2026-03-12 03:39:26
Thirty years from now, or maybe three days from now given the culture's waning and highly variable sense of what is real and what isn't, we will be treated to someone postulating that Bam Adebayo actually didn't score 83 points in a game. Maybe it was all AI, or whatever acronym the post-AI generation will have to grapple with, or just an ayahuasca-fueled fever dream. Anyway, the supposed factual record is implausible—nobody gets to shoot 43 free throws, and nobody has 31 in the first quarter, and for sure no team would actually put out a lineup quite as bereft as the Washington Wizards did last night. Maybe people in the future will think this because the NBA fixes tanking for good in three months and teams being purposely abject for draft lottery purposes fades into feeling like a hallucination that never actually happened. Maybe people in the future will think this just because they are people.
Hey, some people currently think that Wilt Chamberlain never scored 100 points because there isn't film to prove it, and Adebayo's game was only on NBA League Pass and in a couple of local media markets, which is the modern version of the same thing. But maybe the easiest way to deny it will be because, well, Bam Adebayo had 83 points? That cannot possibly be, and so by fiat or just through the sort of attrition that applies to things like this, it didn't. Tinfoil hats don't make themselves, but they are built for comfort.
But for all the teethwringing and gnashing of hands over Adebayo's performance as it was, it was exactly as normal and forgettable as other mega-games. It came against a remarkably bad team, but so did Chamberlain's (real) century and so did Kobe Bryant's 81 and so did almost all the other 70-plus point performances in league history. Adebayo got a ridiculous 43 free throws, which is a league record, yes, but one that is never cited as any kind of actual achievement in any other context, unless you count the fact that most of the other high-free throw guys were deliberately fouled because they couldn't shoot free throws. He scored more than half his team's points, which is supposed to be really selfish to the point of being unethical, but also do you know who else did that in a game? Willie Burton and Michael Redd.
2026-03-12 03:20:12
Iran's participation in the U.S.-hosted 2026 World Cup promised to be an uncertain, contentious matter even before the U.S. and Israel started raining bombs on Iranian political leaders and schoolgirls alike. The American government had already denied visas to several members of the delegation Iran planned to send to the World Cup draw back in December, as part of a blanket travel ban on Iranian citizens that would've prevented the vast majority of Iranian fans from being able to attend this summer's event. Another controversy arose soon after the draw, when Iranian and Egyptian officials raised a stink about a pre-planned LGBTQ Pride event in Seattle that the draw happened to schedule for a group-stage Iran-Egypt match. Naturally, those little points of friction, and the longstanding geopolitical tetchiness they reflected, came to a head in the form of the war that FIFA Peace Prize winner and known war criminal Donald Trump decided to wage on Iran. Iran's now-official response was hardly unexpected.
"Considering that this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader," Iran sports minister Ahmad Donyamali said on Wednesday in reference to the U.S. government, "under no circumstances can we participate in the World Cup." He added, "Given the malicious actions they have carried out against Iran, they have forced two wars on us over eight or nine months and have killed and martyred thousands of our people. Therefore, we certainly cannot have such a presence."
Donyamali's comments came on the heels of a related report on Tuesday, when FIFA president and autocrat ass-licker Gianni Infantino said on Instagram that he had met with our dear leader to talk about what the ongoing war meant for the World Cup, reporting back that "President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is, of course, welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States." Infantino ended his message noting that "We all need an event like the FIFA World Cup to bring people together now more than ever, and I sincerely thank the President of the United States for his support, as it shows once again that Football Unites the World." As for the man himself, when asked last week for his thoughts about Iran at the World Cup, Trump responded "I really don't care."
2026-03-12 03:04:48
This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to welcome Will Anderson of Hotline TNT. Will is the main creative force behind one of my favorite guitar-forward bands, our second guest to be awarded Best New Music by Pitchfork, and a lifelong Minnesota Timberwolves fan, though perhaps more relevantly, he is the publisher of Association Update, a great, long-running zine about basketball.
On this episode, we discussed Will's admiration for Dennis Rodman, his antipathy for the Oklahoma City Thunder (next week, we will have a real, actual Thunder expert to defend his team's values) and why artists detest OKC so much, and his decision to remove his band's music from Spotify. He also told us about playing a show in Oklahoma City the night the Wolves won Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals last year, talking mild shit about the Thunder on stage, and getting screamed at in the merch line.
2026-03-12 02:44:00
Nineteen-year-old Joao Fonseca is a generational talent. Or an imminent bust—you tell me. His scant tenure on the men's tennis tour has served as a case study in the lunacy of early-career cycles of hype and disappointment. What's clear is where he stands right at this moment, after a spine-tingling 7-6(6), 7-6(4) loss to Jannik Sinner on Tuesday night at Indian Wells: Fonseca is a prodigy with an intoxicating peak level, and one of the best forehands in the world, who can challenge the Sinner-Alcaraz regime more compellingly than players a decade his elder.
Almost exactly three years ago, Fonseca was a 16-year-old playing his first-ever tour-level match at his home tournament, the ATP 500 in Rio de Janeiro. (He got annihilated; I didn't even remember that match happened.) The following year, he rolled back into Rio with a wild card and some baby fat, and beat both the world No. 36 Arthur Fils and world No. 88 Cristian Garin, nuking Fonseca's quaint plans to play college tennis at the University of Virginia. His future was in the pro game. At the time, I favorably compared him to Jannik Sinner at the same age, and predicted he'd be top 10 by the time he was 20. By the tail end of that 2024 season, Fonseca had climbed hundreds of ranking spots and fallen just short of the U.S. Open main draw, losing his last match of qualifying with a passionate pro-Brazil crowd that has since become a reliable, globe-spanning hype machine. The expectations rose even higher.
To the extent it is possible for an 18-year-old to have an "underwhelming" season at the highest levels of pro tennis, I suppose Fonseca's 2025 fits the description. On paper, the achievements were unreal for a player that green: a Challenger title, a 250-level title, a 500-level title. But judging by the talent he displayed in his best matches, and his ease in high-pressure scenarios, he seemed capable of even more: pushing into the second week of a Slam, say, or cracking the top 20 in the rankings, both of which narrowly eluded him. His movement and conditioning still couldn't match the level of his ball-striking, though that could have been easily chalked up to his physical immaturity, and it wasn't until last month that my own projections of his future did finally darken. After Fonseca lost early in Buenos Aires, he and his team disclosed that he was born with lumbar hyperlordosis, a back issue that requires careful management, and that he suffered a stress fracture in his back five years ago. Some of his physical shortcomings could now be seen in a new, more concerning light.
2026-03-12 02:25:30
Kobe Bryant was not just some normal NBA player. No indeed: He was the second-best shooting guard in the history of the Los Angeles Lakers franchise, and something like the 11th-best Laker overall, and possibly one of the dozen or so best players who played the bulk of their careers between 1996 and 2016; at his peak, he was almost as good as Tracy McGrady, his contemporary. In some seasons he was debatably the third- or fourth-best player in the NBA, if you feel like being generous. This is not a distinction you can bestow on just any old guy, although it is one you could argue for bestowing on something like eight different players in any given NBA season. Also, he died in a helicopter crash at the age of 41. It is for these reasons that Bryant's professional achievements must never be surpassed by anyone.
"[Kobe's] death puts greater weight on every one of his most cherished feats and creates a sense that they should be handled with a certain kind of care," as the Athletic's Sam Amick put it on Wednesday. In his blog, Amick argues that Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat should have stopped scoring points when he scored his 81st point in Tuesday night's win over the putrid and disgraceful Washington Wizards—equalling Kobe's career high and tying for the second highest single-game scoring total in NBA history—instead of canning two more free throws to finish with 83 on the night.
One must not idly displace Kobe Bryant from somewhere near the top of a historical chart! When Kobe dished his career-high 17th assist of the night on Jan. 15, 2015, in a seven-point loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, he was not just entering into a hundreds-way tie for something like 5,000th place in the NBA record book for most assists in a single game; he was gracing the sport with his legacy. Who can forget the moment when he threw whatever type of pass it was, to whichever guy, and so etched his name very tinily somewhere extremely far down on the pedestal of history? No one, that is who. And not only because no one remembered it in the first place, but because when Kobe does it, it means something.
2026-03-12 01:51:54
The Washington Post brings us a story today that could only be produced by Donald Trump's administration of influencers. According to two sources who spoke to the Post under the condition of anonymity, photographers from several news outlets were banned from Pentagon press briefings because they had previously published photos that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's staff found unflattering.
The offending photos were taken at a March 2 press briefing at the Pentagon, and photographers were subsequently barred from press briefings on March 4 and March 10. According to the Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Getty Images all had their photographers banned.
The Post's report doesn't specify whether it was one or all of these outlets which published photos that may have thrown Hegseth into a debilitating bout of dysmorphia. Defector pays for a subscription to Getty Images, though, and is happy to try and shed more light on the situation by examining the photos they published from the March 2 press briefing.
