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James Harden, who demanded a trade from the Houston Rockets in 2021, the Brooklyn Nets in 2022, and the Philadelphia 76ers in 2023, has demanded a trade from the Los Angeles Clippers. The language is more couched than that—per Shams Charania's latest runic dispatch, "Both sides are aligned in conversations together and with interested teams"—though as always any such reporting will take the form of what an agent demands, and also, the Clippers have no other reason to suddenly start shopping their 36-year-old point guard around. Harden has two plausible reasons to try to get out before Thursday's trade deadline, neither of which have anything to do with wanting to win a championship. Even among recent, strange Clippers seasons, this has been a particularly weird one. The story of the NBA offseason was owner Steve Ballmer's alleged under-the-table payments to Kawhi Leonard via a baroque greenwashing scam, an issue that is still not resolved and which obviously hangs over the franchise's head. The team retooled its bench around a bunch of old guys, all of whom started the season playing clunky, slow basketball. Their beloved coach Ty Lue got into a huge fight with would-be retirement tour participant Chris Paul that ended with Paul being publicly called a nuisance and sent packing. The Clippers were 6-21, in position to send the Thunder a generational player, when a guy tweeted about eating some paper and inadvertently turned the team around. Leonard has maybe been the best player in basketball for a month. The Clippers have gone 17-5 in their last 22 games and even re-signed GM Lawrence Frank, which is certainly, uh, notable given his involvement in signing Leonard to the deal currently under mega investigation. As the bottom of the west has fallen out, they are all but certain to at least qualify for the play-in.

Like its more tangible products, Fanatics' apologies are shoddy and practically worthless, yet Michael Rubin's sports apparel company keeps issuing them anyway. In this latest instance, Fanatics is sorry for its shitty Super Bowl merch that is definitely not worth the listed price. Here's the company's statement, posted Monday night: NFL fans, we've seen your jersey feedback, and we take it very seriously. We’ve let Patriots and Seahawks fans down with product availability – we own that and we are sorry. This Super Bowl matchup has created unprecedented challenges for us because of the massive surge in demand we saw from Patriots and Seahawks fans. Both teams went from missing the playoffs last season to being in the Super Bowl, an incredibly rare occurrence that led to these two fanbases buying nearly 400% more jerseys since Thanksgiving vs. last year. Even though we ordered substantially more jerseys for these teams than ever before, we’ve struggled to meet the overwhelming demand to keep team color jerseys in stock, which we know is your expectation. As sports fans, we understand your frustration and we will work tirelessly to be better. We are bringing in more team color jerseys daily and offering alternative options in the meantime. We’ve heard questions about the quality of these alternate jerseys and can assure you that, despite some unflattering photos, these jerseys are identical to the standard Nike replica “Game” jersey – one of the highest consumer-rated items we carry built on the core template that has been unchanged since Nike took over NFL jerseys in 2012. That said, if you’ve ordered any product that you’re not fully satisfied with, including one of these alternate jerseys, it can always be returned free of charge via the Fanatics app – part of our long-standing return policy. Fans who purchased online via NFL Shop or the Patriots/Seahawks team stores can do the same. We want you to know that we’re listening and we’re ready with a deep assortment of jerseys and fan gear for whoever wins on Sunday. There is nothing better than serving passionate sports fans and we value your feedback above all.

The multiple annoyances of having The Big'Un in your town do not really become evident until Thursday, and sometimes even as late as Friday. That's when the rubes show up in their cheap Fanatics knockoff jerseys, clogging the airports and highways, swallowing all the restaurant reservations and generally acting like the kind of people you would emigrate to avoid. A peaceful and moderately civilized living experience is suddenly and overwhelmingly overrun by Americans, with all the turbo-ick that implies. This particular Superb Owl being played in Santa Clara doesn't matter, because everyone stays 40 miles away in San Francisco, Home Of The Thousand-Dollar Room Rate. The great failing of San Francisco, contrary to all the fulminating on the topic done by weird rich people and the conservative media that sustains their mental illness, is that everything fashionable and extortionate happens in the equivalent of six square miles, which means that the only ways to get in or out of town are two freeways and two bridges. Moving all those people to Santa Clara and back will be, as Pope Leo said the last time he saw the White Sox in person, "a comprehensive shitshow." But at this point in the week, the Owl still belongs to the NFL's small world—how the Rooney Rule, to help promote the advancement of black coaches, went from being named for Art to being named for Mickey; how Roger Goodell is planning to farm out the 16 18th games to different countries ("You are looking live from high above Ljubljana, Slovenia ... "); and now the return of the high comedy and low tea of the Hall of Fame Conspira-fest. America has not arrived yet. It's still just Football Country out here for the time being. It's a busy country, too. You already know about Bill Belichick, how he didn't get into the Hall Of Fame, and how quickly the voters raced to the internet to violate the deeply held precept of confidentiality. But having learned nothing while wading through the ashes of that hilarity, the Hall has sustained another breach of secrecy with the report that Belichick's former boss and current bête noire, Robert Kraft, also didn't get voted in despite being even more desperate for induction than his noisome former employee. 

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 fake booze, depressing old sex movies, driver’s ed in a Tesla, and more. PROGRAMMING NOTE: Today’s Funbag will be mildly truncated as I and the rest of the Defector staff prepare for Dan McQuade’s memorial later this week. I’ll be back at normal length next week, although I’ll still be quite testy that Dan is no longer with us. Stupid cancer; you’re almost worse than Trump. Your letters:

It was a bonnie morning 410 million years ago in what are now the Rhynie chert fossil beds in Scotland. The mists had begun to lift and swirl over the landscape, where hot springs burbled, lichen papered over rocks, and worms slithered as only worms can. Here, almost all life stayed close to the ground. The second-tallest organism at the time, a plant called Cooksonia, grew to a few centimeters at most. This made Prototaxites, an organism with some species that towered above these landscapes at heights of up to 26 feet, an actual behemoth. Prototaxites was a strange sort of life form. It had no branches, leaves, flowers, fruits, nor a discernable root system. Instead, it resembled a beautiful sausage sprouting from the ground. In this way, Prototaxites was ahead of its time: undeniably phallic in a time long before phalluses existed. The Rhynie Chert 410 million years ago.

Hopefully you have not already heard, but the Charlotte Hornets are one of the hottest teams in the NBA. LaMelo Ball is for once an aptonym, Brandon Miller is playing like Paul George (laudatory) instead of playing like Paul George (derogatory), and Kon Knueppel is going nuts from three. It's all working, for what feels like the first time in a decade. So this week on Nothing But Respect, we invited on Mother Jones editor Jacob Rosenberg, because he's a smart, hilarious person and also a Hornets fan. We of course began with a Dan McQuade tribute, as he is in all of our thoughts this week, and the Sixers just honored him in more ways than one. The three of us planned to talk about way more than the psychic geography of Charlotte and the bizarre, mostly awful history of the Hornets, but Jacob did so much research that the only non-Charlotte thing we got to was itself actually something that took place in Charlotte, as it involved Steph Curry.

NEW YORK — On day one of the Westminster Dog Show, the Westminster Kennel Club hosted a Judging Insider program, where longtime judge Michael Faulkner helpfully pulled back the curtain on what actually goes into judging dogs and bitches (a strict technical term in the dog show world, and one which is used with a regularity that is startling if you're not used to it). How do you decide which of 33 seemingly identical Pomeranians is the best Pomeranian? Faulkner emphasized that the dogs in the Best in Group or Best in Show categories, which feature multiple breeds, are not judged against each other, but are judged on which dog comes closest to its individual breed standard on that day. Barring disqualification for flaws such as signs of aggression or incorrect size or coloring, judging should always be on the positives of the dog, rather than the negatives.  In order for a breeder to become a judge, the American Kennel Club requires 12 years of experience in the sport at all levels, and at least four champions bred across five litters. As Faulkner, who breeds Golden Retrievers, riffed, "it takes longer to become a dog judge than a brain surgeon." But for all of the education and the standards and the rigamarole, the supposed quality of a dog is undoubtedly subjective. Faulkner’s descriptions of dog standards conveyed the idiomatic importance of, say, an Australian Cattle Dog’s head and jaw shape for surviving the potential consequences of "get[ting] kicked by a cow." He offered rapturous remembrances of the dogs that spoke to him in the ring, like a German Shepherd that "gave me goosebumps; when she went around the ring, I felt every muscle in her heart pound." It's an art and a science.

Thanks to the eerie longevity of its recent greats, men's tennis has been preoccupied with endings over the last few years. It's all about legacy, the decision to retire, the tally of major titles once the rackets have been set down for good. All of it is almost a little morbid. How refreshing that the game's greenest superstar is reorienting the conversation around beginnings instead, because no career in men's tennis has ever started quite like that of Carlos Alcaraz. No man had ever seized all four of the sport's biggest trophies by the age of 22, a labor that the Spaniard completed Sunday by defeating Novak Djokovic, 2-6, 6-3, 6-2, 7-5, to win the 2026 Australian Open. Going into this season, Alcaraz had won the three other majors, twice apiece, but in Melbourne he had never advanced past the quarterfinal stage. There was no reason to think he couldn't; his success on outdoor hard courts had been demonstrated amply at other stops on tour. This year, he pushed through bodily distress and one of his most difficult opponents to finish the job and secure the career Grand Slam. To even think about a 22-year-old's "legacy" right now would feel wrongheaded. How can you be looking forward and not straight at him? His staggering talent, and his very style of play, demand that any observer stay locked into the present moment, so as not to miss a single swagger, smile, or deranged moment of improvisation. Alcaraz's title run only ever looked in peril at two moments. The first occurred during his semifinal against Alexander Zverev, the opponent who cut short his 2024 run in Australia by serving him off the court. This year, Alcaraz had won his first 17 sets at the tournament, including the first two over Zverev in that semifinal. Carlitos seemed bound for straight-set victory when he started to cramp late in the third. He took a controversial medical timeout—cramps are not technically grounds for a medical timeout—vomited into a towel, drank some pickle juice, and proceeded to hobble around the court like a pirate for the better part of two sets. Zverev, dilly-dallying fatally, needed tiebreaks to win the third and fourth sets. He went up a break in the fifth and had an opportunity to serve out the match. Instead, the greatest mover on tour recovered the feeling in his legs and claimed the next three games to win in five hours and 27 minutes, the longest semifinal in tournament history and one of the strangest victories of his young career.

In 2012, a self-published author of erotic Twilight fanfiction, whose books had gained a large fan base online, was offered a seven-figure contract by a major American publisher. E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy would become the three bestselling titles of the 2010s in the U.S. (even Fifty Shades Freed, the now mostly forgotten end to the trilogy, outsold The Hunger Games). They would also sell over 150 million copies worldwide across 52 languages. The impact was immediate: Op-eds were written. Bad prose was excerpted. Stock photos of fluffy handcuffs appeared everywhere. And, amidst all the endless discussions about ethical BDSM and "mommy porn" and what, exactly, women might want, fanfiction had suddenly become highly lucrative. Instead of asking what Fifty Shades meant for women, people should have been asking what it meant for publishing. Some fanfiction authors and readers have always been deeply opposed to monetizing fanworks, seeing it as a fundamental betrayal of fanfiction itself. But the eruption of a subterranean erotic world into mainstream publishing has had more seismic effects than just irritating fanfiction purists. Fanfiction-originated romances, erotic and not, have an eye-catching presence in most bookshops now; this has fueled ongoing culture war content about the feminization of contemporary fiction, the degradation of literary standards, and whether men can even sell books anymore. Plus, the spectacular example of Fifty Shades has given fanfiction adaptations a reliably pejorative connotation. Adapting fanfictions can attract a very invested fanbase, but it has also always been freighted with accusation: of bad, melodramatic, cheap writing, and even of plagiarism, or a more nebulous kind of cheating. 

NEW YORK — People are talking about boxing again! Sure, it took a guy getting his hairpiece punched off his head to do it, but why complain? Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, 317-pound heavyweight Jarrell Miller got hit so hard his hair fell off. No, not figuratively. Miller's hairpiece was actually loosened up by the force of a straight left to the face he took from his 288-pound opponent Kingsley Ibeh, with about a minute left in the second round. Then a quick and equally stout Ibeh right got his head rug flapping. The poor pelt peeled back further during some infighting between the big lugs and an exchange of blows as the round ended.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dky36nkTh8