2026-01-16 05:15:00
The podcast medium is, among other things, an effective technology for getting people to say extremely ill-advised stuff in public. Ultra-powerful sports agents are no exception. Rich Paul, CEO of Klutch Sports Group and longtime agent to LeBron James, said some wild shit on Monday's episode of Game Over, the podcast he launched last month with Max Kellerman.
If there's a precedent for an active agent floating trade proposals that would directly affect his clients, I have not encountered it. That's exactly what Paul did on the podcast episode, as he and Kellerman discussed roster moves for the Los Angeles Lakers, the team that employs James:
Rich Paul: The Lakers have options. If I was the Lakers, I would probably be targeting the Memphis Grizzlies as a trade partner.
Max Kellerman: For?
Paul: Jaren Jackson.
Kellerman: Yeah, that would be a great fit. For whom?
Paul: Well, that's the thing, because you gotta figure out the package. But some way, somehow, I would be trying to get Jaren Jackson, maybe get back GG Jackson—Jackson and Jackson Associates, because he's a young player that you can develop, got good size, can shoot the ball. But I think if you're building around Luka [Doncic] going forward, which they are—
Kellerman: You need a guy like that.
Paul: You need that anchor, and Jaren doesn't want to be a part of a rebuild. They just put Ja Morant on the market, right, saying they're willing to trade him, etc. [...] Now, the package just goes out, is what you have to decide. Because if you're able to trade out [expiring contracts] and give up the last first-round pick you got, that could be one scenario, right? Or you could say, let me withhold that.
Kellerman: Austin Reaves?
Paul: This comes with a very unemotional attachment, because Austin is beloved, which he should be. He's an underdog.
Kellerman: But he's about to get paid.
Paul: And here's the thing. If you really—there's a world where you can do what's best for your team and do what's best for Austin, because Austin deserves to get paid right now. I love him as a Laker, but that is a situation where we get in balance, because if you put all the money into just the backcourt, and then—your flexibility is restricted going forward to fill out the rest of the team, then that's kind of like riding—when you just have the training wheels on your bike, but the one training wheel is off and it kind of leans.[...]
Paul: But that would be—regardless how it goes, whatever the package may be, that would be my target for the Lakers. So now, if you're doing that, and if I have those two pieces to start from, and I know everybody wants this to be LeBron's last year, hopefully it's not LeBron's last year, whatever that looks like going forward, that's yet to be seen. [Ed. note: This person has been LeBron James's agent for about 13 years.] But if you have those two pieces on your board, and then now I'm looking at how to fill in the rest of the blanks, that's a good starting point. Now, it doesn't guarantee you a championship tomorrow, but it gives you some building blocks.
2026-01-16 04:45:01
It is one of the rules of podcasting: If you can avoid it, which you generally can, you should avoid the "A Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables" trap. This trap's extremely pithy name was inspired by a June 2020 episode of Bill Simmons' podcast entitled "A Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables With Ryen Russillo," which aptly (and, again, pithily) sums up the challenge of attempting to talk about something extremely serious (in this case, it was George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police) while also talking about The 2005 NBA Redraftables. It's a hazard for podcasts that want to be serious sometimes and silly at other times, and while it's not an argument for being all one or all the other, it is a reminder of how jarring it can be to try to be both. All that said, I have some news:
We did it. We did the Truly Sad Day In America Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables thing, and I believe we were right to do it. It helped that this week's guest, Arif Hasan of the Wide Left newsletter, is both one of the best people to talk to about the disgraceful ongoing ICE offensive in his home city of Minneapolis, and one of the best people to talk to about this week's NFL playoff slate. But also there was really no other way to do it. While there is plenty of silly stuff in the episode—the first line in my notes is "Drew's Berlin mayonnaise misadventure"—there is too much bad stuff going on not to talk about it, and too much interesting football happening not to talk about that. As a result, the episode broke down into two notably clean halves: the first being about what it is like when ICE invades your city, and the second involving a lot of stuff about the Buffalo Bills.
2026-01-16 02:17:26
Wednesday's Africa Cup of Nations semifinals were covered head to toe in narrative appeal. Senegal-Egypt was the more straightforward of the two, in an increasingly star-dominated landscape: Former Liverpool teammates Sadio Mané and Mohamed Salah faced off internationally for the sixth time, and the second time deep in AFCON knockout play (Senegal beat Egypt in the 2022 final, on penalties). On the other side, Nigeria-Morocco had the more immediately intriguing storyline: What happens when the most dominant team of this tournament faces off against the best African team of the past half-decade? The answer, it turned out, was that Morocco, that best African team of the past half-decade, survived a grueling 120-minute stalemate to reach only its third-ever AFCON final, thanks to a 4-2 penalty shootout win.
Entering Wednesday's match, this exact matchup had been the one to circle on the calendar since the start of the knockouts. Nigeria had a roller coaster of a group stage, winning all three of its matches with eight goals scored and four against: 2-1 against Tanzania; 3-2 in a wild one against Tunisia, in which Nigeria opened up a 3-0 lead then gave up two late goals to shake the nerves; and 3-1 against Uganda, that time doing a better job seeing out a 3-0 lead. The Super Eagles then steamrolled Mozambique 4-0 in the round of 16, and dispatched Algeria 2-0 in the quarters. Morocco, on the other hand, stumbled in the group stage with a 1-1 draw to Mali, but otherwise took care of Comoros and Zambia by an aggregate 5-0 scoreline. A 1-0 victory over Tanzania led into a 2-0 dispatching of heavyweight Cameroon in the quarters, setting up a semifinal in which neither team had trailed all tournament.
2026-01-16 01:45:02
Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it.
We’re on the cusp of the NFL offseason, which portends a great many ruminations. We get our last wall-to-wall weekend of football for this divisional round and then POOF! The sport all but disappears after that. Chances are your team’s season ended weeks ago anyway, as mine did. Once the football ends, there is only thinking about football to subsist on. That usually means obsessing over free agency, the draft, and getting a new head coach for your team who isn’t a complete boob.
Most of all, the NFL offseason allows your mind to wander away from your team so that it can obsess over the league itself. As the number of games shrinks, you glean nits to pick with how this sport is played and, much more importantly, how it’s officiated. This is why every spring brings endless discourse surrounding otherwise minor affairs: the overtime format, the ethics of the tush push, and so on and so forth. Being the visionary that I am, I have already found the most important petty grievance to bring to the NFL’s rules committee:
2026-01-16 00:00:30
They say that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. The way they played on Wednesday night, the Rangers couldn't make it in a beer league rink in Binghamton. Facing the Ottawa Senators at home, the worst team in the Eastern Conference took its fifth straight loss, its eighth defeat of its last nine, and its second utter humiliation in its last three outings. Maybe that 10-2 loss in Boston looks a little worse as a final, but last night's 8-4 clowning—in which the Sens held a 6-0 lead in the second period—was the bed of nails that awaited the Rangers after a long and dramatic fall from the Presidents' Trophy–winning season of two years ago.
If you were lucky enough not to catch the game, here's what happened: Ottawa scored, and then they scored, and then they scored, and then they scored, and then they took a break and all the New Yorkers booed the Rangers, and then Ottawa came back out and scored twice more. Poor old Jonathan Quick, who might be starting to worry about getting his Hall of Fame ticket canceled, got pulled after goal No. 6 and from there the Rangers found a few ways to beat Ottawa's Leevi Merilainen and give whoever stayed at the Garden a dead-cat bounce to cheer.
New York's J.T. Miller was asked, essentially, if it's depressing to be down 4-0 in the first period of a hockey game. "No shit," he said.
2026-01-15 23:08:39
Back in December, CBS News chief Bari Weiss intervened to spike a deeply reported and extensively documented 60 Minutes story about conditions faced by captives sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador's CECOT concentration camp. Her rationale, as proffered in memos to CBS staff, was that without on-record comment from a member of the administration—which had declined several requests for exactly that—the story lacked necessary balance; without participation from the administration, 60 Minutes was not prepared to give viewers "the full context they need to assess the story."
In case anyone on the face of the Earth was silly enough to buy that Weiss's decision had anything to do with some commitment to balanced and rigorous reporting, this ought to clarify things:
