Tom Ley

The NBA offseason presents a pit that must be filled with trade rumors, free-agency drama, and delirium-inducing podcast segments. It takes a lot of slop to fill that pit to the brim, which is how you end up with Jaylen Brown and an ESPN dope conspiring to dust off a tiresome conversation about the place of analytics in the NBA.

A recent New York Times story about former NFL insider Dianna Russini resurfaced an anecdote that Russini had previously shared on a podcast earlier this year.

There are a million reasons why the World Cup is the greatest sporting event on Earth, and one of those reasons is that it's the rare setting in which soccer managers can be forced to eat some shit.

If there's one clean, satisfying lesson to be taken from the World Cup action we've seen so far, it's this one: Big games tend to be decided by the big dogs.

It is said, probably more often than is necessary, that a team that loses a player to a red card must be prepared to suffer. This is particularly true when the team that has gone down a man has a lead to protect. As soon as that card comes out, fans must prepare to watch their team hunker down, absorb constant pressure from the opponent, and pray to god that they can hold onto the lead.

Perhaps it is too fucking hot where you are to do anything outside this weekend. Perhaps you prefer to be locked inside watching World Cup matches while eating popsicles. While you do that, feel free to hang out here and chat in the open thread.

Soccer is not usually the sort of sport that causes its players to lose their voices. And yet there was Harry Kane, minutes after his 10-man England squad escaped The Azteca with a 3-2 win over Mexico, nearly unable to complete his post-match interview due to the hoarseness of his voice. It was an unusual thing to see, but befitting of the game Kane had just played, which was so strange, so dramatic, that it was easy to imagine most everyone who watched or played in it being left speechless.

It is difficult to pin down an international team's true quality and character based on the results of one brief tournament. The games are too few, and the environment too variable, to come to any definitive conclusions. But the games are revealing nonetheless, and any team that plays enough of them will have their specific strengths and shortcomings put on display, some more immutable than others. The teams that tend to thrive in the World Cup are the ones most capable of shrinking the distance between the best and worst versions of themselves, such that the arrival of either is not overly surprising or destabilizing. On Monday, Belgium reached through the swagger and confidence that the USMNT had spent four games building, and drew out a fragility that lurked deep within. Unprepared to face the worst version of themselves, the Americans crumbled.

Terry Thompson is part of a lawsuit against FanDuel and DraftKings claiming that the sports books used their VIP services and products to intentionally prey on his gambling addiction. Thompson says he wagered $18.5 million with FanDuel and became addicted to gambling via the sports book's in-game micro bets. His suit claims he was also encouraged to continue gambling by a FanDuel VIP manager named Bryttanni Morgan, who at one point sent Thompson a personalized video from Bryce Harper.

In September 2025 the NBA hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate the Los Angeles Clippers for potential salary cap circumvention after Pablo Torre Finds Out reported that the team had arranged a no-show endorsement deal for Kawhi Leonard with a fraudulent tree-planting company called Aspiration. On June 30, 2026, the Clippers agreed to trade Leonard to the Toronto Raptors. That trade is now on hold because, somehow, the aforementioned investigation is still ongoing.