2026-02-04 02:32:11
James Harden, who demanded a trade from the Houston Rockets in 2021, the Brooklyn Nets in 2022, and the Philadelphia 76ers in 2023, has demanded a trade from the Los Angeles Clippers. The language is more couched than that—per Shams Charania's latest runic dispatch, "Both sides are aligned in conversations together and with interested teams"—though as always, any such reporting will take the form of what an agent demands, and also, the Clippers have no other reason to suddenly start shopping their 36-year-old point guard around. Harden has two plausible reasons to try to get out before Thursday's trade deadline, neither of which have anything to do with wanting to win a championship.
Even among recent, strange Clippers seasons, this has been a particularly weird one. The story of the NBA offseason was owner Steve Ballmer's alleged under-the-table payments to Kawhi Leonard via a baroque greenwashing scam, an issue that is still not resolved and which obviously hangs over the franchise's head. The team retooled its bench around a bunch of old guys, all of whom started the season playing clunky, slow basketball. Their beloved coach Ty Lue got into a huge fight with would-be retirement tour participant Chris Paul that ended with Paul being publicly called a nuisance and sent packing. The Clippers were 6-21, in position to send the Thunder a generational player, when a guy tweeted about eating some paper and inadvertently turned the team around.
Leonard has maybe been the best player in basketball for a month. The Clippers have gone 17-5 in their last 22 games and even re-signed GM Lawrence Frank, which is certainly, uh, notable given his involvement in signing Leonard to the deal currently under mega investigation. As the bottom of the Western Conference has fallen out, they are all but certain to at least qualify for the play-in.
2026-02-04 02:09:45
Like its more tangible products, Fanatics' apologies are shoddy and practically worthless, yet Michael Rubin's sports apparel company keeps issuing them anyway. In this latest instance, Fanatics is sorry for its shitty Super Bowl merch that is definitely not worth the listed price.
Here's the company's statement, posted Monday night:
NFL fans, we've seen your jersey feedback, and we take it very seriously. We’ve let Patriots and Seahawks fans down with product availability – we own that and we are sorry.
This Super Bowl matchup has created unprecedented challenges for us because of the massive surge in demand we saw from Patriots and Seahawks fans. Both teams went from missing the playoffs last season to being in the Super Bowl, an incredibly rare occurrence that led to these two fanbases buying nearly 400% more jerseys since Thanksgiving vs. last year. Even though we ordered substantially more jerseys for these teams than ever before, we’ve struggled to meet the overwhelming demand to keep team color jerseys in stock, which we know is your expectation. As sports fans, we understand your frustration and we will work tirelessly to be better.
We are bringing in more team color jerseys daily and offering alternative options in the meantime. We’ve heard questions about the quality of these alternate jerseys and can assure you that, despite some unflattering photos, these jerseys are identical to the standard Nike replica “Game” jersey – one of the highest consumer-rated items we carry built on the core template that has been unchanged since Nike took over NFL jerseys in 2012. That said, if you’ve ordered any product that you’re not fully satisfied with, including one of these alternate jerseys, it can always be returned free of charge via the Fanatics app – part of our long-standing return policy. Fans who purchased online via NFL Shop or the Patriots/Seahawks team stores can do the same.
We want you to know that we’re listening and we’re ready with a deep assortment of jerseys and fan gear for whoever wins on Sunday. There is nothing better than serving passionate sports fans and we value your feedback above all.
2026-02-04 01:48:17
The multiple annoyances of having The Big'Un in your town do not really become evident until Thursday, and sometimes even as late as Friday. That's when the rubes show up in their cheap Fanatics knockoff jerseys, clogging the airports and highways, swallowing all the restaurant reservations and generally acting like the kind of people you would emigrate to avoid. A peaceful and moderately civilized living experience is suddenly and overwhelmingly overrun by Americans, with all the turbo-ick that implies. This particular Superb Owl being played in Santa Clara doesn't matter, because everyone stays 40 miles away in San Francisco, Home Of The Thousand-Dollar Room Rate. The great failing of San Francisco, contrary to all the fulminating on the topic done by weird rich people and the conservative media that sustains their mental illness, is that everything fashionable and extortionate happens in the equivalent of six square miles, which means that the only ways to get in or out of town are two freeways and two bridges. Moving all those people to Santa Clara and back will be, as Pope Leo said the last time he saw the White Sox in person, "a comprehensive shitshow."
But at this point in the week, the Owl still belongs to the NFL's small world—how the Rooney Rule, to help promote the advancement of black coaches, went from being named for Art to being named for Mickey; how Roger Goodell is planning to farm out the 16 18th games to different countries ("You are looking live from high above Ljubljana, Slovenia ... "); and now the return of the high comedy and low tea of the Hall of Fame Conspira-fest. America has not arrived yet. It's still just Football Country out here for the time being.
It's a busy country, too. You already know about Bill Belichick, how he didn't get into the Hall Of Fame, and how quickly the voters raced to the internet to violate the deeply held precept of confidentiality. But having learned nothing while wading through the ashes of that hilarity, the Hall has sustained another breach of secrecy with the report that Belichick's former boss and current bête noire, Robert Kraft, also didn't get voted in despite being even more desperate for induction than his noisome former employee.
2026-02-04 00:54:46
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 fake booze, depressing old sex movies, driver’s ed in a Tesla, and more.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Today’s Funbag will be mildly truncated as I and the rest of the Defector staff prepare for Dan McQuade’s memorial later this week. I’ll be back at normal length next week, although I’ll still be quite testy that Dan is no longer with us. Stupid cancer; you’re almost worse than Trump.
Your letters:
2026-02-03 23:17:10
It was a bonnie morning 410 million years ago in what are now the Rhynie chert fossil beds in Scotland. The mists had begun to lift and swirl over the landscape, where hot springs burbled, lichen papered over rocks, and worms slithered as only worms can. Here, almost all life stayed close to the ground. The second-tallest organism at the time, a plant called Cooksonia, grew to a few centimeters at most. This made Prototaxites, an organism with some species that towered above these landscapes at heights of up to 26 feet, an actual behemoth.
Prototaxites was a strange sort of life form. It had no branches, leaves, flowers, fruits, nor a discernable root system. Instead, it resembled a beautiful sausage sprouting from the ground. In this way, Prototaxites was ahead of its time: undeniably phallic in a time long before phalluses existed.
2026-02-03 22:33:09
Hopefully you have not already heard, but the Charlotte Hornets are one of the hottest teams in the NBA. LaMelo Ball is for once an aptonym, Brandon Miller is playing like Paul George (laudatory) instead of playing like Paul George (derogatory), and Kon Knueppel is going nuts from three. It's all working, for what feels like the first time in a decade. So this week on Nothing But Respect, we invited on Mother Jones editor Jacob Rosenberg, because he's a smart, hilarious person and also a Hornets fan.
We of course began with a Dan McQuade tribute, as he is in all of our thoughts this week, and the Sixers just honored him in more ways than one. The three of us planned to talk about way more than the psychic geography of Charlotte and the bizarre, mostly awful history of the Hornets, but Jacob did so much research that the only non-Charlotte thing we got to was itself actually something that took place in Charlotte, as it involved Steph Curry.
