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You know the thing that the truly great rim protectors do, in basketball, where they learn they can alter shots by aura alone? The area under the basket becomes a Sarlacc pit, the remote and terrifying domain of a very large, patient, and hungry creature. The great ones are happy, thrilled even, to welcome a meal. They learn to stop jumping out and using their body to cut off ball-handlers and take charges, because they've seen the advantages they can sometimes gain by inviting drives, by baiting some fool into taking another dribble, into dreaming of scoring at the basket. Victor Wembanyama has advanced to another plane, to what his opponents will have to hope is the ultimate stage of rim-protection dominance: He appears to be developing the no-look shot-block. He had an eye-popping one of these Wednesday, in a road win over the Toronto Raptors. Wembanyama refused to leave a darting and cutting Collin Murray-Boyles, down in the dunker spot, in order to deter a drive from Scottie Barnes, who was isolating against a size mismatch. Barnes is Toronto's best player; Murray-Boyles, God love him, is just some guy, some well-meaning rookie fella. The book is pretty clear on this matter: Go ahead and leave Collin Murray-Boyles, send help at Barnes, zone up the weak side, and force the Raptors away from the basket. Wembanyama has his own damn book, a grimoire containing secrets of the darkest defensive magic. Instead of leaving Murray-Boyles, Wembanyama fully turned his head and back to the court and faced into the stands, showing no sign of even noticing Barnes's attempted dunk until the Raptors forward was already in the air. Then, whoa hey, suddenly a huge hand was flying in and slapping the ball out of there. Wembanyama looked almost irritated at Barnes, like he'd rudely interrupted something, as if what the Frenchman really did want to do on that possession was closely observe the movement patterns of his undersized counterpart. The ball raced back the other way, and the Spurs jogged into an open transition three-pointer.

The biggest business story related to the NBA has nothing to do with tanking, Kawhi Leonard, nor the NBA's new national broadcast partners. We are only a little more than a year away from the launch of NBA Europe, a new basketball league across the Atlantic that proposes to upend and Americanize the game. NBA commissioner Adam Silver is swinging huge: The proposed league would feature 16 teams, 12 of whom would have permanent slots, and they are reportedly trying to put teams in Athens, Istanbul, Paris, Lyon, Munich, Berlin, Rome, Milan, Madrid, Barcelona, London, and Manchester. That list of cities highlights both how disruptive the venture would be and how much new ground would have to be broken. Basketball culture in Europe is not centered in the biggest cities the way it is in the United States, so the NBA is essentially betting that they can create it from whole cloth in places like London and Milan. On the other hand, teams like Olympiacos and Panathinaikos in Athens and Fenerbahçe in Istanbul have deeply established traditions that the new league would disrupt. Massively important and well-supported teams in less glamorous markets like Belgrade and Kaunas, along with the EuroLeague structure, could be left to wither and die if this all works the way Silver wants it to. "If I thought that the ceiling was the existing EuroLeague and their fan interest," Silver said in January, "we wouldn't be spending the kind of time and attention we are on this project."

Five of the eight Champions League playoff ties went roughly as expected. Paris Saint-Germain had a bit more trouble separating itself from its Ligue 1 rival Monaco than predicted, but rode a 3-2 first leg win to a 5-4 aggregate victory. Newcastle demolished Qarabag, 9-3. Atlético Madrid turned a 3-3 first-leg draw around with a 4-1 second leg at home to dump out Club Brugge. Bayer Leverkusen vs. Olympiacos was a snoozer, won 2-0 on aggregate by the former. Real Madrid comfortably dispatched Benfica 3-1, with an uncomfortable amount of racism playing the starring role in the match-up. It all went pretty straightforwardly, in other words. Except for the racism, that sucked. The other three ties provided some more excitement, though. Borussia Dortmund took a 2-0 lead from a dominant, entertaining first leg, but ran out of steam against Atalanta back in Italy, where the home side won 4-1 to squeak by on a one-goal aggregate victory. In what would normally be the biggest upset of the round, Galatasaray rocked Juventus 5-2 at home last week, and then endured a tie-leveling 3-0 Juve fight-back in the return leg before scoring two goals in extra time, the Turks advancing by a 7-5 aggregate margin. It was thrilling, messy, and featured a wonderful winning goal by Victor Osimhen, which was just about the most expected outcome in an unexpected showdown. https://bsky.app/profile/cbssportsgolazo-m.bsky.social/post/3mfpqn4jtva2j

Take one look at the NBA standings lately and you’ll discover that teams like the Jazz, Kings, Wizards, and Nets are slacking off even more than they have in previous seasons. It’s made for some pretty dire television. Last week, NBA commissioner and Tim Burton character Adam Silver informed the general public that he intended to do something about it. Will Silver simplify the byzantine rules surrounding protected draft picks? Might he even get rid of the draft altogether? Pfft. Pish posh. Did you really expect a lawyer to make things less complicated? No, instead the NBA has proposed even more rules on top of all of those other rules. Are any of these tweaks a good idea? THAT, dear listeners, is the subject of this week’s Distraction. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/bfac48c7-baef-4166-891f-7f9073b0a292 But wait! That’s not all you get for your money. With David Roth stranded by Winter Storm Scary Name, Defector bossman Tom Ley bravely stepped into the breach to act as my sparring partner for 45 and change. We wrapped up the Winter Olympics, spent a brief moment ruminating over how the Trump people went about ruining the good vibes those games elicited, and we both agreed with Pat Riley that NBA coaches should wear fancy suits again, if only because it’s more fun to watch a grown man roid out on the sideline while clad in Armani rather than in athleisure.

The Tom Thibodeau–era Chicago Bulls were a special team, a rockpile collection of asskickers dedicated to playing a rapidly obsolescing style that nonetheless proved extremely effective. Thibs surrounded a young Derrick Rose with a bunch of incredible defenders, most notably avant-garde jump shooter and 2014 Defensive Player of the Year Joakim Noah, in an endearing attempt to win every game 70-57. It didn't quite work, but did earn the Bulls the respect of a nation. I loved those teams, as did the anti–LeBron James bloc, defense enthusiasts, and apparently, according to emails released by the Justice Department a few weeks ago, Jeffrey Epstein. Unlike many NBA-affiliated people, whom we will get to shortly, Noah himself appears in the emails only as a subject, and only twice. The first time was in 2010, when Eva Dubin—Epstein's ex, friend of Ghislaine Maxwell, and wife of hedge-fund billionaire Glenn Dubin—sent a Real GM article (for the record, this is the only time a RealGM.com URL appears in the files) about Noah's 2010 contract extension to a bunch of people, including Epstein. One of them responded, "He better take care of momma!!"

The Athletic, your new home for the Washington Post's former sports section, delivered 2,600 words on Connecticut head coach Dan Hurley Wednesday morning, largely on the theme of Mellowing Madman. Hurley's history as the man who smuggles wasp hives in his gym shorts and then waits for someone to brush against him by accident precedes, defines, and explains him; a shorter way of saying this is that he is "from New Jersey," but there's not much in the way of imagery there. If Hurley's personal growth was the pregame sell for UConn's Wednesday night home game with rival St. John's, the audience got hosed. This was the easiest high-profile game his hair-trigger shall ever have to navigate. It's hard to say if the Athletic story was entirely convincing, given that he is still a piece of work in progress, but Hurley was downright zen in the sixth-ranked Huskies' pre-tournament showdown with 15th-ranked St. John's. He had no choice but to be; when the opponent chooses to make no shots whatsoever for nearly all of the second half, what's a barely hinged martinet to do but bite a hole in his chin—tightly wrapped coaches can indeed bite their own faces when properly provoked—and walk away confused but worryingly chill. He almost looked haunted. UConn won, 72-40, and that final score flatters the Johnnies, who entered the game having won their last 13 consecutive games and had that NCAA four-seed look about them. And then, as they say within the royal family, the shit went bad. Monumentally bad. Galactically and nearly historically bad. And after awhile, laughably bad.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. Having a severe chronic illness has made me intimately familiar with the American healthcare system and its hospitals. Hospitals here are terrifying and full of excruciatingly lengthy waiting periods, often for nothing more than the result of a blood test or X-ray. Hospitals are scary, even when you spend most of your stay doing nothing at all. It's kind of like a dream in that way. You are for all intents and purposes trapped, surrounded by people having the worst night of their lives. While passing the time, you get to luxuriate in the unique ambiance: belligerent fellow patients, some of whom are drunk or high; jaded nurses showing up whenever they can get to you; overhead lighting that is always too bright; and the dulcet beeps and blares of hospital machinery. As you might imagine, I spent most of my recent three-day excursion through the hospital system drowning myself in as much music as possible, mostly catching up on what's new and what I'm supposed to be checking for in this first quarter of 2026. The specifics of my stay aren't that important. I have sickle cell anemia. No stay is ever easy, but some are more arduous than others. Due to an excess of patients and an overworked staff, I spent 48 hours in the emergency room alone, which is not built for extended stays. Even though I was exhausted, it's hard to fall asleep in a room full of fluorescent lights and screaming people. So, naturally, I decided to check out the new J. Cole project.

Anyone with a shred of common sense could immediately tell that Kash Patel's trip to the Winter Olympics was a Batkid-style situation. Still, it is satisfying to have what was obvious to everyone confirmed by the FBI's own internal scheduling documents. The New York Times got its hands on the official FBI schedule produced for Patel's long weekend in Italy, which confirmed that the FBI director spent the bulk of his time abroad fucking off and watching hockey. According to the document reviewed by the Times, Patel landed late in Rome on Thursday, Feb. 19. From there he went to dinner with Tilman Fertitta, a billionaire shithead who is the U.S. ambassador to Italy and the owner of the Houston Rockets. On Friday, Patel had an hour-long meeting with Italy's domestic security agency, followed by snacks and drinks and several ceremonial events, after which he flew to Milan to watch the U.S. men's hockey team play Slovakia. The Times reports that Patel's Saturday schedule consisted of one 20-minute briefing, a half-hour tour of the Olympic joint security operations center, and a private lunch with an unidentified guest. The hours between 2:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. were booked for “personal time/cultural activities,” followed by a private dinner with unidentified companions.

Conventional wisdom states that no one really cares about another person's dreams unless they're being paid to care, but humor me. Over the last year or so, I have had a recurring dream in which I am a player on Survivor. It's not always the same dream, exactly, but the format generally holds: I have made it to the final seven or so, and I am fighting for my life. I don't think I would be good at Survivor, and that's how I always know it's a dream; I wouldn't sniff final seven. That doesn't matter, though; the dream returns repeatedly, and it always ends with me winning an immunity challenge. Then, I vomit. Welcome to my brain on Survivor. Over the last year, I watched almost all of the show: 44 out of 49 available seasons, mostly but not entirely in order, while skipping only five seasons that I was told were either not all that important to the meta-narrative of the show (Palau, Guatemala, Fiji) or straight up bad (Thailand, Nicaragua). Other than starting with 2018's David vs. Goliath, generally considered the best standalone season for a beginner, and moving Cagayan, which is generally considered a top three non-returning player season, up in the order, I have powered through the whole show since January of 2025. That date is important in this demented journey: The urge to watch Survivor came from watching Boston Rob Mariano on the third season of The Traitors. In a lifetime of highly questionable television decisions, this is a rare conclusive answer. For your good and mine, I won't be delving too deeply into that. But seeing the way that everyone revered Boston Rob on that show, and the aggressive way he played, plus the blind spot I've had for this authentic cultural juggernaut for most of my life—I turned 11 during the first Survivor season, Borneo—finally made me take the plunge. I asked my Survivor fan coworkers for advice on what seasons to watch—Kelsey sent me an iPhone note with a guide, and Giri passed along this Reddit thread—before promptly ignoring them and just saying "Fuck it, let's do it all." (I did listen to their advice about starting with David vs. Goliath rather than the much slower first season, which helped; I think I can pinpoint the moment I got hooked as Episode 8, when the undermanned Davids pulled off a great idol-vote split play to eliminate pro wrestler John Hennigan.) Since then, I have thought about Survivor more than almost anything else in my life. There is no denying that the highs and lows of a show that has about 15 great seasons and a whole lot of garbage have, due to repeated exposure over this last year, shaped my days and now my dreams as well. I know that I am not the same person I was before I did this.

It has been five days since Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno made the claim that his team's fans view winning baseball as a low priority, and the reaction has been, well, fairly low priority. It could hardly be any other way, because "low priority" is the Angels in a nutshell. It's hard to make a compelling case for a team whose de facto slogan has been "Meh With A Side Of Fries" for the decades it's spent under Moreno's thumb, but the real truth here is that the Angels don't really make a compelling case for anything. That Moreno claims this institutional ennui as a virtue is the boldest marketing strategy the team has displayed since he first bought the team in 2003 and immediately made himself a local hero by lowering beer prices. That is also the last time he has been a local hero, because the Angels in his time have had one of the faintest pulses in baseball since, and that includes the 12 years in which they employed the game's best player, whether it be Mike Trout or Shohei Ohtani or both. But, as your own eyelids lower, consider that Moreno may actually be correct that the synergy between his team's lack of interest in on-field success and that of its fan base is in lockstep. Sure, there are about half a million people per year who no longer attend Angels games compared to their last postseason win in 2009, but the real takeaway here is that the Angels don't want to bother anyone's purchasing choices by being interesting. If the people that are still going to Angels games don't care what happens in those games, there's no reason to bother them.