2025-12-22 04:49:12
In Defector's 2025 annual report, our business guy Jasper Wang wrote, "When we started the company, a big chunk of our staffers were in their 20s, bestowing large portions of our editorial output with the imprimatur of youth, but it turns out that every 28-year-old becomes 33 five years later, like clockwork. While we’ve frequently hired early-career writers in their twenties, our overall average age continues to inch upward, as everyone progresses interminably towards unc status." I laughed when I read this, because it's funny and true, and also because in the year and a half since I joined Defector at 28, I'd felt the long arc of my universe start it's inevitable bend towards uncdom.
There's the fact that in August, I hurt my back for the first time. In the months that have passed since I wrote about it, I've learned just how right one of the commenters was when they pointed out that nobody's ever said, I used to have back pain. But as I wrote then, I'd also never particularly enjoyed being young. Call it PTSD from skipping fifth grade, but I've long felt that being the youngest person in the room comes with too many expectations and none of the benefits of experience. There's something freeing about familiarity, a soothingness in routine.
2025-12-22 00:45:06
Watch sports for long enough, and you will come to learn an ironclad yet vague rule: There are some things that a man simply cannot say to another man.
This law of dudehood is most often invoked by a player following a game in which there was a particularly spirited bout of shit-talking. One party will sometimes end up more aggrieved than the other in these circumstances, and it is when they are asked to explain their ire after the game that you can expect to encounter this particular talk about guy talk.
2025-12-21 22:38:04
How much you will or won't enjoy the Caleb Williams experience depends almost entirely on the timing of your dosage. Catch him during one of those quarters when the Bears can't buy a first down and all Williams seems capable of doing is avoiding pressure and throwing the ball out of bounds, and you're liable to throw your hands up and conclude that Ben Johnson needs a new quarterback. But catch him when he's in the middle of one of his fourth-quarter comebacks—he's got six this year—and you might think there isn't a better quarterback in the league.
With five minutes left to play in last night's 22-16 win over the Packers, the Bears were trailing 16-6 and Williams had thrown for 129 yards and zero touchdowns. Chicago looked to be headed towards its most dispiriting loss of the season, one that would have dropped them to 0-2 against their division rival and put their playoff hopes at risk. And then Williams started making throws.
2025-12-20 03:49:09
While the rest of the NBA's elite have distinguished themselves in a series of showcase games this month, Giannis Antetokounmpo has spent his December in a prison of his own making. The fourth-best player in the NBA has reached a dead end with the Milwaukee Bucks, yet neither he nor the team have yet shown themselves willing to accept reality, leading to a series of strange and frustrating developments.
The Bucks got filleted by the Indiana Pacers in the first round of last spring's playoffs and said goodbye to the newly torn-up Damian Lillard, losing along with him any possibility of team-building flexibility. They somehow managed to wriggle around enough to sign Myles Turner away from those Pacers, though the team was clearly drawing dead once again in the East, even with the Pacers and Boston Celtics maimed by, respectively, Jayson Tatum's and Tyrese Haliburton's Achilles tears. This past May, Shams Charania reported on Antetokounmpo having developed a bit of a wandering eye, writing in his characteristically cryptic style that "for the first time in his career, Antetokounmpo is open-minded about exploring whether his best long-term fit is remaining in Milwaukee or playing elsewhere."
2025-12-20 03:06:28
I was able to hold it together until I was alone, but I cried when I learned that the Mets had traded Mookie Wilson. This was at summer camp, so the news might have been days old by the time it finally made its way to me and alone time was decently hard to come by. I was 11, which was old enough for Mookie to have been one of my favorite players on the Mets' 1986 World Series champs and nearly old enough for me to understand why the team had decided to trade him away. I cried all the same, just for a minute, while walking up a long grassy hill towards the bunks. It seemed, even then, like something that wasn't quite worth crying about on the merits, but you can't really negotiate with yourself on stuff like that. A big part of caring about a sports team amounts to figuring out how to accept things that are entirely out of your control, and it is a life's work.
The Mets had been too troubled by injury and addiction and natural attrition to come close to repeating in the years after '86. Getting to watch that utterly dominant and worryingly disinhibited team so early in my life as a fan was disorienting and set some very strange expectations; watching it fall apart, little by little and then all the way down to stinking rubble, was my first and most painful lesson in what being a fan is mostly like. The many incandescently radioactive personalities from that championship team had always existed in an extremely tenuous dynamic tension, and the front office swapped them out gradually and very carefully, like plutonium rods.
2025-12-20 02:44:53
Tyrese Haliburton can only be a spectator to Indiana Pacers games this season, watching from the sidelines in outfits that make him look like an increasingly cool substitute teacher. Regardless, I have found myself thinking about his role on the so-very-almost NBA champions as they have sunk to a 6-21 record in his absence. A debate over Haliburton's stardom bloomed during last season's playoffs, fueled by The Athletic's player poll deeming him the most overrated player in the league (he received a truly overwhelming 13 votes of a possible 90). A psychedelic run of game-winners across the Pacers' four playoff series mostly quieted that debate; his Achilles turning into a Fruit Roll-Up in Game 7 of the Finals—he'd nailed a trio of deep threes inside the first five minutes—ruling him out of that game and this entire season, killed it off for the moment.
Haliburton threw in some sleepy, stinky performances during that ecstatic streak, but made it obvious he was most responsible for the Pacers' unfailing heart. The degree to which Haliburton powered the team's engine, too, is becoming clear. At their best, the Pacers raced back and forth with such speed that opposing teams always tired first, leaving them vulnerable to that last-minute comeback. Without Haliburton, the Pacers have found themselves skewered on the pointy end of close games they won consistently last season.
