2026-01-21 04:33:17
The New York Knicks, beautiful NBA Cup champions of December, have drifted toward the toilet. After winning the midseason trophy amid a 23-9 start, they have gone 2-9 in the weeks since. Monday night at Madison Square Garden, a severely undermanned Dallas Mavericks squad racked up 75 first-half points, and the home team, trailing by 28 points, was getting booed vigorously by their own fans. "If we're playing crappy, boo. If I were in the stands, I'd probably boo too," said Knicks head coach Mike Brown, who seems to have lost control of a roster that he was orchestrating deftly in the first few months of the season.
Brown is scrambling for answers, but there are suddenly far too many questions. The Knicks have fallen apart on both sides of the floor during this calamitous 11-game stretch, where they have the 28th-ranked defensive rating and 25th-ranked offensive rating. Injuries have been mild: Josh Hart and Jalen Brunson missed a few games with ankle issues, but they've struggled with them back in the lineup, too. Yesterday's 114-97 loss to Dallas was inexplicable: The Knicks enjoyed a rare day with the roster at full health and proceeded to get routed by an offense spearheaded by Naji Marshall and Max Christie.
“Halftime, we usually do the clips and talk about technical X’s-and-O’s and all that crap that coaches do, teams do," Brown said after the game. "There was nothing to be said at halftime. Except for lock in and do your fucking—excuse me on that—do your job." Their problems are so widespread as to defy crisp diagnosis.
2026-01-21 02:45:07
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 music, Caleb Williams, dishwasher mishaps, best foods to throw up, and more.
Your letters:
Adrian:
2026-01-21 01:51:58
After almost two weeks of hearing about how Miami would get crushed by Indiana, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the Hurricanes played in Monday night's national championship game. Miami's defense was brutal in the good way throughout, putting Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza under more pressure than he'd faced all year, hitting him ferociously at every opportunity, sometimes right on the line of legality, if not past it. Indiana coach Curt Cignetti complained to ESPN's Holly Rowe about uncalled personal fouls against Miami, and he wasn't wrong, especially with regards to Jakobe Thomas's potential targeting hit on Mendoza in the first quarter; the Miami-raised QB was bleeding from the lip after Thomas's helmet smashed into his face, but, as was the case most of the night, the flags stayed in the referees' pockets.
On the other side of the ball, the Canes offense was brutal in the bad way throughout the first half, but woke up enough in the second to keep Miami within striking distance. (No credit here to the special teams, which essentially gifted Indiana 10 points with a doinked field goal at the end of the first half, and a blocked punt in the third quarter that the Hoosiers recovered in the end zone.) After Mendoza's superhuman fourth-down touchdown run put Indiana up 10 with 9:18 left, Miami's offense unleashed its best drive of the season, a game after it pulled off a similar miracle drive to beat Ole Miss in the semifinal. Malachi Toney, perhaps the most explosive player in all of college football, finally got space to turn on the afterburners, resulting in a 41-yard reception to move Miami into Indiana territory and then taking a toss 22 yards for the touchdown, which would end up being Miami's final points of the season.
Up 24-21, Indiana chewed clock on its next drive and kicked a potentially damning field goal—on its previous drive, the one that ended with Mendoza's run, Indiana had converted two fourth downs, but chose to kick a field goal to go up six rather than go for it on fourth-and-4 on the Miami 17 on this final drive; a conversion would have ended the game—and so the stage was set for Carson Beck and Miami to pull off the improbable comeback and beat the team that looked unbeatable for so much of this season, and for all of the playoffs.
2026-01-21 01:18:18
Jimmy Butler's season is over. His painful-looking collapse in the third quarter of Golden State's win Monday night over the visiting Miami Heat was caused by the sudden kerplosion of his right ACL, a crisis that will require surgery and then many months of recovery. This stinks for Butler, who is now facing the most serious injury of his career during his age-36 season. Butler delivers and takes beatings, a consequence of his particular style of basketball, which aesthetically certainly is not for everyone. You have to grade durability on a curve: LaMelo Ball will miss 15 to 40 games per campaign due to having papier-maché ankles; Butler, meanwhile, played a solid majority of his team's games every season for 13 years despite deploying his own tender body every night as a bulldozer, a forklift, a wrecking ball, an excavator, a railway stopblock, and a grenade. That he made it this long without any ligaments shredding catastrophically should be a real point of pride.
Lately he'd been cooking pretty good, and the Warriors had won 12 of 16 games to climb up to eighth in the Western Conference, a season-best six games over .500. Even with Butler, the Warriors are desperately cramped for offensive space and reliable shot-creation. Of the players who have played at least half of Golden State's games this season, only Butler and Stephen Curry have posted usage rates over 20 percent, which does not seem like it should be possible and in any case cannot have been sustainable, not when those two players have a combined age of 73 years old. The next most engaged Warriors regular by usage, after Butler, is veteran De'Anthony Melton, who is working his way into form after missing the first month of the season while recovering from his own ACL injury; the next most engaged guy is reserve guard Pat Spencer, who despite Steve Kerr's sweaty insistence to the contrary is 100 percent not "that motherfucker." Across Golden State's last 11 games, Spencer has scored a grand total of three points.
It would sure be a luxury if the Warriors had another talented scorer in reserve, preferably someone with the floor skills and in-between game to handle some of Butler's bruising creation duties, and the size to hold up at all when assigned to defend opposing swingmen. Unfortunately, such players nowadays cannot be had for less than, say, $22.5 million per season, an expenditure that would push a team with Golden State's other salary commitments deep into the luxury tax. Obviously you cannot expect the Warriors—a tax-repeater, and thus subject to an onerous tax multiplier— to have splurged on such a thing, and thus to now be on the hook for an estimated tax bill for this season of more than $81 million. Obviously, had they made such a bold commitment, the player would already be in Kerr's rotation, spelling Butler, absorbing an important share of the offense, and pushing washed-up bozo Buddy Hield to the very end of the bench. Especially if that player were just 23 years old, in good health, had cost the team a valuable lottery pick, and had averaged 21 points per game across the team's most recent playoff series. Frankly, I don't even know why we are still talking about this!
2026-01-21 00:38:42
I am occasionally high-minded about space exploration. The quest for knowledge, the nobility of the human spirit, the inexorable call of the great void, blah blah blah. But then there are other times when I admit to myself that a sizable part of my interest is a simple, primal enthrallment at finding out just how big we can make a huge rocket before setting it on fire.
On Saturday in Florida, NASA wheeled out the assembled components of the Artemis II mission, which as soon as early February will take humans around the Moon—farther from Earth than humans have ever been. It was quite literally wheeled out, on a massive and purpose-built crawler, carrying the Space Launch System vehicle and the Orion spacecraft the four miles from the assembly building to the launchpad. It was a slow roll—about 1 mph—because that is one big honking rocket. Including the launch tower, that's about 14 million pounds being moved.
2026-01-20 23:54:16
The thing about "unprecedented events" is that they rarely are. Something weird or unusual that you just saw has almost certainly happened before, usually within about four years, and in pretty much the same form. This isn't to say that strange and new-seeming things aren't happening all the time, but of all the things that human beings are good at, doing the same thing over and over is among the top three, even if it's not by design. People, including those rich enough to own NFL teams, are people.
And so it is with the current NFL coaching mudfight, in which 10 teams, some of them quite successful, have decided that the person in charge of that success must lose their gig anyway, either because the team owner wants something else out of disappointment, boredom, or personality defect. Sean McDermott's firing two days after the Buffalo Bills performed their annual postseason flameout seemed unusually precipitous, at least until you remembered that John Harbaugh got fired and Mike Tomlin quit despite having better career records and a bejeweled hubcap where their ring finger usually stands during their tenures with Baltimore and Pittsburgh, respectively.
Also, "unusually precipitous" depends on what you think is unusual. The league abruptly losing three coaches with 500 combined victories and a winning percentage of .619 will catch the untrained eye because it dismisses history for the more kneejerky "What pissed me off today?" methodology of the modern owner. And let's be honest (as opposed to the myriad of times when we just baldfaced lied to you): That's what a firing often is. We know what type of person owns NFL teams, by this point. There's no reason to act surprised when that kind of person does the kind of thing that kind of person does.
