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Rich Paul, CEO of Klutch Sports and active NBA agent, has drawn some ire this season for things he said on his new podcast called Game Over, which he cohosts with Max Kellerman. Anonymous members of the Lakers staff were reportedly mad at him for fake-trading Austin Reaves for Jaren Jackson Jr. Lakers fans are mad at him for causing the "disconnect" in the Lakers’ locker room. Stephen A. Smith was mad at him for not understanding that people see him as LeBron James’s mouthpiece. All of these reasons, I fear, are misguided. The only good reason to be mad at him is that he has leveraged the unlimited resources and power of Klutch Sports, CAA, Spotify, and The Ringer to make a daytime SportsCenter simulacrum without the catchphrases. Paul and Kellerman’s FanDuel-sponsored podcast is bad. It's bad in the sort of banal way that most podcasts are bad: The hosts don’t say much of substance, they are stricken with red light syndrome, and their riffs are obtuse and unimaginative. Paul started a recent episode with the line, "Can’t put a watch on without the time being right." This reads like some kind of adage, but Paul was literally just talking about his watch. 

This morning Dave McKenna was observing, with great pride, that Ireland had won zero medals at the Winter Olympics—not sure that any added context will help a reader here—so I decided to check in on the status of India's squad. There were only two athletes, both skiers: one in alpine and the other in cross-country. More had been written about Arif Mohammad Khan, the alpine skier from Kashmir, and I soon encountered these curious sentences in his Wikipedia entry: Khan’s expectation in Beijing was to ski and make it to the finish line.[7] Khan now has his eyes set on the 2026 Olympics.[8][9] You do not often hear an Olympian's ambitions summarized as "make it to the finish line." Time to consult the 2022 men's slalom results to see if Khan had in fact achieved his goal:

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe. This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on Feb 18. In his second collection of recollections and reflections, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the physicist Richard Feynman begins his book with the following anecdote:

I have to come clean about something. For a while now, when writing about the state of the Premier League title race, I have treated an impending Arsenal coronation as basically a fait accompli. This has been in part an earnest reflection of my belief that the Gunners have the best top-to-bottom roster in the world, employ one of the game's best managers, and, maybe most importantly, compete in a field without challengers of the level we've come to expect. However, I'd be lying if I denied that part of my written confidence in the Gunners was meant as a jinx. It would be so funny, and so incredibly Arsenal, if the team were handed every conceivable advantage en route to a title race they should by all rights win at a canter, only to wilt under the pressure and collapse before reaching the finish line. While I of course have no influence on the performances or states of mind of anyone on the team, I do get a dark little thrill when I imagine one of my Arsenal-supporting friends seeing me assure them on the page that they shouldn't fear the thing that they are obviously, rightly most terrified of, in doing so only increasing their dread. Now, no one with any familiarity of the club's historical reputation would've been surprised to see Arsenal ultimately fumble away the trophy. Nevertheless, I don't think even the biggest haters would've expected Arsenal's title charge to get this dire, this quickly. On Wednesday, the Gunners traveled to the West Midlands to face Wolves. The odd timing of the game (scheduled during the Champions League playoffs to compensate for Arsenal's domestic cup duties) and the gap in the table between the teams (first-place playing last-place) meant most neutrals probably didn't even bother monitoring what would've appeared to be an easy three-pointer for Arsenal. If you did decide to check the scoreline at some point during Club Brugge vs. Atlético Madrid or the like, you probably would've found what you expected. The Gunners got out to an early lead with a Bukayo Saka header in the fifth minute, and doubled the advantage about an hour later with Piero Hincapié's 56th-minute goal. Even later, should you have spotted that Hugo Bueno halved the deficit in the 61st minute, you probably wouldn't have assumed Arsenal was in any real risk. But what those context-free scoreboard checks would've hidden from you, which the final 2-2 scoreline cemented, was that Arsenal had been playing like total ass, and is now in the midst of a full-blown panic attack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXllA7juRNE

When athletes are said to thrive under pressure, that generally does not mean that they do not feel it. Rather, the common understanding is that athletes, or at least the great ones, are capable of taking pressure and turning it into fuel. That thermodynamic process is a part of the incomprehensible psychology necessary to reach the pinnacle of competitive athletic greatness. What better source is there for relentless motivation than wanting something so badly, or having something to prove? Alysa Liu has no need for any of that nonsense. Where ordinary—or even extraordinary—athletes might be fueled by pressure, she simply doesn't feel any, ever. She thrives because she is immune. It was always understood that Liu could win gold at the Olympics, but with her technical content, she would need other skaters—say, Kaori Sakamoto, Ami Nakai, and Amber Glenn—to make errors. That assumption, however, always took one thing for granted: Of course Liu herself would never falter. And of course she would never falter! Listening to Liu, it's so easy to forget the broader narrative of there not having been an Olympic women's singles figure-skating medalist from the United States since Sasha Cohen won silver in 2006. A storyline can overwhelm a skater, but Liu is untouched by externalities. She takes an artist's pleasure in sharing her work with a broader audience, but other than that, she appears—or, at this point, with qualifiers surely unnecessary, simply is—so self-possessed that everything she does is truly for herself. If there were any doubts about Liu's mentality, she dismissed them on Thursday, by executing under benthic pressure when no one else could and walking away, unscathed, with a gold medal.

The members of the U.S. women's Olympic hockey team may not admit to this, but they needed to have the pants scared off them by Canada to give the whole gold medal exercise some badly needed historical context. They needed Hilary Knight's reaper-cheating goal with 2:04 left in regulation to tie the game 1-1 and relocate their binary rivalry with our northern brethren and sistren, and they especially needed Megan Keller's ultra-crafty game-winning goal in overtime to make it all stick—not just for the postgame pictures, but for the rest of their lives. https://bsky.app/profile/cjzero.bsky.social/post/3mfaidlioak26 But that's the thing about America's relationship with the Winter Olympics. It is not just a hinder-kicking medal exercise like the Summer Games, because there are too many events at which the U.S. simply is not pre-eminent, or even minimally eminent. Skimo, for example, a new event that dared to ask the question "Why not ski up the mountain?", was designed specifically for Europeans who can't get to work by bus. For the U.S., the tensest Winter Olympic moments matter because the margins of victory are simply not sufficiently wide or sufficiently plentiful to allow for much in the way of jingoistic preening. Genuine drama substitutes for the usual heady mix of arrogance and dominance. And drama was the only aspect of the task at which the American women's hockey side had been particularly poor.

"My sister Emily loved the moors," wrote Charlotte Brontë, in the introduction to a selection of Emily's poems published in 1850. Emily had died in 1848, and had not lived to see the publication of the second edition of Wuthering Heights, carefully revised by her older sister. "Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of sullen hollow in livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights and not the least and best loved was—liberty." The hills and moors that were Emily's Eden, says Charlotte, offered very little beyond liberty. "The scenery of these hills is not grand—it is not romantic; it is scarcely striking. Long low moors, dark with heath, shut in little valleys, where a stream waters, here and there, a fringe of stunted copse. Mills and scattered cottages chase romance from these valleys; it is only higher up, deep in amongst the ridges of the moors, that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot: and even if she finds it there, she must be a solitude-loving raven—no gentle dove. If she demand beauty to inspire her, she must bring it inborn; these moors are too stern to yield any product so delicate." Emerald Fennell, whose Wuthering Heights adaptation is presently in theaters, clearly did not find anything worth examining in the stark, scoured emptiness of Emily's Eden, the liberty and solitude. Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" is drowned in visual excess. Scenes are made to revolve around matters of costuming, with skirts, corsets, and bustiers used as flamboyant and ham-handed markers of luxury or poverty, or internal torment, or social surrender, or romantic desperation. More confounding is the focus on rooms and interior spaces. Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" is trapped indoors by the director's evident infatuation with photogenic living spaces. There are grand rooms washed in garish hues and suffocating rooms arranged in arresting squalor; there's at least one room wallpapered with what appears to be fragments of dyed glass; another room where hundreds of plastered hand-shapes form a bizarre mantle; another room explicitly upholstered and colored to evoke the complexion and texture of a character's skin. Because whole big movements of the film are told in the format of soundtracked montages, I guess it should not be surprising that they are also decorated like a mid-career Hype Williams joint.

A series of posts and direct messages from the Twitter account @gethigher77 has been screenshotted, circulated, and attributed to Houston Rockets star Kevin Durant. The contents of those screenshots have been compiled here for your browsing ease. The messages from @gethigher77 have a sense of humor roughly congruent with Durant's, indicate familiarity with NBA figures in Durant's orbit, and besmirch Durant's teammates past (Russell Westbrook, Kyrie Irving) and present (Alperen Sengun, Jabari Smith Jr.), but none of that would be difficult to fake. This all broke into wider circulation during the All-Star Weekend; Durant was seen glued to his phone during warmups before the main event, although, in fairness, he seems to always be on his phone. Of course, there is historical context here. In 2017, Durant was caught trying to operate a burner: He accidentally tweeted from his main account, referring to himself in the third person, and confessed to doing so. In 2021, the league fined Durant $50,000 for sending Instagram messages with homophobic slurs to actor Michael Rapaport, a target who has become less sympathetic in the years since. In 2023, Durant said he was on the Threads platform with a burner: "Come find me." More generally, he could never be accused of lacking the Poster's Mentality. But the default assumption is to not believe a pile of screenshots of unknown provenance. At least that was the thinking until Wednesday, when Houston Chronicle Rockets reporter Varun Shankar did the much-needed dirty work and asked Durant about the supposed burner tweets.

It's a strange thing to have a sports fandom that operates on something like the same life cycle as a cicada, but I do, and curling is that sport. Even by the standards of Olympic sports that I barely know how to watch, curling is both abstracted and wonderful to me—the opacity of it, the ASMR-adjacent audio experience, the strange and specific mastery required. I wanted to talk about curling before the Olympics go back into hibernation, and happily we were able to get John Cullen—author of the new book Curling Rocks!, host of the award-winning CBC curling podcast Broomgate, among other notable podcasts, and a former elite curler himself—on the pod to talk to us about it. First we started with some other things, and anyone who wishes to skip past a long discussion of how I came to purchase Barstool-branded coffee at a deep discount, and why I now have it sitting in my home, should start the pod around the 15-minute mark. But those 15 minutes are densely packed, and include a long-awaited peek behind the curtain of my grocery shopping process, a deep reading of the (extensive) text on the package of Dan Katz's signature coffee product, the phrase "positive vibes" as a marker of the exact opposite of positive vibes, and John's experience recording too-spicy-for-TV jokes for a restaurant commercial.

Wednesday afternoon, Hornets point guard LaMelo Ball smashed his custom camo Hummer into another car in downtown Charlotte. Video obtained by local news station WSOC shows a gray sedan entering an intersection, only for Ball's much larger, fast-moving vehicle to swerve into it, knocking out the Hummer's front left wheel. Charlotte's WCNC obtained video from a different angle in which the driver of the sedan appears to try to avoid Ball as the latter drifts out of his lane and straight into the other car. Ball climbed into a Lamborghini and left the scene after police arrived. Both Ball and the driver of the other car reportedly got out of their smashed-up cars without severe injury; someone told the Associated Press that Ball was not injured, but an eyewitness did tell WCNC that the other driver "basically fell down" after exiting her vehicle and crossing the intersection on foot. This is far from the first time Ball has been caught on video doing wildly irresponsible car stuff. He and the Hornets organization were sued in May 2024 after Ball allegedly ran over a child's foot while speeding out of the arena following an October 2023 scrimmage. The Hornets were dismissed from the suit this past October, though Ball, whose attorneys have argued the incident was the child's fault, is still involved in the case.