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This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to welcome David Roth back to the show. Roth knows more about men's college basketball than either Harry or I, but more importantly, he has equally strong opinions about draft prospects. I mean that in both the specific and general senses. We all have guys we like, as well as various archetypes that remain permanently tantalizing. Lots of good Yaxel Lendeborg chat, so tap in.

If you could dig up my Google Maps history from fall 2022, you would find that I had repeatedly searched for how to get from Columbia University to the American Dream mall by public transportation. Located in East Rutherford, N.J., American Dream is the second-largest mall in the country, right behind the Mall of America. There’s an indoor ski slope, roller coasters, an aquarium, a water park, and even a virtual-reality cliff jumping attraction, whatever that means. But it wasn’t any of those things that made me consider the journey out to New Jersey. Instead, I was much more interested in visiting the indoor, NHL-sized ice rink located in the middle of the mall. In September 2022, the Metropolitan Riveters of the Premier Hockey Federation, a professional women’s hockey league, announced that their home ice for the season was going to be the rink at the American Dream. They’d allegedly be able to have up to 2,000 spectators—with the caveat that there were no built-in seats at the mall’s rink, so the stands would need to be set up before every game. Controversially, then-Riveters president Digit Murphy made a comment about how players could promote the game by doing fashion shows on the ice. I wanted to see a professional women’s hockey game in person, and to root for the Riveters, but I also couldn’t get over the indignity of these top-tier women’s players calling a megamall’s rink their home base. It was as if they were one of the many novel spectacles at American Dream, somewhere between the Nickelodeon theme park and the Angry Birds mini golf. As one Seattle Torrent fan, Katrina L., told me this past weekend, it felt like the last few professional women’s hockey leagues had been “really elaborate Ponzi schemes.”

The final week of the NBA's regular season is here, and with scant meaningful basketball on the horizon, it's time to debate various NBA awards. Will Victor Wembanyama's narrative momentum help him overtake the obviously correct MVP choice, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? Will Karl-Anthony Towns sneak onto the All-NBA third team? Will Sacramento's Maxime Raynaud or Utah's Ace Bailey earn the final All-Rookie first-team slot? All valid questions, but discussion around any award must necessarily reckon with the strange boundary circumscribing the parameters of every end-of-season award, except for the rookie ones: the 65-game rule. As part of the 2023 collective bargaining agreement, the NBA and the players association agreed that in order to be eligible for any end-of-season award (except the rookie ones), a player would have to have played at least 20 minutes in 65 games. The precise language affords some wiggle room—players who hit 62 games and then suffer a season-ending injury can be eligible, and there is a grievance process in place for players who experience "extraordinary circumstances"—though not enough to prevent several star players who had great seasons from missing out on their deserved rewards, or having to hustle back from serious injuries to play in meaningless games in order to scrape onto the ballot. Cade Cunningham suffered a collapsed lung five minutes into his 61st game of the year with the Pistons, and he will have to play all of Detroit's final five games to be eligible for All-NBA honors which he has more than earned. Anthony Edwards hurt his knee and will not get to 65. Luka Doncic is on 64 and out for the remainder of the regular season, and will file a grievance. Detroit's Isaiah Stewart, who should be All-Defense, won't get to 65; his teammate Ausar Thompson, who should join him in that honor, has played 70 games but has gotten to 20 minutes in only 61 of them. Wembanyama hurt his rib against the Philadelphia 76ers and is one game short.

In the midst of yet another apocalyptic news cycle, nothing lifts my spirits more than a good old-fashioned sex scandal. And what’s this? It appears that Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel, who once told the world he’d cut off his own penis to win a Super Bowl, has decided to make good use of that penis while it’s still attached to his body. Tuesday night, Page Six ran a series of photos showing Vrabel getting up close and personal with The Athletic's NFL insider Dianna Russini at an adults-only, honeymooner resort in Sedona, Ariz. Both Vrabel and Russini are married, just not to each other. They also each have two kids … again, not with one another. Oh shit. While the Post didn’t get hard evidence of these two in flagrante delicto, they did score multiple photos of Vrabel and Russini holding hands, hugging, soaking in the hot tub, and just generally doing shit that people who are fucking each other tend to do. The Post also had sources at the resort offer a few more irresistible details: Both Russini and Vrabel insist they were there with friends and say they simply weren’t visible in the pictures. A source close to Russini says she was staying at the hotel during a hiking trip with two female pals. One of Vrabel’s friends told Page Six that they and the coach drove up to Sedona for the day with another pal and that they all drove back to their own hotel, some two hours away, after hanging out with Russini and her gang.

The thing that has most consistently awed me as I've plunged into Brazilian funk is just how deep the genre is. In its earliest days, funk really was just about as simple as one particular rhythmic sample laid atop existing dancy hits. But the genre's explosion since then has been downright Cambrian, incorporating new rhythms and constantly birthing new styles, oftentimes finding growth by devouring techniques and characteristics from musical traditions within and outside of Brazil—a voracious cultural cannibalism that would make Oswald de Andrade and Caetano Veloso proud. For the uninitiated, funk's enormity and perpetual churn may seem intimidating, like hearing about a nice swimming hole, heading over for a leisurely dip, only to find yourself before raging whitewater rapids. But what I've learned is that if you're willing to make the leap of faith and dive right in, you will not be disappointed by the wild ride it takes you on. Sure, I have probably lost multiple decades of lifetime aural functionality by playing this gloriously damaging music at dangerous volumes for hours and hours, and my every doctor's appointment threatens to include a trip to the ER before I get a chance to explain why my heart now beats to the rhythm of tamborzão, and while I have come to learn about 18 words of Portuguese, the bulk of them are merely synonyms for various reproductive organs. Nevertheless, I have loved getting swept along in funk, going on a journey that has led me to places I never would've imagined, many of which I wouldn't have even thought I'd like so much before getting there. With that in mind, I figured I'd share some of the things I've come across recently, to maybe help guide a curious fellow traveler.

Where its harsh, cold plains stretch toward the Uruguay River, the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul is blanketed by the pampas, expansive fields at odds with the sandy beaches and verdant mountains typically associated with Brazil. In fact, Rio Grande do Sul is a bit like the American West: built on settler mythology and Indigenous blood, conquered by men with a thirst for profit, and boasting of that vast kind of nature, big skies and endless plains. Also, there are cowboys.  A South American cowboy is called a gaucho. If, in North America, cowboys come clad in tall boots and tall hats, on the pampas their hats and boots are stouter, they wear neck scarves, and drink mate (a beverage enjoyed nationally in Argentina and Uruguay, but regionally in Brazil; we call it chimarrão). The gaucho is, finally, a virile man—a descendant of those combative settlers, a rugged horserider. Sandra Jatahy Pesavento, one of the preeminent historians of the state, describes the gaucho ideal as “the brave horseman of the undulating plains, the valiant centaur of the pampas.” The Brazilian South is a largely conservative region, and strikingly white compared to the rest of the country, due to European and particularly German colonies established in the 19th century. It enjoys a place of prominence in the Brazilian collective imagination, perhaps nowhere more prominent than in the south’s own estimation—it has bred separationist, racist and homophobic ideas, and a psyche addled by European envy. Past presidents from Rio Grande do Sul include João Goulart, the last democratically elected president before the establishment of the military dictatorship in 1964, and dictators—some, like Getúlio Vargas, more popular than others, like Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco. Gisele Bündchen is from there, too. 

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Ray answers a pair of questions on parent peer pressure.

It is a rare occasion when baseball players actually land any solid punches in a bench-clearing brawl, and this clip will be no different. No heavyweight blows connected cleanly in Tuesday's bout between Braves starter Reynaldo Lopez and Angels outfielder Jorge Soler. It was pretty rowdy nonetheless. Keep an eye out for a flying tackle of Soler by Atlanta manager Walt Weiss. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg4M02JzKOg Soler had homered off of Lopez in his first at-bat and gotten plunked in his second. That, one might think, would be the end of it, honor restored all around in whatever silly red-assed code required it. But in the fifth inning, Lopez sailed a pitch to the backstop. He said there was no intent behind it, and that's plausible enough, given it allowed a runner to move into scoring position in a close game. Soler wasn't having it. "I asked him if everything was OK and the answer he gave me, I didn’t like it," Soler said afterward. "That’s why I went out there."

Sometimes the best music is the most embarrassing music. That's part of the magic of art: the mystical properties that can make a work simultaneously vulnerable and uncomfortable and alluring and groovy. A desire to jam and to hide my face in my hands—that is Dashboard Confessional to me. Dashboard Confessional, the final boss of 2000s emo pop, was the brainchild of Florida boy Chris Carrabba, the jet-black-haired (and sideburned) original tattooed sensitive guy, with his Abercrombie chic of tiny shirts, tight jeans, and a silly armband. Brooding with a sleeve of tats, you know he might be trouble, but in that irresistibly wounded, emotionally expressive way. "Yes," your brain tells you, "I can fix him." Dashboard formed in 1999 and put out their first album the following year, but their breakthrough came with their sophomore effort, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, which turned 25 last month. The year is 2001, and Carrabba and Dashboard Confessional have become an MTV staple. "Screaming Infidelities," a year-old song that had already appeared on their first album, is suddenly a big hit. The band has begun to ride the line between teeny-bop twee punk for the TRL set and the go-to punchline of every derisive joke about the cloying excesses of the fake genre that is emo, while simultaneously being a quality band with great, karaoke-ready pop songs. For my part, I am a 12-year-old boy, and they are the band I don't want anyone to know I am listening to ... even as I listen to them all the time.

Well, what is it? According to the official 2026 MLB rules, a strike—in isolation, absent swings and foul tips—is called when "any part of the ball passes through any part of the strike zone." The strike zone is duly defined, in a long-winded and broadly unpunctuated phrase, as "that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap," which "shall be determined from the batter's stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball." The definition, handed first to human umpires, is filled with human imprecision. Reasonable people may disagree on the exact location of the "hollow beneath the kneecap." How precisely middle is the "midpoint," often defined by fans as the letters on the jersey? Would a given batter's midpoint vary over the course of a season should they start adhering to high-waisted fashion trends? With the implementation of the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system, these ambiguities have been quashed. After a rigorous independent height-measuring process that shrunk batters across the league, ABS now shirks the minutia of calf-to-thigh proportions in favor of defining the top of the strike zone at precisely 53.5 percent of a hitter's height, and the bottom at 27 percent of the player's height. So, that's that. While a human umpire may use knees and torsos as reference points, a true strike is called when any part of the ball passes through any part of the strike zone, which is defined as the area over home plate within a range between 27 and 53.5 percent of the batter's height.