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The NBA has concluded its investigation of the Los Angeles Clippers and Kawhi Leonard, and the punishments are major. The league announced Wednesday that the independent probe, conducted by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, uncovered "a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by the Clippers organization, a prior offender of the salary cap circumvention rules," and as such the team will have to forfeit five first-round picks. The NBA also issued fines and suspensions to various members of the Clippers organization. The NBA opened an investigation almost one year ago, after Pablo Torre reported on a bizarre arrangement between Leonard and the scam greenwashing company Aspiration, in which the NBA player seemingly had a no-show marketing deal designed to funnel money from Clippers owner Steve Ballmer to Leonard and avoid the salary cap in the process. The law firm's report can read in full here; it's a breezy 35 pages. As a result, the NBA docked the Clippers five-first rounders, one in each draft from 2029 to 2033. The team is also fined $30 million; Ballmer and team president Gillian Zucker are both suspended for one year, Zucker without pay; Clips GM Lawrence Frank is suspended for six months without pay; the organization will be subject to an NBA compliance and monitoring program for five years; Leonard will have to pay $700,000 to the NBA; and Leonard's nefarious uncle Dennis Robertson has been banned from dealing with anyone or anything related to the NBA for five years.

Some people are fans of the Denver Broncos. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Denver Broncos. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Denver Bron—***THE DEFECTOR OFFICE GETS HIT WITH A SUDDEN CATEGORY 12 BLIZZARD, PREVENTING ME FROM WRITING ANYTHING GOOD FOR THE REST OF THIS PREVIEW*** Your 2025 record: 14-3. Only three years removed from Nathaniel Hackett coaching Russell Wilson in the Sunset Boulevard phase of Wilson’s career, your Denver Broncos were the top seed in the AFC. Now, the advent of the 17-game schedule has, in a short amount of time, produced many strange outlier teams that ended their respective seasons with 13-14 wins despite failing the eye test. Eleven of Denver’s victories last season were by one score. I’m not saying they failed the eye test, but that’s mostly because there was too much snow falling for anyone to actually witness you guys being exposed as frauds:

Two hours after Tuesday night lapsed into Wednesday morning in the Eastern time zone, Alexander Zverev served out his grueling U.S. Open first-round matchup against Lorenzo Sonego. The final match of the night was a real thriller, with the top seed and the feisty Italian challenger letting each other have it for nearly five hours, on and on until Sonego stopped being able to hit a backhand with any zip and, at the exact right moment to avoid a catastrophic upset, Zverev remembered how to serve. As he watched a desperate Sonego forehand sail long to seal the match, Zverev raised his arms and stood still, courting the crowd. The tournament's top seed took a moment to soak in the quiet applause of what felt like 500 stragglers remaining in the cavernous, mostly empty Arthur Ashe Stadium. The first three nights of play at this year's U.S. Open have all gone late. Night sessions are composed of two matches in each of the two stadia—Louis Armstrong, which is good, and Arthur Ashe, which is Arthur Ass—that begin at 7 p.m. ET and end at some point in the wee hours of the next day. By splitting the day's play into two distinct sessions, the U.S. Open can sell more tickets and ensure that at least the first of the two stadium matches begins right at primetime. Every Grand Slam tournament besides Wimbledon does this. However, because this is the U.S. Open and takes place in the U.S., it amounts to sacrificing quality to appease rich people and putting match flow at the mercy of ring light-wielding influencers, and thus is more galling. While not every night will go late and end up pissing everyone off, tennis matches go long all the time; when it happens in one of the late matches, it can ruin everyone's night and tournament in the process. Everyone except me, that is. If you live on the West Coast, life is good. This shit is awesome. I am persecuted Europeanly all year round, waking up at 6 a.m. Pacific time to watch the Giro d'Italia, watching a good chunk of the tennis season after the fact, and missing half of my favorite team's Premier League matches because I have the immense fortune of living in the best place in the world. But the U.S. Open is the perfect event for me. Play starts at 8 a.m. PT and extends until 11 p.m., allowing Californians to watch tennis the entire time they're awake.

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 question about making sure you don't turn into your own father.

FLUSHING, N.Y. — One set into the first-round match, I wondered when the Gael Monfils show would begin. Tuesday was his 40th birthday, and this could be his last-ever match at a Slam—didn't he want to party? We did. Seven years after his last deep run at the U.S. Open, the elastic, buoyant Frenchman still held onto a well-deserved reputation for spectacle. But already down a brisk 6-2 set to Adolfo Daniel Vallejo, the world No. 60, Monfils seemed to be offering an uncharacteristically low-wattage farewell to New York. Somehow, all these decades later, I was still judging a Gael Monfils match by its opening set. My own unforced error. He got loose. As he reported after the match, Monfils started to move his legs better, stopped playing so upright, and remembered how well he'd been striking the ball all week. He styled on the 22-year-old Vallejo to win 2-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-0, to the vast delight of those present, who got what they came for in the end: play that transcends the specificity of tennis fandom and becomes something like fundamental human entertainment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhGo8Ws_K7Y

On Aug. 23, Texas Christian University Athletics announced they were pulling the credentials for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The announcement came after the paper reported on a locker room fight that led to the hospitalization of wide receiver Dozie Ezukanma and the team expulsion of high-profile transfer player Jacob Fields. According to TCU spokesperson Kyle Neaves, the credentials were pulled because the newspaper's source "lacked direct firsthand knowledge of the locker-room incident and has since been discredited.” This all started on Aug. 18, when TCU announced that Fields was dismissed from the team due to an undisclosed "violation of team rules." The Star-Telegram's TCU beat reporter, Steven Johnson, investigated the situation, relying on both an unnamed source and the university's public crime log to find information about the altercation between players on the football team. The source claimed that Fields had been targeted by other teammates, with coaches doing nothing to de-escalate the issue, which eventually led to the confrontation. The Star-Telegram's initial reporting stated only that Fields had been removed following a locker room fight with an offensive player, but did not name the other player involved. On Aug. 21, the Star-Telegram identified Ezukanma, after the player posted a since-deleted Instagram video detailing his hospitalization for a brain bleed and concussion. The Star-Telegram also updated their original reporting after a second source who claimed to speak on behalf of Fields and his family disputed the original reporting that Fields had been mistreated or bullied. Fields has since been arrested for the altercation. All the while, officials and coaches for TCU, including head coach Sonny Dykes, have remained silent and unwilling to speak to reporters.

FLUSHING, N.Y. — As we waited for Alexandra Eala to walk into Louis Armstrong Stadium for the most anticipated first-round match of the tournament, the crowd whooping as a victorious 40-year-old Gael Monfils shed his shirt, I had a quick chat with Dyan Castillejo, the first Filipino ever to play on the WTA Tour. Castillejo is now a journalist; I'd read a number of stories in American publications by American authors that analyzed Eala's spectacular fame, but here was a chance to talk to somebody who could tell me firsthand about Ealamania in the 117-million-strong Philippines. Per ESPN, Castillejo has covered Eala since she was six years old. So just how big a deal is she? "She's a super big deal. She's our biggest star now, whether athlete or non-athlete," Castillejo said immediately. "I would say she's probably the most celebrated Filipino right now. Because of her, tennis is introduced in the Philippines. Before, it was a segment of a tennis community. Now the masses are learning about tennis, what the sport is all about. Tennis clubs are full, trainers are busy, rackets are selling, parents want their kids to take up tennis." By tennis metrics alone, the 21-year-old, 18th-ranked Eala's popularity startles. Roger Federer, who visited the U.S. Open on Monday night to rapturous cheers—people filmed him from so high up on Arthur Ashe Stadium that he couldn't have looked like anything bigger than a very fashionable ant on their screens—is often held up as the ultimate example of popularity in tennis. When he played the great British (Scottish) hope Andy Murray in a Wimbledon final in 2012, you'd hear the crowd's rooting interests described as 50-50. When Eala beat American Jessica Pegula in the final of the D.C. Open last month, the crowd was around 95-5 for Eala.

This week on Nothing But Respect, we mostly talked about dumb stuff with a smart guy. The guy in question was Jake Bittle, staff writer for Grist and the author of The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, while the dumb stuff was Jake's amazing spree of Twitter fights back when that was something worth doing, and also Drake. Jake is a Raptors fan, and Harry knows a ridiculous amount of ball on all things rap, so it was a long time coming. We also talked about the new politics of climate vis-a-vis Silicon Valley's right-wing turn. Primo offseason stuff, and not all dumb! You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!

This Ketel Marte thing keeps getting stranger, at least linguistically. Marte made his return to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday, during their game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Before the game, Marte, who speaks through an interpreter, answered questions about his apparent no-call-no-show from the Aug. 17 game against the Boston Red Sox, serving mostly to generate more questions. "It was a moment of frustration. I'm the type of person that when something is going on in my life, I don't like to talk about it. That morning I woke up, my body was in pain and I couldn't react. No one made the decision for me, I'm the one that made the decision not to show up," Marte said, raising some interesting philosophical considerations about whether the body or the mind dictates agency. He said that he would "stand in front of my teammates like a man" and "ask for forgiveness." In one of the more direct responses, he also indicated that he had nothing to say to fans. The home Diamondbacks fans made their own opinions clear, booing Marte when he came up to bat. After the game, it remained unclear whether Marte still had nothing to say to fans. He showed up to the press conference wearing an either highlighter-yellow or neon-green (depending on your color opinions) hat which read "MAY THE BRIDGES I BURN LIGHT THE WAY." This line, I am told, originated from Beverly Hills, 90210; in neither case does it hold up to additional scrutiny, though the intended sentiment (burning bridges = good for me!) is obvious.

This turned out to be quite an eventful summer for Monaco and USMNT striker Folarin Balogun. After the red card-that-wasn't at the World Cup, Balogun has now become the main character in a perfect transfer saga for this deeply unserious transfer window. The 25-year-old's move to Everton seemed secure late into the dying hours of the transfer window on Tuesday, but on Wednesday, Balogun remains a player for AS Monaco, and along the way completely bricked three different teams' plans for the upcoming season. The whole saga is puzzling, rather funny, and a perfect example of why soccer gets just one thing right about its player movement system. OK, so what happened? Let's start with Everton. The Toffees were looking relatively settled as the transfer deadline approached, but the sudden departures of star winger Iliman Ndiaye and striker Beto meant they needed to bring in some attacking reinforcements. Balogun was a good target here; he's young, talented, and played exceedingly well at the World Cup, red-card saga be damned. That's a great recipe for a move, and so Everton reached a deal with Monaco for around €47 million. So far, so good. But the problems started with Balogun's medical. Normally, medicals are a formality; most injuries are widely documented, and teams know roughly what they are in for when they agree to purchase a player. However, Everton's medical team flagged some issues with Balogun's fitness, which seemingly scuttled the move. Everton swiftly pivoted to try to loan Manchester United's Joshua Zirkzee, whose 2024 move to Old Trafford didn't really amount to anything last season. United, however, did not want to let Zirkzee go, which left Everton in a tricky situation with only hours to go in the window. The Toffees then decided to go back to Monaco and try to arrange a new deal for Balogun.