Tom Ley

Good news for Adam Silver: Ja Morant is no longer pretending to shoot a gun after hitting big shots. Potentially bad news for Adam Silver: Ja Morant is now lobbing imaginary grenades into the crowd. Morant’s grenade toss featured prominently in Thursday’s nationally televised game between the Grizzlies and Timberwolves, which Minnesota won 141-125. Morant […]

Tomorrow, the Dallas Mavericks will be tipping off a play-in game against the Sacramento Kings. Win, and their hopes of making the postseason stay alive. Lose, and their season ends. Obviously, today was the perfect day for the front office to orchestrate a strange, semi-secretive sit-down with selected members of the local media, the purpose […]

During Monday's White House visit by the FCS National Champion Ohio State Buckeyes, former Ohio Senator and current Vice President JD Vance attempted to pick up the National Championship trophy and did not succeed; Vance fumbled both the top and the bottom of the trophy, the base of which tumbled to the ground. Here, Defector presents two perspectives on the incident.

Chuck Grassley, Iowa’s 91-year-old Republican Senator, held a town hall with some of his constituents yesterday in Fort Madison, Iowa. After reviewing eight minutes of footage from the meeting, I have to say that the people of Fort Madison were really getting Chuck’s ass. The small crowd was blessed by the presence of several people […]

If the play-in tournament is good for anything, it’s throwing an annual spotlight on some of the NBA’s most stuck-in-the-mud franchises. Whereas 9- and 10- seeds used to be able to slink into the offseason in relative anonymity, they are now dragged into the light for one more nationally televised, win-or-go-home game that is sure […]

Listen, I will happily devour any article about Nikola Jokic. He's my big special guy and every anecdote that gets published about him keeps a place in the most lovingly curated segment of my mind. So it is with great sadness that I am forced to issue a yellow card on this simile from

Have you seen this? Are you aware of this? The NBA playoffs are about to begin! This is real. I would not lie to you. This means that the time has come for you, the casual basketball fan, the dunce that you are, the grime on the bottom of a true basketball-knower’s shoe, to begin […]

Lotsa games today! Lotsa games tomorrow, too. Feel free to hang out here and chat while you binge on all that spectacular hoops action.

A closely contested NBA playoff game is an insanity device. Every turnover is a rake across the brain, every missed free throw a boil on the soul. Each second of game time that passes is designed to pull the contents of your guts closer and closer to the edge of your throat. If that is […]