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After getting caught sending an intern in ill-fitting jeans out to snoop on a Middlesbrough practice session ahead of an EFL Championship playoff match, Southampton has been booted from the promotion playoff final. During the league's independent disciplinary panel's investigation, Southampton copped to having sent spies to record opponents' practices on two additional occasions. Boro will now take Southampton's place in the final, where they will face Hull City for a spot in the Premier League next season. This incident will immediately go down in English soccer history as one of the dumbest own goals the game has ever seen. The potential rewards for spying on a soccer practice are, in the best of circumstances, minuscule. Evidence of this truth can be found in the Saints' record in the three matches in which they enjoyed this dubious advantage: a 2-1 loss to Oxford United in December, a 2-2 draw with Ipswich Town in April, and a 0-0 draw with Boro in this month's playoff first leg. The marginal gains of spying on practice are so small that that fact was actually the strongest argument that maybe Southampton didn't deserve to be DQ'd from the final. Ultimately, the disciplinary panel disagreed, and only the biggest of Southampton homers could make the case that the punishment wasn't well-earned, for the sheer stupidity if nothing else. https://bsky.app/profile/johnspacemuller.com/post/3mlqlxexo422m

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking cooking violence, living with your own mediocrity, actors as P.I.s, and more. Your letters: Mick:

Late last week, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners of its 2026 Short Story Prize. The quintet will move on to a final round of judging ahead of the grand prize announcement on June 30, though we can probably count out Caribbean regional winner Jamir Nazir. It seems Nazir's "The Serpent In The Grove," published last Tuesday in Granta, was written by a large-language model. On Monday, Wharton associate professor Ethan Mollick pointed this out, noting in the process that the AI-checker he used tends toward false negatives more than false positives. Nazir's online footprint is small: a self-published 2018 poetry book called Night Moon Love: Poems For All Who Have Loved Or Dreamed Of Love and a prolific, AI-fueled turn on LinkedIn as an AI evangelist. The Commonwealth Foundation told The Bookseller they are "conducting a thorough, transparent review of the selection process." A Granta spokesperson, meanwhile, said that they simply copy-edit the stories selected by the Foundation—this one includes the lines "She had the kind of walking that made benches become men," and "The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink," raising the intriguing possibility that "The Serpent in the Grove" won an award and got published in a prestigious literary magazine without anyone ever actually reading any part of it—that they were "alarmed by the speculation," and would keep the story up until the review is complete. Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing also turned to Anthropic LLM Claude for some help analyzing the story, and quoted Claude at length in her statement, in case anyone was feeling sympathetic toward the magazine. Nobody could get in touch with Nazir, who appears to be a real guy with a fake profile picture.

I still can't help but associate Montreal goalie Jakub Dobes with a game I went to in New Jersey in November. It was an OT win for the Devils, and the first loss of the season for a 24-year-old netminder who'd only made 15 starts for the Habs the previous year. He took it hard. Talking to media in the postgame, he seemed devastated in a way that better fit a Game 7 defeat, putting all the blame on himself for a loss he took very personally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEeGlpv1pRQ&t=196s "I'm just disappointed in myself. That's pretty much it," he said.

It's easy to come out of Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals with only Wemby on the brain. Do you focus on the defensive presence that threw off Oklahoma City's entire roster, save for Alex Caruso? Or the Steph Curryesque three-pointer at the end of overtime? Or the aura farming in front of his awed teammates? Victor Wembanyama gave everyone what they wanted on Monday night, which is why it falls to me to ignore the nine-foot-tall alien and ask a very important question: Dylan Harper, are you serious? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2riVtF8ynE In any other game, on any other night, with any other teammate, Harper would be the story coming out of Game 1. Having come off the bench for most of the season and all of the playoffs so far, the rookie from Rutgers notched his first postseason start on Monday, thanks to a late scratch for De'Aaron Fox (ankle soreness). And what a time for that to happen: Game 1, on the road, against the defending champions. The Spurs were very patient with Harper this season, letting him grow without overexerting him (he averaged only 22 minutes per game in the regular season, a figure that increased to around 25 minutes through the first two rounds of the playoffs). That patience, and Harper's growth not just as a scorer but as an all-around star in the making, paid off on Monday: 24 points, 11 rebounds, six assists, and a ludicrous seven steals. Even that stat line doesn't do a complete job of hyping up the best game of Harper's young career.

For the first time in six years, I have closets. At the Brooklyn apartment I just moved out of, all available evidence points to them just screwing up the blueprint. My bedroom was twice the height of a normal bedroom, and there's no reason why they shouldn't have extended the other bedroom, a flight of stairs up, over my room. There was a secret, unfinished space above the kitchen, accessible by vent, which we only discovered five years into our residence thanks to a beeping smoke detector. And there wasn't a single closet anywhere in the apartment. I kept my clothes in a bulky wardrobe assembled out of canvas and poles: hangers in the middle, other stuff sorted into compartments on either side. I stuffed as much as I could into that thing, and by the end I think the only thing keeping it from falling over was that it was wedged between two sturdy pieces of furniture. Moving to my new spot in Queens, I was excited to store my clothes in a place that didn't constantly carry the threat of structural failure. But the thing about changing apartments is that it forces you to reckon with the physical mass of the things you own. When I first moved within New York City, all of my stuff fit inside my dad's SUV. When I moved into my last place, it required two trips. This time—probably the last occasion I'll ever move without a dedicated van of some sort—it took three. Some of this is because I now actually own real furniture, but I can't deny that my clothes collection has grown astronomically over the last several years. As I organized outfits in my new bedroom—and reluctantly resigned certain pieces to boxes under the bed—I had the chance to listen to the stories they told, about me then and about me now.

This weekend, history repeated itself on the unnecessarily pyrotechnic stage of Eurovision as singers from Israel and another country waited to hear which would be crowned the winner of the increasingly contentious song contest. In the end, the Bulgarian banger "Bangaranga" by singer Dara edged out Israel's "Michelle" by singer Noam Bettan. Last year, Austrian singer JJ served as a similar spoiler with his operatic "Wasted Love." Now Eurovision, it would seem, plans to proceed as if everything were normal, announcing the competition will take place next year in Bulgaria. But, of course, something is rotten in the state of Eurovision, a competition where many fans find themselves in the harrowing position of rooting not for their favorite song, but for anyone but Israel. In recent years, artists, fans, and governments have protested the competition's inclusion of Israel over its genocidal war on Gaza. The ongoing boycott against the competition is the largest in its 70-year history. Last September, the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the song contest, promised to vote on Israel's participation. But the vote was postponed after a ceasefire was announced, per the New York Times. When the broadcasters gathered again in December, after Israel violated the ceasefire nearly 600 times, they skirted the vote once again through a bureaucratic loophole that allowed Israel to remain in the competition. In response, five countries—the Netherlands, Ireland, Iceland, Slovenia, and Spain, one of the "big five" countries in Eurovision—pulled out. The Swiss singer Nemo, who won the contest in 2024 with "The Code," a song about discovering their nonbinary identity, returned their trophy to Geneva. "Israel's continued participation, during what the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry has concluded to be a genocide, shows a clear conflict between those ideals and the decision made by the [European Broadcasting Union]," Nemo said in a statement posted to Instagram. "The contest was repeatedly used to soften the image of a state accused of severe wrongdoing, all while the EBU insists Eurovision is 'non-political,'" they continued.

Short answer: no one yet. Chennedy Carter has been everything the Las Vegas Aces imagined she could be when they signed the 27-year-old guard to a one-year deal this offseason, a signing that marked her return to the WNBA after a 2025 spent playing in China and Mexico. In Carter's first five games of the year, she’s scored 97 points, a league record for a player coming off the bench. She wrecks whole defenses with what Aces head coach Becky Hammon called “eye-popping” speed, “especially if you haven't really seen it or you haven't seen it in a while.” https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6KwwOS4Gnvg That is indeed the experience of watching Carter for the first time in a long time. At points in Sunday's Aces-Dream game, an 85-84 Vegas win in Atlanta, even the camera seemed like it was struggling to keep pace. Speed aside, there may not be a deeper bag than Carter's in the WNBA. She can pull up on a dime, snake her way through clusters of defenders on her way downhill, or cross over the very athletic Allisha Gray (see above). The depths of that bag have been tested by some of the gnarliest spacing situations the WNBA can offer a young downhill scorer. In Chicago, she’d managed 17.5 points per game despite sharing the paint with two non-shooting bigs. She simply doesn’t need much help. In a 20-point game on 7-of-13 shooting in her 21 minutes, only two of her buckets were assisted.

Late in Monday night's Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals, a beleaguered Shai Gilgeous-Alexander dribbled tentatively into the mouth of San Antonio's defensive zone. That zone had been total hell for the two-time reigning MVP. Now, with the Thunder down four points inside the final minute of the game's second overtime period, Gilgeous-Alexander was pretty well wasted. He'd played 50 minutes of intensely frustrating basketball; he'd been guarded by approximately 78 different sturdy and long-armed Spurs, often by two or three at a time; with few exceptions, every time he'd carved out a sliver of attacking space, he'd looked up and seen Victor damn Wembanyama looming up in front of the basket. He'd tried floaters, and step-backs, largely to no avail; he'd tried hesitations and Nash dribbles, to even less avail; he'd tried kick-outs to the corner, a really striking number of which had been deflected or intercepted by opportunistic Spurs defenders. That was his night: waves of pesky guards and sturdy wings, zipping around in impossible numbers, and backed always by that huge menacing Frenchman. That Frenchman, by the way, was putting the finishing touches on the defining performance of his still-young career. He would finish the Spurs' 122-115 victory with 41 points, 24 rebounds, and three blocks. Moments before Gilgeous-Alexander embarked on the aforementioned drive, Wembanyama had snatched an entry pass, tossed away Oklahoma City's best defender, pirouetted in the paint, and smashed a two-handed dunk, through a foul, directly in the mug of the home team's best rim protector. Minutes before that, he had sent the game into its second overtime by rising up for and burying an audacious 28-footer in semi-transition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gHzi6r5TbE

It is a perfectly reasonable assessment of the Montreal Canadiens that they are recipients of a long and lingering tongue kiss from the gods. It is equally rational to remind Habs fans in their moment of glorious triumph that the gods are treacherously profligate trollops who distribute their drooly favors indiscriminately and without a moment's thought for whomever they kissed last.  But that's tomorrow's broken heart. In the immediate moment, the hyperplucky Habs are the charmed ones, and rarely more so than Monday night in the seventh game of the Eastern Conference semifinals against Buffalo, in Buffalo, before the most beloved and never rewarded fan base on the continent. Months of indomitable Sabre-hood boiled down to one last superb performance, foiled in the end by the impish Alex Newhook.  https://youtu.be/pnTboPwMKiw?si=RBwq993ghh7FNuik&t=984