2025-12-18 06:09:51
Expansion teams are usually bad because they’re contingent on being bad. For narrowing the other teams’ slices of the revenue pie, they can join the league only at a high cost and at some competitive disadvantage. If they do fashion something workable from everyone’s leftovers, a la the Valkyries or Golden Knights, good for them, but that success wouldn’t be by design.
What if this pie doesn’t get sliced at all? In October 2024, the PWHL announced its plans to expand from six to eight teams for the 2025-26 season, with new franchises in Seattle and Vancouver. The league is wholly owned and operated by a single entity, Dodgers owner Mark Walter’s holding company. In this case, it’s actually in the interest of the owner for any expansion teams to be good and competitive right away. Maybe too good and too competitive, some PWHL fans thought when all the details came to light. Rather than let existing teams keep their rosters mostly intact, these expansion draft rules were unusually favorable to the expansion teams: The original six could protect only three players each.
2025-12-18 03:42:17
Laura Wellington is estranged from one of her adult daughters. The Connecticut 59-year-old is somewhat famous for this, in fact, or anyway famous for her response to it. Across TikTok and Instagram, under the name "Doormat Mom," Wellington's railing against the supposed injustice done to her by a daughter she calls an "ungrateful little bastard" has brought her some 140,000 total followers. This past weekend, she was one of the subjects of a Wall Street Journal article reporting on what the writer Elizabeth Bernstein calls a "movement" aiming to "reduce stigma, build community, and empower others who are enduring one of life's most painful experiences: the loss of a child who is still alive."
From the Journal article, a reader can learn that Wellington, who regards herself as a good mom, reportedly initiated the estrangement herself, after learning she wouldn't be invited to her daughter's wedding. You can learn that Wellington, in addition to her dedicated TikTok and Instagram accounts, also has launched Facebook and YouTube accounts, a podcast, and a self-published book, all themed around the supposed phenomenon of parents being unjustly cut off by their cruel adult children. You can certainly, on the basis of these facts, start to form a pretty good idea of what kind of person Laura Wellington is, and, say, what it might be like to encounter her as a worker in a retail or customer service job.
2025-12-18 01:06:49
In a surprising offseason move, men's No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz has split with his coach Juan Carlos Ferrero, after seven years and six major titles. Thus ends one of the most successful and intimate partnerships in tennis. It began when Alcaraz was a teenager, traveling an hour from home to train at Ferrero's academy, and grew deep enough that Alcaraz often referred to Ferrero as his "second father."
In the relatively new era of legal on-court coaching, the two kept open a channel of nonstop chatter and gestures. A 19-year-old Alcaraz, on the cusp of his first major title in 2022, was still asking Ferrero where to serve at specific junctures in the match. Sometimes it seemed like Ferrero's chief task was emotional rather than technical: getting his overheated charge to simmer down and play simpler tennis in critical moments. This education worked. The 22-year-old Alcaraz of today is significantly better at self-soothing, and tennis at a whole.
Both player and coach acknowledged the move on social media Wednesday, and the phrasing of Ferrero's message suggested that it was not a mutual decision. "I wish I could have continued," he wrote. "I am convinced that good memories and good people always find a way to cross paths again."
Possibly their issues were financial or emotional, because it would be difficult to argue with the on-court results. Ferrero has been a responsible steward of one of the greatest raw talents the ATP has seen, advancing his game piece by piece. This time last year, the team tackled the one aspect of Alcaraz's tennis that still called for significant technical improvements: the serve. Those changes to his service motion bore fruit in the 2025 season, best seen in a U.S. Open run where Alcaraz saw his serve broken just three times. He described it as his "best tournament" ever. It was the first major title that he'd won so straightforwardly.
2025-12-18 00:40:19
Terence “Bud” Crawford, the most accomplished fighter of his generation, announced his retirement Tuesday night on social media, saying he had “nothing else left to prove.”
It's hard to argue with the man. Crawford leaves the fight game with a 42-0 record, and recognized as the only fighter in the alphabet-soup era of boxing to hold undisputed championships in three different weight classes. The first came at light welterweight (140 pounds) in 2017, when he KO’d Namibian Julius Indongo with a savage third-round left hook to the kidney in Lincoln, Neb., in a fight that only a few boxing hardcores cared about.
2025-12-18 00:17:58
There is a rarefied group of NHL players worth watching no matter the circumstances—time, place, stakes, teammates, opponents, whatever. Macklin Celebrini might already be in that club. The 19-year-old center, drafted first overall in 2024, is leading a resurgent, playoff-minded Sharks squad with 18 goals and 33 assists in just 34 games. Even when, for example, it's a weekday midnight on the East Coast and the Sharks are playing the flickering Calgary Flames, Celebrini alone is enough of a draw to stay awake and tune in.
Following up on his team's huge four-goal, third-period comeback over the Penguins on Saturday, Celebrini contributed four points in a 6-3 victory on Tuesday. The big ones were the assist he notched just a minute in, and the goal he scored to widen the lead early in the third. All together, they kept him just below MacKinnon and McDavid on the list of the NHL's most productive players so far this year.
2025-12-17 23:52:00
I'm doing things a little differently this year. Instead of writing a list of matches, I'm going to look at the last 12 months of pro wrestling in three different parts of the world, then give you some matches to watch at the end of each section. Ready? Ring the bell.
The U.S.
