2026-03-14 01:01:19
This has been in almost all ways a foul season for the Toronto Maple Leafs. They are Canada's daily media poison in the same ways that the Lakers, Cowboys, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and the Dodgers' payroll are America's, and offer similarly scant nutritional value. But clearly, if anyone involved wanted to change our consumption diets, we would have at least stopped eating that second bowl of ice cream by now.
And say this much for the latest edition of Leafs Institutional Misery: It has been busy. Toronto's season has been a cavalcade of hope-turned-to-manure almost since Canadian Thanksgiving, to the point where the wheels of their nine-year streak of underachieving in the playoffs had come off the wagon entirely, and in the worst imaginable way. From Jan. 12 through yesterday, they had gone 4-12-4, and hadn't won a single game against an American-based team. Since the National Hockey League is 78 percent American, this presents a real mathematical challenge to glory, with the result being that this Leafs season has been abandoned and the arguments about it have morphed into how many people at multiple organizational levels must be fired for cause, and what specific star they should be fired into. Their talent level has been mocked, their basic team structure besmirched, even their molecular GAF has been shamed. To satisfy an incandescent fan base and begin the desperately needed rebuild, something is going to need to be done, mostly to someone else.
That does not separate the Leafs from any other forlorn team, of course, and as a result Thursday night's game against Anaheim held minimal interest and emitted minimal significance—until it very much did. The unimportant part is that the Leafs won, 6-4, to break an eight-game losing streak, which in its own way is another bad result for those who support the idea of a catastrophic bottom-out for the sake of draft lottery odds and getting a jump-start on the reconstruction work ahead. But under the theory that you can still have your house catch fire when it rains, this win was way worse than that. That's because the team's captain and best player, Auston Matthews, had his knee crushed on an open-ice knee-to-knee hit from Anaheim's notorious troublemaker Radko Gudas. This takes the worst-case scenario and turbocharges it.
2026-03-14 00:38:44
Basketball is meant to be played on blacktop or hardwood. But some big-thinking Big 12 dumbass big-thought it was time to give glass a shot.
That dumbass is conference commissioner Brett Yormark, who installed a high-tech LED court made of glass for the league tournament, which is being contested this week in Kansas City. Turns out glass is fine for backboards, but, as has been clear since the tourney started, not the floor. So now they're uninstalling it: CBS Sports reported Thursday night that the commissioner, who came to the Big 12 after a run as COO of Jay Z’s Roc Nation, decided to yank his avant-garde surface and replace it with "a traditional hardwood court" forthwith. Yormark said he made the decision after talking to “the coaches of our four semifinal teams.”
Probably could have added “and a personal injury attorney.”
2026-03-13 23:12:21
Miami-Dade prosecutors filed four criminal charges against Atlanta Falcons edge rusher James Pearce Jr. on Thursday, following his arrest last month. The charges came a few weeks after a Miami-Dade circuit judge extended a temporary restraining order granted to Pearce's ex-girlfriend, WNBA player Rickea Jackson, who told the court that Pearce had physically abused her and threatened to kill her, including a threat "to place a bag over my head." In her request, the Los Angeles Sparks forward told the court, "I am truly in fear for my life."
The four criminal charges are: felony aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, felony fleeing police, felony resisting an officer with violence, and misdemeanor stalking. The charge of aggravated battery, according to the charging document, is for driving his car into Jackson's car, and the stalking charge is because prosecutors said he followed, harassed, or cyberstalked Jackson leading up to the day when she went to the Doral police station, seeking help. The other two charges are connected to the police chase that followed.
Here is what Jackson said happened, as described in her subsequently granted restraining order request.
2026-03-13 22:17:38
Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus, that "progression" has seen R&B music become more indebted to trap records and the moody atmospherics of alternative bands like Radiohead, Coldplay, or My Bloody Valentine. These attempts at innovation and relevance have made for interesting music, but they have also created a lot of stale stuff that has no real point of view beyond the tastes of a particular artist/ producer. Even worse, much of it has been channeled into what has been termed "Toxic R&B," a sub-genre that mostly involves men crooning delicately about their inability to be good partners. In a time when rap has become the center of pop music, it seems to be the easiest way by which men (usually men) who sing can still affect the machismo of rap, despite not actually rapping.
2026-03-13 22:11:18
Give me the biggest hockey man you have. No, even bigger than that. Make him huge. Make him tall, thick, and dense—a real slab. Give him a powerful slapshot, and a willingness to use it. Make it the fastest, hardest, heaviest shot in the sport. Make him eager to use it. Let him go weapons-free and really wallop the bejesus out of that puck as hard and as often as he can. Let's see how much that puck can take. Let it be punished for its crimes. He is large, like a beef, and it is small and hard, and all the laws of physics conspire to impart his magnified aggression upon it. Woe be unto those in its path!
Let him clobber the puck again. And again and again. Torque and leverage and ill will are his compatriots, while its allies have deserted it. No goalie comes to its rescue to cover it. No whistle provides a temporary truce so that it may live to be abused another day. See: Again, he is rearing back. Again, he is preparing the lash. Beatings will continue until morale improves or possession is turned over. Neither come. The puck is funneled back to him. What did it do in its past life to deserve this? Why are they letting children watch this carnage? He is a disc of rubber and pain, now. In the world, there is only him and the huge man's stick. The huge man winds up again.
2026-03-13 21:42:34
After a courtship that took longer to consummate than a Victorian marriage, Kyler Murray has signed a deal with the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikes are on the hook for a single season at the league minimum, with the quarterback’s former employer, the Arizona Cardinals, picking up the rest of the tab. It’s just like the deal that Russell Wilson signed with Pittsburgh after getting curbed by Denver, with the notable exception that Wilson was five years older and many years cornier. Out of all the potential quarterbacks that the Vikings could have plucked off the scrap heap, Murray was the best of a decidedly motley crew.
Of course, Minnesota didn't have to be in this position to begin with. Two years ago, the Vikings signed Sam Darnold to a one-year flyer so that he could serve as a bridge QB while the team spent a year developing then-rookie JJ McCarthy behind the scenes. Darnold was a revelation in 2024, tossing 35 TDs and leading the Vikings to 14 wins. Then he fell apart in the final two games of that season, including a woeful performance in a wild-card loss to the Rams, and the Vikings (and their fans) decided that one year of Darnold was all the Darnold they required.
They decided wrong. Infamously so. Darnold went to Seattle and immediately won his new team a Super Bowl. McCarthy—and maybe you heard about this—did not. In just one season, Minnesota went from having the best deep passing attack in football to having no passing attack at all. To make matters worse, the Vikings had also failed to retain QB Daniel Jones for the 2025 season, leaving Max Brosmer and a half-deceased Carson Wentz as the only other options in their QB room. I’ve had more fun watching a fish die out of water.
