2025-12-02 03:47:40
Deni Avdija, in his sixth NBA season and second with the Portland Trail Blazers, is suddenly a monster. Sunday night he put up a crazy triple-double against the invulnerable Oklahoma City Thunder, in an encouragingly narrow and competitive home loss for the Blazers. Avdija scored 31 points on just 14 shots, pulled down 19 rebounds, dished 10 assists against just a single turnover, and finished plus-four in 37 minutes of floor time. It's not even that weird a line for Avdija, who was once considered a draft near-bust by the stewards of the Toiletburg Toilet Creatures. Avdija has topped 25 points in 12 of Portland's 20 games; he's got six double-doubles and a couple of triple-doubles; he leads the Blazers in scoring, is second in usage, rebounds, and assists, and is third in blocks; and he's doing it all on mighty 62 percent true shooting. He is producing like a superstar.
Avdija seemed to figure something out right at the tail end of his time with his first NBA team, an outfit which shall go unnamed in this space. He's tall and long, and fast and strong, and after a couple of wasted seasons playing glorified spectator around that abominable franchise's trumped-up alpha dogs, Avdija realized that if he gets the ball at one end of the court—say, if he grabs a defensive rebound—and just immediately tears ass toward the other end, good things will happen often enough that no one will yell at him for trying. That was his first brush with NBA success, and it was fun, and his teammates started doing a little motorcycle dance to encourage him forward. As is the case with lots of other fast young guys, eventually Avdija picked up some counters, little secondary ways of broadening the advantages that come from being faster in a straight line than other people his size. Now he's got moves on moves, and has become something of an offense unto himself: Per Cleaning The Glass, the Blazers are a whopping 16 points better per 100 possessions with Avdija on the floor, which ranks in the NBA's 98th percentile, within touching distance of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Nikola Jokic, winners of six of the last seven NBA MVP awards.
2025-12-02 02:53:43
If McLaren manages to stumble its way to a Drivers' Championship victory in the final race of the Formula 1 season, it will not be for lack of trying to lose. Las Vegas saw McLaren intruding on Ferrari territory with a devastating double disqualification; on Sunday in Qatar, with a chance to clinch the championship for one of its drivers, the team retreated back to its old, tried-and-true method of shooting itself in the foot: baffling strategy calls.
Lando Norris entered the weekend with a 24-point lead on teammate Oscar Piastri and Red Bull's Max Verstappen, who were tied in the standings. The McLaren cars consistently had the best pace across each session, and Piastri in particular finally regained his midseason form after a brutal stretch of recent performance. He topped sprint qualifying, won the sprint race, and put himself on pole position for the feature race. Norris was not nearly as consistent, but he outplaced Verstappen in the sprint, and started P2 for the feature race.
2025-12-02 02:26:20
As a close observer of an NBA franchise that has spent the past few decades in various states of putrefaction, an exercise I like to undertake from time to time is to consider which of the 30 NBA teams faces the bleakest medium-term future. This excludes most teams presently in the thick of the playoff race, because maintaining such a position is easier than attaining it. It also excludes most of the teams currently populating the depths of the standings, who have youthful talent and/or future draft picks with which to make their way out of fallow periods. Before the current season began, one may have thought the Phoenix Suns—who finished 11th in the West last season and do not control their first-round pick until the end of the next presidential administration—were the answer, but they have turned out to be super feisty. No, despite serious competition, the league's worst future outlook belongs to the Los Angeles Clippers.
The Clippers are 5-15 on the season, having just wrapped up a 2-13 month that a Clips beat writer argued could be one of the worst in the history of one of the NBA's losingest franchises. Given the unmitigated bleakness of the pre–Chris Paul era, and the fact that the Clippers nearly knocked off the second-best team in the NBA in a killer seven-game playoff series like six months ago, that might seem almost impossible to believe. It's also totally fair.
2025-12-02 01:08:25
Jacksonville Jaguars move to 8-4 record on the season with another big win this week. Unimportant people gape in slack-jawed amazement. Many have asked me, "How did we get here?" Well it all started right where you would think—in Week 1. That's when the Jaguars scored a big win over Carolina Panthers, holding Panthers star Rico Dowdle to only 12 yards of rushing. Ever since then the Jaguars have been on a rocket ship to the moon. Meanwhile, Rico Dowdle remains trapped in his humdrum life, each new day a disquieting echo of the last.
"Hi, Mr. Dowdle?"
"Hi, I'm Mr. Dowdle. You can call me Rico. Rico Dowdle."
"Welcome Rico. Or Mr. Dowdle, haha."
"Haha. Either is fine. Rico, or Mr. Dowdle. Rico Dowdle."
2025-12-02 00:40:00
I didn't consider the possibility of failure enough when I was developing this show. For the last episode of the season, I was supposed to have a conversation with Ronald Young Jr., who had been wanting to spend time learning piano and do a small show for his loved ones. But the week I was supposed to record with Ronald, he emailed me to admit that he hadn't learned the song on piano, he never had the recital we'd agreed he'd do, and he wasn't ready to record with me.
I freaked out for a few hours. I knew I still had to deliver an episode, and I had no idea what to do. I considered spinning up a new episode with myself as the test subject: Could I learn to play football in like three weeks? But after sleeping on it, I decided to ask Ronald if he'd be willing to chat with me anyway—but this time, about failure.
2025-12-02 00:14:13
George Best was once the only man from Northern Ireland to make a stir kicking a ball in America. But now the NFL is rife with Irish kickers. Last season, Jude McAtamney hit a field goal for the Giants. (It went less well for him this year.) And on Sunday, Charlie Smyth joined him with a successful kick of his own, joining Neil O’Donoghue in the growing fraternity of Irish-born NFL kickers.
Smyth was previously just another guy in the booth at Super Bowl 59. During a break, announcers on the UK Sky Sports broadcast brought him in for a chat. They introduced him as a member of the New Orleans Saints—he’d spent the year on their practice squad, and signed a futures contract for the following season—and “a big fan of the NFL.”
