NowLoop

Get past the unseasoned beef between Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown in Tuesday's Celtics-Sixers matchup, and reach instead for the real juice: a killer performance by Paul George, the player for whom Brown was traded. Though a single regular-season game in November is no way useful to assess a trade in its entirety, the contrast last night between those two wings was telling: Brown (keyed-up, foul-prone, poor decision-making) sat out much of a game where George (methodical, efficient, at ease in the flow of offense) flourished. Boston won, 123-101. More than anything, George's 36-point outing was a reminder of his eerily slick, timeless style could have plugged into every NBA roster constructed over the last decade, and how it distills Joe Mazzulla's Celtics squad to its spiritual essence. Fair minds were skeptical that a star version of George would ever return. In two years with Philly, he seemed to have receded into a fog of lower-body injuries, mystery drug use, and inconsistent podcasting, playing just 78 total regular-season games. Meanwhile, Brown had just come off a workhorse campaign for the Celtics, logging 71 games while soaking up 36 percent usage on his way to an All-NBA second team. For all the hand-wringing about Brown's true value, both in a vacuum and within the Celtics system, he was clearly the more valuable player at the time of the trade. When swapping two seemingly onerous contracts for one another, each one asking somewhere between 32 and 35 percent of the salary cap for a wing who likely wouldn't live up to that price tag, it was the Sixers who had to sweeten the deal with draft picks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7mSyzoPfbk

Three years ago, after a long but loveless marriage, the Minnesota Vikings let QB Kirk Cousins walk out the door. They felt free. Unburdened. Hopeful, even. No longer would they have to spend night after night asking themselves, “Where is this relationship going?” They could finally find someone new. They could believe in love again, and maybe even have a bit of fun getting back out there on the scene. That scene, much to the Vikings’ chagrin, turned out to be far less exciting than they’d anticipated. Maybe it was them. Maybe they weren’t quite as charming and attractive as they thought they’d been. Regardless, they eventually found themselves lonely, broken, and frankly hard up. And so, with Taylor Swift’s “Style” playing on a loop in the background, they swallowed their pride, along with a good amount of red wine, and made the call they swore they’d never make. Kirk Cousins is a Viking again, and us Vikings fans feel a little bit ashamed that we let this happen all over again. That’s the subject of this week’s special Trade Deadline Edition of All Ball. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/d0e962b6-9e05-45c6-af98-0b5f8d111e53

Under any other circumstances, in any other year, Kirk Cousins being traded back to the Minnesota Vikings would be universally mocked under the You Can't Make Someone Go Back Home statutes. The story of Kirk and the Vikes is one that had been told all the way through, in no great rush at that, and was on the merits not one that would have had the public demanding or even imagining a reboot. But here, now, in the situation in which the Vikings have placed themselves—well, put it this way: No NFL trade has ever had so many people call their shot ahead of time and then nod with approval after it came to pass. Yes, even though Cousins already titillated and frustrated the Vikings alternately over six years by being Almost That Guy, they brought him back on Tuesday in a desperate admission that they had turned their quarterback room into a lividly radioactive dump site. Cousins, we must presume, went with a song in his heart, because he finally found his nirvana: a place without a young quarterback desperate to make his bones waiting to replace him. A Cousins trade of some kind had been rumored from the moment he landed in Las Vegas to play for the Raiders, primarily because he was so obviously there to hold the place card until No. 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza was ready to replace him. Minnesota wasn't much of a trade option until the Vikings made themselves one—well, the only one. After Cousins was lured to Atlanta (illegally, as the league eventually ruled), the Vikings fell in and out of love with J.J. McCarthy, fell briefly in like with Kyler Murray and then watched his hamstring explode, watched Carson Wentz melt into a puddle in real time on Monday night, and rejected Max Brosmer as a viable option on the fly.

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, Giri offers suggestions on how to avoid the pitfalls of the Toddler Music Industrial Complex.

You'd be forgiven for briefly losing track of your place in linear time at the end of the third quarter of Tuesday night's marquee matchup between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Portland Trail Blazers. How could this be 2026, with Damian Lillard nailing a quarter-ending buzzer-beater from the logo over a cadre of defenders? Clearly we had switched tracks and were now in the realm of Dame Time, or, barring the supernatural, 2019 again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY8T7gR0WD8 The Blazers coasted from there for a comfy 123-103 win, in which Lillard paced his team with 25 efficient points in just 24 minutes. Every part of that sentence would have been inconceivable as recently as 18 months ago.

The Capitals beat the Senators in overtime on Tuesday, but the most impactful play of the night was not a goal. Late in the third, with the score 2-2, Ottawa's Nick Cousins kind of casually gathered the puck in his own corner and started to skate up the ice. Before he could do anything with it, however, Cousins got comprehensively bulldozed by Caps defenseman Jakob Chychrun, who sent his opponent's body into horizontal flight against the boards before it bounced limply to the ice. After a review, the refs deemed the hit clean, but Cousins did not return to action. He didn't go to the hospital, but according to his coach Travis Green, "He’s not doing great.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3E6wjvAA9M I have complicated thoughts about this play. It is very difficult for me to resist marveling at Chychrun's spectacular force and its devastating aftermath; it's as real an athletic feat as any skillful dangle. The fact that it was perpetrated on Cousins, a pest so annoying that his peers named him the league's most punchable player last year, only makes it easier to ignore the human toll. But it's also hard for me to see it and not think about Claude Lemieux, among other ex-NHL tough guys, whose brain was donated to CTE research after his death by suicide earlier this year.

The 2009 remake of Friday the 13th is, by most conceivable metrics, a bad movie. Cacophonous, slapdash, and dutifully uninspired in its pursuit of tits and guts, the movie is a chore even in the forgiving eyes of horror gorehounds. But on the southwestern edge of Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, on the giant screen of The Mahoning Drive-In—the largest still showing movies on 35mm film—it's intoxicating. Not because of some magical idyllic drive-in experience, but for the deep, strange siren song of this drive-in, and the Gathering of the Juggalos–esque events it hosts every year. There are lawn games, costume contests, and raffles. People pitch tents and set up campers, they unfold card tables and have potlucks, spread out blankets and camp chairs and spooky lamps to make it easy for friends to find them in the dark between movies. Almost everyone here is from somewhere else, and none of them care how bad the movie is. They like the movies, sure, but they love The Mahoning. People are lured to this place. That's how most encounter it—someone brings you, serves as a guide, an evangelist. Something makes visitors want to share it with others immediately, in no small part thanks to the spectacle of events like Camp Blood, an annual celebration of slasher movies. This is my third Camp Blood; I first came here because a friend brought me, and this time I want to know how others found their way to this unremarkable patch of the Poconos. I speak to a gaggle of friends, many of which are connected by a man from New Hampshire named Keith. He united a bunch of movie fans from Boston and Ohio, and inspired them to make the long drive down to Lehighton for the Mahoning. I was eager to meet Keith, but unfortunately he was busy mainlining another triple feature at another repertory house, The Gap Theatre in Wind Gap, Penn., a 48-minute drive from the triple feature that began here at sunset. "[Keith] was like, 'The programming at this drive-in is incredible," one of the friends, a man named Desmond, tells me. "And then one year I had to go because they played The Valley of Gwangi, which is a dinosaur movie I'm quite fond of from the '60s … that got me out here, and it's the first drive-in I've ever been to." 

The weightlessness of the early season and the ever-increasing rate of injuries can make it hard to sell a weeknight NBA game in November. There remains, however, a reliable shortcut between "box score I'll check in the morning" and "game I gotta watch live," and it is a route lined with beef. Beef was not promised in the leadup to Tuesday night's game between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers, which pit former teammates Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum against each other for the first time since Brown was traded in the offseason, but a savory aroma was in the air. Brown's trade brought with it all sorts of thinly sourced reports about he and Tatum having a contentious relationship, and those suspicions were more or less confirmed a few weeks ago. On Oct. 22, Tatum posted on YouTube another episode of his self-produced documentary series. A clip of this episode, in which Tatum recounts the shock he felt when he found out that Brown had been traded—"You traded him down the street?" he says to the person who broke the news—was posted on Instagram, and in the comments section of that post, Brown responded with the "cap" emoji. Brown was calling Tatum a liar, which was enough to elicit some direct questions about their relationship from reporters. ​"Jayson's a great guy," Brown said. "Like I said, great family, hell of a basketball player, hell of a PR team. There's no beef, but it might be a little lamb chops, and some gravy, you know what I mean? He should stay ready at all times."

In honor of Monday night's Vikings debacle, some members of the Defector staff share their memories of terrible quarterbacking. Dan Pastorini, Oakland Raiders vs. Houston Oilers, Oct. 9, 1972 Dan Pastorini was a highly regarded but still inexperienced Houston Oiler in 1972, before any of your parents were born, and 30 years before the franchise stopped being either Houston or Oilers. But Pastorini had the bad luck of being drafted by a team that was bad and about to become much worse. He won one of his 22 starts across his second and third seasons, to give you an idea of how horrendous the Oilers were.

Here is a thing that Republicans do not do when they sweep into power: They do not bother brainstorming ways that they can signal a values match with the people who oppose them, and whom they have just defeated. They do not look around, blinking, from the hilltop they have just won, and fret about appealing to the vanquished foes lying half-dead at their feet. When Republicans win, they set about changing the laws, or using the existing laws to their advantage. That is the job. Republican lawmakers express their values through the laws that they make and enforce. They do not get sidetracked by the idea that they can make friends with progressives, and not only because they know that their voters do not want them to do that. They perceive an authentic mismatch of values, and their solution to that is to make progressives eat shit. You will say that this is a weakness of their politics. You will point to their long-dwindling popularity and last week's electoral bloodbath, and say that their reflexive and idiotic tribalism is a terminal illness, and that Democrats should learn from it only that it is self-defeating. You fool. Here you have done them the favor of flattening the actual, substantive, qualitative differences between the goals of the right and the left. You shouldn't do that, because those differences are important. People on the left want things—actual tangible things: laws and institutions and structures—that make sense, that arise from active, curious, engaged minds thinking deeply about how to run a community of any size or complexity. Those things are aimed at the goal of making society more equitable and less brutal, and making life more dignified and less degrading.