2026-02-27 02:29:42
You know the thing that the truly great rim protectors do, in basketball, where they learn they can alter shots by aura alone? The area under the basket becomes a Sarlacc pit, the remote and terrifying domain of a very large, patient, and hungry creature. The great ones are happy, thrilled even, to welcome a meal. They learn to stop jumping out and using their body to cut off ball-handlers and take charges, because they've seen the advantages they can sometimes gain by inviting drives, by baiting some fool into taking another dribble, into dreaming of scoring at the basket.
Victor Wembanyama has advanced to another plane, to what his opponents will have to hope is the ultimate stage of rim-protection dominance: He appears to be developing the no-look shot-block. He had an eye-popping one of these Wednesday, in a road win over the Toronto Raptors. Wembanyama refused to leave a darting and cutting Collin Murray-Boyles, down in the dunker spot, in order to deter a drive from Scottie Barnes, who was isolating against a size mismatch. Barnes is Toronto's best player; Murray-Boyles, God love him, is just some guy, some well-meaning rookie fella. The book is pretty clear on this matter: Go ahead and leave Collin Murray-Boyles, send help at Barnes, zone up the weak side, and force the Raptors away from the basket.
Wembanyama has his own damn book, a grimoire containing secrets of the darkest defensive magic. Instead of leaving Murray-Boyles, Wembanyama fully turned his head and back to the court and faced into the stands, showing no sign of even noticing Barnes's attempted dunk until the Raptors forward was already in the air. Then, whoa hey, suddenly a huge hand was flying in and slapping the ball out of there. Wembanyama looked almost irritated at Barnes, like he'd rudely interrupted something, as if what the Frenchman really did want to do on that possession was closely observe the movement patterns of his undersized counterpart. The ball raced back the other way, and the Spurs jogged into an open transition three-pointer.
2026-02-27 02:13:55
The biggest business story related to the NBA has nothing to do with tanking, Kawhi Leonard, nor the NBA's new national broadcast partners. We are only a little more than a year away from the launch of NBA Europe, a new basketball league across the Atlantic that proposes to upend and Americanize the game.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver is swinging huge: The proposed league would feature 16 teams, 12 of whom would have permanent slots, and they are reportedly trying to put teams in Athens, Istanbul, Paris, Lyon, Munich, Berlin, Rome, Milan, Madrid, Barcelona, London, and Manchester. That list of cities highlights both how disruptive the venture would be and how much new ground would have to be broken. Basketball culture in Europe is not centered in the biggest cities the way it is in the United States, so the NBA is essentially betting that they can create it from whole cloth in places like London and Milan.
On the other hand, teams like Olympiacos and Panathinaikos in Athens and Fenerbahçe in Istanbul have deeply established traditions that the new league would disrupt. Massively important and well-supported teams in less glamorous markets like Belgrade and Kaunas, along with the EuroLeague structure, could be left to wither and die if this all works the way Silver wants it to. "If I thought that the ceiling was the existing EuroLeague and their fan interest," Silver said in January, "we wouldn't be spending the kind of time and attention we are on this project."
2026-02-27 01:33:48
Five of the eight Champions League playoff ties went roughly as expected. Paris Saint-Germain had a bit more trouble separating itself from its Ligue 1 rival Monaco than predicted, but rode a 3-2 first leg win to a 5-4 aggregate victory. Newcastle demolished Qarabag, 9-3. Atlético Madrid turned a 3-3 first-leg draw around with a 4-1 second leg at home to dump out Club Brugge. Bayer Leverkusen vs. Olympiacos was a snoozer, won 2-0 on aggregate by the former. Real Madrid comfortably dispatched Benfica 3-1, with an uncomfortable amount of racism playing the starring role in the match-up. It all went pretty straightforwardly, in other words. Except for the racism, that sucked.
The other three ties provided some more excitement, though. Borussia Dortmund took a 2-0 lead from a dominant, entertaining first leg, but ran out of steam against Atalanta back in Italy, where the home side won 4-1 to squeak by on a one-goal aggregate victory. In what would normally be the biggest upset of the round, Galatasaray rocked Juventus 5-2 at home last week, and then endured a tie-leveling 3-0 Juve fight-back in the return leg before scoring two goals in extra time, the Turks advancing by a 7-5 aggregate margin. It was thrilling, messy, and featured a wonderful winning goal by Victor Osimhen, which was just about the most expected outcome in an unexpected showdown.
2026-02-27 00:46:47
Take one look at the NBA standings lately and you’ll discover that teams like the Jazz, Kings, Wizards, and Nets are slacking off even more than they have in previous seasons. It’s made for some pretty dire television. Last week, NBA commissioner and Tim Burton character Adam Silver informed the general public that he intended to do something about it. Will Silver simplify the byzantine rules surrounding protected draft picks? Might he even get rid of the draft altogether? Pfft. Pish posh. Did you really expect a lawyer to make things less complicated? No, instead the NBA has proposed even more rules on top of all of those other rules. Are any of these tweaks a good idea? THAT, dear listeners, is the subject of this week’s Distraction.
But wait! That’s not all you get for your money. With David Roth stranded by Winter Storm Scary Name, Defector bossman Tom Ley bravely stepped into the breach to act as my sparring partner for 45 and change. We wrapped up the Winter Olympics, spent a brief moment ruminating over how the Trump people went about ruining the good vibes those games elicited, and we both agreed with Pat Riley that NBA coaches should wear fancy suits again, if only because it’s more fun to watch a grown man roid out on the sideline while clad in Armani rather than in athleisure.
2026-02-26 23:51:57
The Tom Thibodeau–era Chicago Bulls were a special team, a rockpile collection of asskickers dedicated to playing a rapidly obsolescing style that nonetheless proved extremely effective. Thibs surrounded a young Derrick Rose with a bunch of incredible defenders, most notably avant-garde jump shooter and 2014 Defensive Player of the Year Joakim Noah, in an endearing attempt to win every game 70-57. It didn't quite work, but did earn the Bulls the respect of a nation. I loved those teams, as did the anti–LeBron James bloc, defense enthusiasts, and apparently, according to emails released by the Justice Department a few weeks ago, Jeffrey Epstein.
Unlike many NBA-affiliated people, whom we will get to shortly, Noah himself appears in the emails only as a subject, and only twice. The first time was in 2010, when Eva Dubin—Epstein's ex, friend of Ghislaine Maxwell, and wife of hedge-fund billionaire Glenn Dubin—sent a Real GM article (for the record, this is the only time a RealGM.com URL appears in the files) about Noah's 2010 contract extension to a bunch of people, including Epstein. One of them responded, "He better take care of momma!!"
2026-02-26 23:28:29
The Athletic, your new home for the Washington Post's former sports section, delivered 2,600 words on Connecticut head coach Dan Hurley Wednesday morning, largely on the theme of Mellowing Madman. Hurley's history as the man who smuggles wasp hives in his gym shorts and then waits for someone to brush against him by accident precedes, defines, and explains him; a shorter way of saying this is that he is "from New Jersey," but there's not much in the way of imagery there. If Hurley's personal growth was the pregame sell for UConn's Wednesday night home game with rival St. John's, the audience got hosed. This was the easiest high-profile game his hair-trigger shall ever have to navigate.
It's hard to say if the Athletic story was entirely convincing, given that he is still a piece of work in progress, but Hurley was downright zen in the sixth-ranked Huskies' pre-tournament showdown with 15th-ranked St. John's. He had no choice but to be; when the opponent chooses to make no shots whatsoever for nearly all of the second half, what's a barely hinged martinet to do but bite a hole in his chin—tightly wrapped coaches can indeed bite their own faces when properly provoked—and walk away confused but worryingly chill. He almost looked haunted.
UConn won, 72-40, and that final score flatters the Johnnies, who entered the game having won their last 13 consecutive games and had that NCAA four-seed look about them. And then, as they say within the royal family, the shit went bad. Monumentally bad. Galactically and nearly historically bad. And after awhile, laughably bad.
