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When Lakers majority owner Jerry Buss died in 2013, he left his 66 percent stake to six of his children, with daughter Jeanie Buss acting as the team's governor. Jerry hoped his family would hold on to the franchise, and toward the end of his life, he took financial and contractual measures that made it easier for them to do so. Naturally, after his death these six Buss children got caught up in over a decade of infighting that saw them split into three rough camps. Eldest siblings Johnny and Jim wanted to sell and cash out; in the middle, Jeanie wanted to keep running the team, and Janie followed her lead; Joey and Jesse, over 20 years younger than the rest, wanted to hang on and eventually run the team themselves, based on the tontine-like structure of the trust. Somehow all this infighting culminated in Jeanie, who had been resistant to previous suggestions of a sale, initiating the sudden 2025 sale of a majority stake to Mark Walter. That left the Busses with a 17.8 percent stake and Jeanie acting as governor until at least 2030, although that arrangement already appears to be obsolete. After Walter—who is under federal investigation—in turn sold the Lakers to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner last week, the Buss siblings saw an opportunity to sell the rest of their stake in the team, according to Monday's report from ESPN's Shams Charania. "We love the Lakers, Laker fans and will continue to support Los Angeles; but it is time to use this opportunity to move on and exit gracefully while we still can," the Buss family said in a statement. Charania helpfully clarified that Jeanie would be unable to act as governor once she owned 0 percent of the franchise, which I can confirm fails to meet the 15 percent minimum threshold.

The Arizona Diamondbacks either have an injured cleanup hitter, a truancy problem, a communications dysfunction, some mysterious and possibly sinister fourth thing, or all of the above. Well, there's a sixth possibility: They don't mind taking a beat writer for a ride now and then to preserve clubhouse tranquility. But let's take that as a given, because that's what a beat writer is for: to toss under the bus when you want the driver to stop. Anyway, one of their best players, second baseman and designated hitter Ketel Marte, skipped Monday night's 11-1 loss in Boston after going through the bother of flying there from Atlanta with his teammates. This led Arizona Republic beat writer Nick Piecoro, a responsible sort with two decades of said responsibility in the job to prove it, to post this:

In Okinawa's coastal forests, brown puffballs protrude from roots of trees like unwanted warts. Although they might appear to be mushrooms, the balls are plants. To be more specific, they are fruits. To be even more specific, they are clusters of up to a million fruits that each encase a tiny seed, fruits made larger and more dazzling by their proximity to each other, fruits designed like pavé diamonds. But Balanophora fungosa, also known as fungus root, is not strange because it looks like a mushroom, or even because it has an unreasonable number of fruits. It is strange because it has no chlorophyll with which to photosynthesize, and it has no roots with which to drink water. Instead, the fungus root survives by parasitism, entrenching itself on the roots of trees. In other words, it's a freaky little plant. Petra Svetlikova, a plant researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, said as much in a statement: "It’s a fascinating example of how something so strange can evolve from an ancestor that looked like a normal plant with leaves and a normal root system." The plant in question.

Some people are fans of the Carolina Panthers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Carolina Panthers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your Team: Carolina Panthers. Your 2025 record: 8-9, but not just any old 8-9. This is the best 8-9 in the whole NFC South, making the Panthers division champs despite having a losing record—the bad smell that comes with its own deodorizer. Only five teams have ever achieved such a feat, and the Panthers are two of them. They also had the third-worst point difference of any division winner ever (minus-69), so the only luck they could claim as their own was their location.

This week's episode of Nothing But Respect was a really fun one. We set out to make a Broke Jumper Tip Line–focused episode, but only got to the BJTL about 50 minutes in because we had too much other good stuff to talk about with frequent guest Ock Sportello. As to that other stuff: We chatted about the Brooklyn Nets fan's experience of the Knicks title run, spent a lot of time talking about the scourge of AI rap music (read Ock's excellent review of the new Tyga album and Iz's story on Fenix Flexin), and played a game involving the new Pat McAfee album. As for the BJTL: We talked about the hoops acumen of Barack Obama and Chris Hayes (who I'm just realizing now I misidentified as Chris Haynes), and reveal a funny tip about Draymond Green's email behavior.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about reunions, the extinction of the hard T, dinosaurs, and more. Your letters: Dusty:

Some transphobic dickheads were again wearing XX-XY shirts at Sunday's game between the Indiana Fever and Atlanta Dream. Everyone knows what the XX-XY shirt—a truly ugly piece of merchandise made by a brand that raises money for organizations that seek to strip trans people of their rights—means when worn in public. It tells everyone that the person wearing it sees trans people not as human beings, but as targets whose very existence must be protested. It is one of the oldest and most basic forms of bigotry, the equivalent of a big sign reading, "Trans people not welcome." A league security staffer who was working the Dream game on Sunday asked the unfashionable bigots to cover their shirts, for the same reason they might ask a fan sporting the Confederate Stars and Bars to vacate the damn premises: The shirts are meant to target a specific group and make them feel unwelcome in the arena. The WNBA, however, could not abide one of its employees making this reasonable and necessary demand, and on Monday released a statement saying that the security staffer should not have asked for the shirts to be covered: The WNBA is aware of interactions at last night's game in Atlanta in which fans were asked by league security to cover their shirts. This should not have happened.

In November 2018, 29-year-old Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined a group of 200 youth activists associated with the Sunrise Movement as they staged a protest at the office of then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. They were there to urge Democratic leadership to act more quickly on issues of climate change. The period between the election and swearing-in is normally when a newly elected legislator would be getting to know their future colleagues and angling for a good committee assignment. But there was Ocasio-Cortez, the improbable candidate, the member of Democratic Socialists of America who took no corporate donor money and had no major endorsements but still managed to unseat the 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, shaking the table before taking her oath of office, aligning herself more with the activists than the politicians. Ocasio-Cortez's win—along with those of Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, and Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts—served as a warning shot to establishment Democrats about the growing discontent with the party, especially among younger voters who yearned to see the party grow more progressive as the threats of climate disaster, student loan and healthcare debt, billionaire wealth hoarding, police violence, and MAGA Republicans loomed ever larger and put into question what kind of future they would be inheriting.  Earlier this month during an interview on ABC’s This Week, 36-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now one of the country's most popular Democrats, who seems to be eyeing either a presidential or Senate run, was presented with a headline from The Hill which read: “Today's cautious AOC would not have endorsed the AOC of 2018.”

According to a report from ESPN, the NBA hasn't found any evidence that Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer arranged to pay Kawhi Leonard in excess of salary-cap rules via the fraudulent green-banking company Aspiration. Just under a year ago, after a series of reports from podcaster Pablo Torre, the NBA hired the prestigious law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate the alleged scheme. Per the ESPN report, lawyers representing Ballmer and the NBA have been negotiating a resolution over the past few days, and "the league has presented no evidence" to Ballmer that he cheated. Here is a brief summary of how we got here: In early September 2025, Torre reported that Leonard had signed a no-show marketing deal with the now-defunct bank Aspiration, and that this functioned as a way for the Clippers to pay Leonard more than his official salary. Ballmer went on ESPN and played dumb, claiming that while Aspiration was a team partner, he had nothing to do with any arrangements between player and fraudulent bank. Torre produced over a dozen subsequent reports showing a close relationship between Leonard, Aspiration, and various Clippers figures, most notably minority owner Dennis Wong, who reportedly "invested" $1.99 million into Aspiration after the bank was already crashing, and just days before Leonard reportedly received a payment from Aspiration for roughly the same amount. In addition to reams of more evidence about Aspiration, Torre has also reported on what appears to be a similar arrangement between Leonard and scoreboard company Daktronics. The crux of the scandal is the matter of whether Ballmer was intentionally paying Leonard under the table via the Aspiration arrangement. While something shady was clearly going on, providing ironclad legal proof of intent is tricky. The corpus of Torre's reporting is substantial enough that the relationship seems beyond doubt, but the standard for proving that in something approximating a court of law is significantly higher. The NBA's preliminary findings today don't mean that it's all over and Ballmer is for sure in the clear. According to ESPN's report, the NBA seems to have cleared Ballmer of the biggest potential violation of the collective bargaining agreement, but the league is still looking into whether he overstepped rules limiting what teams can do to facilitate endorsement deals for players.

It is difficult to wrap the human mind around the fact that, in the grand old year of 2026, the Milwaukee Brewers are really, truly good. Or maybe that is a personal problem, as someone generally disconnected from the ongoings of the NL Central. What happens over there? None of my business! The operating assumption is that the Brewers will scam the division with 90-or-so wins every year, reaping the benefits of the four other flailing, barely trying teams who share the ignominy of playing in that blighted division, and then will immediately turn around and lose in the NL Wild Card round or Divisional Series. Perhaps last year should have served as a legitimate indicator. The Brewers, after all, won 97 games, the most of either league. But the way the Brewers achieved those 97 wins was undeniably weird. There were (said to the tune of "Shots" by LMFAO) hits, hits, hits, hits, hits, hits and double-digit win streaks somehow chained to other win streaks and the swingiest of games, all of which gave the Brewers' record a faint tinge of eau de frauduleux. The Brewers squeaked out of the NLDS against their divisional rivals, the Chicago Cubs, before getting absolutely curb-stomped by none other than the Los Angeles Dodgers—at their closest pass to their purported juggernaut form—in the NLCS. But this year! This year, it feels more real. Maybe it's because Pete Crow-Armstrong is popping off for the Cubs, so it feels like there's some real competition within the division, or at least like anyone else is taking it seriously.