. But Carl and his team have a plan. They track the princess to the god Khepri’s sanctum in the Vanquisher Club and slay the club’s guards with a MacGyver-demonology contraption. Inside the sanctum, though, Carl is surpr...
about 21 hours ago
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It takes a special kind of creep to stand out for sleaziness among NBA owners, objectively one of the worst demographics our species has ever established. Tom Dundon has been the official majority owner of the Portland Trail Blazers for less than three months, and already he is a standard-bearer . It's clear he doesn't mind being a villain. Having already downsized the organization with layoffs, pinched on travel accommodations, stiffed his team's two-way players, and cheaped out on playoff T-...
about 21 hours ago
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"I score in bunches, and then sometimes kinda just level out," Toronto Tempo guard Marina Mabrey said near the end of her press conference, after the Tempo's 125-97 win over the L.A. Sparks on Thursday. It was an accurate description of her own game, which is built on constant movement and a scalding but occasionally evanescent shooting touch. Last night, however, we finally got to see what would happen if Mabrey never reached the "kinda just level out" phase. What if a whole game was just one...
about 22 hours ago
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Late in the morning of June 13, as most New York City sports fans were mapping out their plans for watching Game 5 of the NBA Finals, I was on the A train headed away from the Brooklyn neighborhood I've called home for 17 years. I was on my way to Aqueduct Racetrack, post time 1:10 p.m .
At the end of the month, after 132 years of equine action, Aqueduct will no longer run horses. The first race took place on Sept. 27, 1894, on a track operated by the Queens County Jockey Club, in a facili...
about 23 hours ago
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Imagine you are seated at a table. A guy sits across from you. He is vaguely humanoid, with a long torso and two arms raised in fist-like clubs. His full name is Edible Agent, but we will call him Eddie and use he/him pronouns. There's something about Eddie that makes you feel at ease. Maybe it's his fragrance, which reminds you of apple juice, of childhood. Maybe it's his two black eyes that gaze upon you without judgment. You decide to unburden yourself to him. You tell him that you've been ...
Drew is at the beach, the sun is high and hot in the sky, and all the major sports events are either over or in the early going. If there was ever going to be a moment to give the podcast over to a discussion of podcast industry dysfunction, conquering the fear of failure, and the goings-on among the cadre of horned-up half-sociopaths on Love Island USA , this was it. I knew what had to be done, and so I made the call. Or I sent the Slack message, and then I sent a second one, and then sometim...
SAN FRANCISCO — On Wednesday night, I attended a Major League Baseball game for the first time since the final game the Athletics played in the Oakland Coliseum. I have all but stopped paying attention to the sport, less in active protest than as a casualty of no longer being able to pay like $9 to be inside of a major-league ballpark (OK, fine, "major-league" "ballpark") within 30 minutes, though the existence of the geographically unmoored Athletics is omnidirectionally repulsive. It was an ...
Everyone's favorite summer sport is back in full swing. The country is tuning in. There are tears. There are shrieks of joy. There is a surprising and concerning amount of toe-sucking! Love Island USA , in its eighth season, has now aired three full weeks of episodes. With tonight's episode, the show will be halfway through the mid-season twist known as Casa Amor. Now seems like as good a time as any to check in with our bravest soldiers: the members of the Defector Staff who willingly sacrifi...
FLUSHING, N.Y. — You sit in the upper decks of that baseball park in Queens where you have spent so many nights both dismal and beautiful, and you stare out at the New York City sky. Everyone around you is booing. This is a good moment to wonder what you are doing there.
You were raised by a Cardinals fan. You could have been happy, or at least middlingly happy, or at least self-satisfied in the way that Cardinals fans seem to be. You could also have followed your brother, abandoned all se...
The Charlotte Hornets have given up on their goofy, gifted, accursed son LaMelo Ball, who was shipped to the Minnesota Timberwolves in a trade Thursday morning.
In return for their franchise player and Josh Green, the Hornets received a pittance : forward Naz Reid, a 2033 unprotected first-round pick, three first-round pick swaps of dubious value (2028, 2029, 2030), three second-round picks that begin in 2029, and the relief of shedding Green's bad contract. Hornets fans will be rightfully ...
It is impossible for Brazil, the most iconic team in the world's biggest sporting event, to have anything resembling a quiet tournament, but the Seleção managed to float through the first two matches of this World Cup a little under the radar. Part of that is because it takes a lot to stand out in a 48-team tournament, but the other part has to do with meeting lowered expectations and little more.
Brazil drew its first match 1-1 against a very good Moroccan side, then beat up on Haiti 3-0 i...
Detroit Lions cornerback Terrion Arnold was arrested late Wednesday in Tampa, Fla., and charged with four counts of kidnapping and four counts of armed robbery. Jail records showed Arnold turned himself in and was booked in Hillsborough County's Orient Road Jail.
Arnold's arrest is related to an ongoing criminal case in which six codefendants have been charged with assaulting and robbing three men in an apartment. According to court documents filed by Hillsborough prosecutors, the six codef...
On June 25, 1976, three and a half years after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S., The Omen hit theaters. Most viewers remember the high-drama deaths—by impalement, decapitation, hanging—or the creepiness of Harvey Spencer Stephens’s young Damien, or Gregory Peck’s commanding gravitas. But I always remember poor Kathy.
Katherine Thorn (Lee Remick, making the most of a fairly thin role) is the wife of Robert Thorn, an American diplomat stationed in Rome and later made ambassador to...
It is easy to miss the Match Momentum graphic the Fox network stamps onto its World Cup broadcasts. The graph pops up only on rare occasion, wedged into the bottom-left corner, less than a third of the height and width of the screen. Often it appears only so briefly that the commentators never make a point to draw attention to it, or to try to explain what is happening within it. If advanced statistics have historically been created 1) to produce better metrics for match analysis and 2) for ad...
Given the circumstances, Iran has played extraordinary soccer in this year's World Cup, equalizing not once but twice with New Zealand in a 2-2 result, and displaying robust defense in a 0-0 draw with Belgium, as keeper Alireza Beiranvand made a save that should go down as one of the best of the tournament. The Iranian team has accomplished all of this despite being legally barred from staying in the United States to rest after their games; Donald Trump's administration has forced the squad to...
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag . Today, we're talking money, U2, lasagna, and more.
Hello! I'm happy to be back guest-hosting the Funbag while Drew is off. Let's get to it.
Adam:
I spent 11 summers at sleepaway camp, first as a camper and then, once I turned 17, as a counselor. Every year around this time, I get nostalgic for the days that moved along to the soundtrack of 2000s pop and Dean Friedman songs, and the freedom of a world where the greatest authority is some guy in his early 30s named Neil whom everyone ignored. I have found only one solution to assuage my yearning for the blue skies and green hills of the Finger Lakes: watching movies where a bunch of teens...
Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas , where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at [email protected] .
This week, Albert answers a question about kids and lying.
Technically, the Chicago Sky are not the worst team in the WNBA right now by record; that honor would belong to either of the teams with one fewer win, the Connecticut Sun or the Seattle Storm. But after Monday's WNBA slate, which featured the Sky's 92-63 loss to the Sun, and Seattle's much more competitive 112-110 loss to the Dallas Wings, the distinction feels like one without a difference. What do you call a team that loses to the worst team in the WNBA by 29 points?
The Sky have been ba...
The San Francisco Giants have permission from Major League Baseball to wear Pride-themed gear. This was explained by commissioner Rob Manfred in a recent letter to Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri. The Giants and Dodgers have a special exemption: Other teams have only the 12 league-wide special uniform events, but these two teams can print and wear (and, of course, sell) Pride gear. It is the responsibility of the Giants, as a condition of their special exemption, to "speak to...