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It would be hard to make up a more charming athlete story than that of Giannis Antetokounmpo. His life is a line connecting unlikely and poignant points: poverty as a son of Nigerian immigrants in Athens, lower-division Greek basketball as a malnourished teenager, speculative No. 15 draft pick by the Milwaukee Bucks, NBA championship, unambiguous place as one of the best players in league history. Coming from the Mediterranean to the Midwest, he tried to jog to a Bucks game in 18-degree weather, and supposedly wiped the windshield of a moving car with his wingspan. He discovered what is most beautiful about America: a "smothie." He picked up almost 50 pounds and ball skills, and won two MVP awards. He plays with an unmatchable motor and has innovated in the fields of arm extension and stride length. Perhaps the greatest transition threat ever to touch a basketball, he is pretty funny, too. This cool basketball player who was once enraptured with blended drinks has amassed a lot of emotional goodwill in my head, and yet, in the span of a single season, he has managed to spend down most of it. Say what you will about LeBron's Decision, but at least he made one. Even James Harden is more direct when he's done with a team, whether he's doing a reverse hunger strike or delivering extemporaneous remarks to Chinese fans. Antetokounmpo has taken a somewhat routine process in his sport and turned it into a tedious and vaguely self-righteous odyssey. The critical shift was when his Bucks co-star Damian Lillard tore his Achilles tendon during the 2025 playoffs. In that instant, Antetokounmpo could have started packing his bags, and no reasonable Milwaukee fan would have begrudged his exit. The all-in trade for Lillard didn't work as anticipated, and the pairing had just been brought to a brutal anatomical end. Antetokounmpo had already fashioned himself into a league-destroying monster and won them the 2021 title. What else could you want the guy to do? He fulfilled any fan base’s most reckless draft-night fantasies, and then some. It was an apt time for a mid-prime superstar to pack up and try to contend on another team.

What is to be done about NBA tanking? Based on the pissy administrative response from the league to some recently and spectacularly egregious examples of Tank Mode, you might think it is the most pressing problem facing a league that has a few of those. Thankfully, the solution is easy: Book a fight in the schoolyard, where the people doing the fighting aren't the students but the teachers. Sign us up for that one every day. Commissioner Adam Silver took the bait on Thursday when he decided to fine the Utah Jazz $500,000 and the Indiana Pacers $100,000 for failing to meet even the subterranean standards for competitive dignity during the past week. The Jazz have been particularly noteworthy—which is a first for them on any front over the past decade or so—and so received five times the tsk-tsk-tsk that the Pacers did. And while every owner regards half a million scoots the way you do a twice-used Kleenex, and while most of your more ambitious lousy teams would gladly pay $500,000 per game the rest of the way if it got them the top pick in the draft, Jazz owner Ryan Smith clearly didn't like the spotlight that came with being fined the equivalent of Brice Sensabaugh's left leg. So he did what any wounded rich guy would do—he went on antisocial media and used the delightful fifth-grade logic of "Yeah, but we don't do it all the time." Smith might have made a better case had he pointed out that the Jazz were not the first team to think of sitting out the healthy starters that had played the first three quarters of the game, but a billionaire scorned is a billionaire scorned. You have to grade these things on a curve.

Work in the outdoor industry long enough, and you’ll learn that only certain jobs in the U.S. are allowed to be taken seriously. Spending your days emailing about nothing is a “career.” Drafting slogans to feed the AI machine? Impressive. Combining the abilities of an EMT, chef, navigator, and athletic coach? Well, you’re just playing outside.  Outdoor recreation work is often seen as summer camp for adults, an in-between seasonal way for young people to play around and earn some cash while they figure out what they “really want to do.” But when a bear shows up at your campsite, an avalanche swoops down, or you step over a root wrong and snap your ankle 30 miles into the backcountry, a guide might be the only thing standing between you and your fast-approaching mortality. So what’s a hard-working guide to do? How does the outdoor recreation industry earn its well-deserved respect? For some, the answer is unions.

Because last week was such a sad and difficult and busy one for us at the site, and also for the broader world in the way that things have been sad/difficult for some time now, I didn't get around to reading the stellar team coverage of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show that Kathryn Xu and Heather Wei-Xi Chen provided until days after the Best In Show had been ... crowned is wrong, I guess. Given a small liver-flavored treat is probably closer to correct. Anyway, the blogs were spectacular, really as fun to read as anything we've had on the site at any time, and because of that and because a mood reset was in order more broadly, Drew and I invited Kathryn onto the pod this week to talk about partying with 33 Pomeranians and the other delights she experienced while covering the WKC early last week. The result is not quite as good for you as actually petting a dog, but it's about as close as you're likely to get from this podcast. After the requisite overture, which touched on football and the effects of the brutal cold snap in the Northeast on our already wobbly psyches, we got straight to the dog stuff and mostly stayed there. We talked about the eternal beats of the dog show, the uneasy combination of thrillingly good vibes and creep-o soft eugenics, which dogs have shooters in the stands, the struggle to balance petting dogs and doing journalism, and Kathryn's personal Pomeranian Reverie and her family's pom history. Some longstanding questions of mine were answered, we came to a consensus on there being too many visible scrotums at the Dog Show, and we discussed how her experience there differed from mine long ago. We agreed, as a group, to give the dogs a pass on not respecting the national anthem.

While the world's attention is currently focused on the various performances, admissions of infidelity, and blood-soaked mascots of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, the guy running the next Summer Olympics is coming under intense pressure for popping up in the latest tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails. That would be Casey Wasserman, founder and CEO of an eponymous talent agency, and chair of the Los Angeles 2028 organizing committee. He retains those positions for now, though an increasing number of clients are leaving the agency or calling for him to step down. When you have to split hairs about exactly how associated you were with Jeffrey Epstein, that makes sense. Wasserman founded the agency in 1998 and quickly expanded it by acquiring as many competitors as possible, including legendary basketball agent Arn Tellem and the powerful soccer agency SFX. You need money and connections to do stuff like that, and every part of running the agency was made easier by the fact that Wasserman's grandfather was Lew Wasserman, one of the most powerful people in 20th-century Hollywood. Lew took Casey under his wing as a teenager, giving the younger Wasserman access to his extensive network of connections and vast fortune, which swelled after Lew sold his agency, MCA, to Matsushita Electric (now Panasonic) in 1990 for $6.5 billion. The Wasserman agency primarily represents athletes and musicians, and Casey Wasserman has made himself synonymous with mogulhood. His public persona is that of a power player connecting the worlds of sports and entertainment to globally powerful people; to that end, his 50th birthday party was attended by Robert Kraft, Bob Iger, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and Doug Emhoff. (Imagine Dragons headlined; even this guy can't buy taste!) In 2014, L.A.'s then-mayor Eric Garcetti appointed Wasserman to spearhead the city's push to bring the Olympics to town, and three years later, L.A. was awarded the 2028 Games.

One hour before the start of the men's skeleton event, Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from participating, after insisting on wearing a helmet with illustrations of Ukrainian athletes and coaches who were killed in the war following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The helmet was banned days ago under Rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter, which reads, "No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas." Heraskevych, Ukraine's sole participant in the skeleton event, continued to wear the helmet during official training sessions and stated his intention to wear it in competition. Before Thursday's competition kicked off, IOC President Kirsty Coventry met with Heraskevych and attempted to reach a last-minute compromise over wearing the helmet on the "field of play." Coventry instead suggested that Heraskevych could wear a black armband during the competition and display the helmet afterward. The nature of skeleton as a sport played a role in the discussion: Skeleton athletes go headfirst, but traveling as fast as 75 miles per hour, at which speed it would not be possible to see the designs on Heraskevych's helmet. After Heraskevych's run was over, the faces would be more clearly seen. Coventry and Heraskevych reportedly agreed on this point, which highlights the fundamentally arbitrary distinctions in IOC rules on expression. From Coventry's perspective, there is no point to wearing the helmet if it is indistinguishable during competition. On the other hand, if the helmet is indistinct, then shouldn't it be irrelevant whether or not it is worn?

To the uninitiated, luge itself might seem a silly sport, given that the average person might guess it mostly consists of holding onto a sled real tight as it goes fast down the ice. Of course, this opinion is wrong. Luge requires athleticism and dexterity, the ability to steer using the slightest movements of your shoulder or leg around the track's curves, all while holding onto a sled real tight as it goes fast down the ice. But there may be no better way to demean a legitimate sport than to take a guy who's already doing it and put another guy on top of him. I would obviously and enthusiastically watch doubles snowboarding or doubles speed-skating, where the world's leading athletes try to go real fast while giving a piggyback to a smaller person, but I can't say it would be for the athleticism. What is there to say about doubles luge that has not already been said? A lot, I think. Alluringly homoerotic and abjectly nonsensical, doubles luge might be the strangest event of any Olympics, winter or summer. Unlike other baffling Olympics sports like biathlon and curling, doubles luge has no legible explanation rooted in Scandinavian military training or bored Scottish people. Doubles luge appears to be the consequence of somebody watching luge and being struck by the idea of stacking another guy on top of the first guy. Apparently back then there were no bad ideas. Only in doubles luge can one luger be doing jazz hands while the other luger pushes off.

Because everyone else at Industrial Foundry No. 682 is basking in the joys of publicly libidinous biathletes and their subtly vengeful exes, snow-runners with nuclear quad muscles, credit card-kiting biathletes, deeply sinister ice dancers, free-range groin photographers, and cartoon murder-stoats, some poor mope has to tackle the backed-up septic tank that is the NBA All-Star Game. Not the thing itself, blessedly, it's not quite that dark yet, but the break is looming just over the horizon of the weekend. You can already feel the symptoms emerging, and see them on the Peacock channel guide. There are still three regular-season games Thursday night—well, timed basketball events of minimal consequence, if we're honest about it—before the league's weeklong break begins, but to listen to the people who purport to care most about the game, the league is up to its eyelids in scorpion venom sunscreen. The All-Star Game itself has been a hot mess for years, and now seems to be in full Pro Bowl territory, but that's the least of Adam Silver's migraines. The NBA, as a whole, is only barely keeping it together, at least beyond those ever-rising franchise values. Tanking is so rampant that teams that win are accused of undermining the product; this is not new in itself, but the grousing about it is in full flower a month earlier than usual, and being done twice as vehemently by twice as many teams. Utah alone has gamed the system so well that even people who hate tanking admire how they've done it. Load management is now the default for grumps who want to player-hate, even though the players aren't the ones doing the managing. The bench-emptying brawl returned with a vengeance, or anyway with a lot of shouting and a few empty swings, as an expression of competitiveness; Pistons big man Isaiah Stewart is one of the next generation of statement players just because his rep is that of a guy who would rather punch your face into the face of the person behind you than get a rebound in a one-point game. Your mileage for that sort of thing will vary, but it's not a thing of beauty.

The Olympic spirit takes a few forms. There's total dominance, as the best athletes in the world display their mastery. There's the unlikely upset, when deep underdogs overcome the odds. And then there are the Olympians with no chance in hell. The ones who are outclassed, outmatched, mostly just happy to be there. Sometimes those Olympians don't know or don't care that they have no hope, and put on the performance of their lives, and that it's still not nearly enough only makes it more moving. This can be the most inspiring form of Olympic pride: battling to the last in the face of certain defeat. Italy's men's hockey team had no chance against Sweden. The Swedes, medal favorites, boast a combined 16,880 NHL games of experience. The Italians? A big fat zero NHL games. This was by design: Team Italy could have pursued NHLers with Italian heritage, and convinced them to spend the minimum two years with the national team to be eligible for the Olympics, but instead chose to actually try to build a program more or less from scratch—Italian-born players, and guys playing in lower-tier leagues across Europe. The idea was that this should be a sustainable program, one that, even if it can't really compete now, hopes to be a genuine force on the European scene in decades to come. A roster like that was going to get its ass beat in Milan Cortina, where the Italians as hosts would receive automatic entry into the field of 12; that was understood. Their first game, against Sweden on Wednesday, should have been a laugher. It was not. It finished 5-2, Sweden, yet felt like a victory for the home side. Don't get it twisted: Sweden was dominant. I suspect that before their next game their coaches will tell them, "Do exactly what you did in that one." They controlled the puck. They dictated the pace of play. They peppered the Italian net to the tune of 60 shots, an Olympic record in the NHL era. That they did not put up historic blowout numbers—it was still a one-goal game with five minutes left—is almost entirely down to Damian Clara, the Italy goaltender who played the game of his or anyone else's life.

How many Premier League teams would you say are super happy with their season so far? I'd put the number at three. First there's Arsenal, which, aesthetic qualms aside, has to be giddy about its prospects of breaking the duck and winning the title. Then there's Aston Villa, already well positioned to nab a Champions League spot for the second time in three years, a remarkable feat for any club outside England's six or seven traditional and/or financial juggernauts. A little further down the table, you have Brentford, the league's one true little engine that could, the lowest-spending team in the competition which in the offseason lost its two best players and also its revered manager and is nevertheless on track for its best-ever EPL finish. Besides those three, though, I don't think any other team's fans would say they have been totally thrilled by their guys' performances up to this point. This strikes me as a little odd! Success in the Premier League is, after all, wholly contextual. Two-thirds of the way through the campaign, I would've thought that more than just three teams could claim to be headed toward what counts for them as fully satisfying success. Sure, there hasn't been any real title race to speak of, and there likely won't be unless Arsenal starts choking at levels that would seem unlikely even for them. (Though, let's be honest, you can never say never with that lot.) But on the other hand, only two teams (the practically already relegated pair of Wolves and Burnley) are entirely devoid of hope, and with only two of the likely five Champions League places more or less locked up already, there are at least seven teams that can credibly claim to be contenders in what is sure to be another dogged fight for the coveted Arsène Wenger Trophy. So why, then, does this season feel vaguely unsatisfying for all but a couple teams? I'd argue this is because no one in the league is simply good. Arsenal is, for certain, a great team, probably the best in all of Europe. Manchester City is very good, with a ceiling that could in theory reach greatness but also a low floor that the team has already collapsed onto multiple times this year. But other than those two, nobody else has been consistently good in absolute terms.