2025-12-04 03:00:22
Against all odds, something special is happening in Phoenix. The Suns began the season without a first-round draft pick, and with a roster stocked almost entirely with variously limited shooting guards, assorted castoffs, and for some reason the Charlotte Hornets' entire post-pandemic center rotation. These guys, most pundits would have said before quickly shuffling down the projected standings to previewing the race for the 14 seed, are perhaps the biggest bummer in the NBA. Wrong: The Suns are 13-9, playing hypermodern hoops and lodging themselves firmly in the playoff race. The player who typifies Phoenix's special season is Dillon Brooks.
Phoenix's most important player is still Devin Booker, who has made a big leap as a playmaker this season, though the guy most responsible for the stuff that Phoenix excels at is Brooks. The Canadian ass-kicker is enjoying the best statistical offensive season of his career, posting 22 points per game on slightly below-average shooting; in a season where Jalen Green has scarcely played and Grayson Allen's ankle sprain was a near-crisis, Brooks's willingness to take a bunch of shots and pull out his assortment of horrifically ugly one-on-one moves to make space matters a lot. But more than his scoring, it's Brooks's fight that is propelling his team.
2025-12-04 01:53:21
This time of year will exhaust even the deepest teams. The NHL is taking a three-week break in February for the Winter Olympics, but they didn't expand the start or end of the regular season. As a result, the schedule is crunched, and you could really see the effect over the holiday weekend, with tired squads playing low-event games. The NHL has long been in an era of relative parity, but the bulk of the teams feel especially interchangeable through the first few months of this season. If you're asked how your local boys are doing, and you don't know, the safest answer is "Oh, they're doing all right." A full 27 of the league's 32 teams currently sit within the range of 25 to 35 points. Truly, anything can happen.
But there is exactly one prediction for April that you can take to the bank: The Colorado Avalanche are not going to miss the playoffs. While nearly everyone else has see-sawed their way to inconclusive contention, the Avs have smothered the field. They've only lost one game in regulation out of 26 so far, winning 19 and showing zero signs of weakness. They're pacing the NHL in both goals scored and goals against, and they've won 12 of their last 13, the lone loss coming in a shootout against Minnesota's sensational rookie goalie Jesper Wallstedt. On Tuesday night against the Canucks, they continued to display all facets of their superiority in a 3-1 win.
2025-12-04 01:32:03
The Los Angeles Clippers and point guard Chris Paul are splitting up. The team is awful. They've lost five straight and eight of nine, and their last three wins—they've only got five total, in 21 games—have come against the Hornets, who are crud; the Mavericks, who are crud; and the Pelicans, who make crud look like a banana split. Paul, who last month leaked his impending retirement, presumably so that he could enjoy a months-long farewell tour, was playing about 14 minutes a game for the Clippers as a reserve. Now a free agent, Paul can offer five months of whatever is left of his vitality to anyone in the market for a rapidly declining middle-aged rotation guard who doesn't like to shoot and who has the mobility and defensive utility of a Roomba.
Usually when an ancient but honored veteran leaves a collapsing team midseason, it is so that he can chase a ring elsewhere, and the course is chosen by mutual consent. That appears not to have been the case with Paul and the Clippers: Paul, in a social media dispatch posted late Tuesday night, described being abruptly "sent home" by the team, which is presently in Atlanta to face the Hawks. Team president Lawrence Frank later told ESPN that while "no one is blaming" Paul for the Clippers playing like total shit, he has nevertheless decided to unceremoniously jettison the best player in franchise history. "We are parting ways with Chris and he will no longer be with the team," Frank said in a text, reported by ESPN's Ohm Youngmisuk. "We will work with him on the next step of his career."
2025-12-04 00:43:02
I gotta admit, I’m terrible about introducing myself to my neighbors. I’m much more likely to chat with someone who lives on the next street over than on my street. And when the people who live right next door are engaging in potentially chaotic behavior—like blowing their leaves onto the street in front of our place, or attaching something to the shared fence with screws that poke through the wood on our side—I put all my energy into convincing myself that I didn’t see anything. Sure, I’m conflict avoidant, but I’m also a Scorpio. If I allow myself to notice my neighbors’ offenses… baby, you’ve got a feud going!
This week’s gossip features some friends of a friend who picked up on some tension in their neighborhood, and decided to wade right into the heart of it.
2025-12-04 00:21:48
The male comedians are going through something. I know, I know, but this time I'm not referring to the obvious ones who have lost their minds through some excess of steroid abuse and podcast appearances. I'm talking about the more thoughtful class of male comedy: Nathan Fielder, John Mulaney, Jerrod Carmichael, Bo Burnham. These guys are savvier, smarter, and more tethered to reality, yet no less stuck in some sort of existential crisis that seems to be affecting all men.
Mulaney and Burnham have waded through this ordeal in their standup, the former engaging with his personal drug and opiate addiction, and the latter exploring what the internet has done to the people of his generation. Carmichael has turned his whole life into reality-show exhibition in a desperate bid to find any authenticity in front of a camera. Fielder has explored the breaking apart of social communication and the human condition in multiple shows, most effectively in his series with Benny Safdie, The Curse, and most recently in the second season of his HBO show, The Rehearsal.
2025-12-03 23:27:08
It is 64 days until the first hockey game of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, and the main hockey arena is still under construction. A test event, to determine whether the ice is good enough to play on, has already been pushed back. While providing plentiful entertainment for the region's Umarell, the construction delay is proving stressful for everyone else, given that, as a top organizer said last week, "there is no Plan B." Now comes the news that even if construction is completed, the ice surface—usually significantly larger for international play than in the NHL—will be smaller than NHL rinks.
The league's relationship with the Olympics has been fraught for a while, but 2026 will see NHLers compete in the Games for the first time since Sochi. So it sounded perhaps like a squeaky wheel seeking some grease when Gary Bettman complained way back in 2023 that construction hadn't yet begun on the 16,000-seat Santagiulia Arena, in Milan's outskirts, which will host half the men's and women's tournaments and most of the marquee games. But Bettman was right to be concerned. When league officials toured the site this past August, they saw a complex still under heavy construction. Ground hadn't been broken on a planned practice facility. They hadn't yet even laid down roads leading to the arena. That's Italian excellence in action; historically, most Olympic venues are opened and tested a full year in advance of the Games.
