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The Washington Post brings us a story today that could only be produced by Donald Trump's administration of influencers. According to two sources who spoke to the Post under the condition of anonymity, photographers from several news outlets were banned from Pentagon press briefings because they had previously published photos that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's staff found unflattering. The offending photos were taken at a March 2 press briefing at the Pentagon, and photographers were subsequently barred from press briefings on March 4 and March 10. According to the Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Getty Images all had their photographers banned. The Post's report doesn't specify whether it was one or all of these outlets which published photos that may have thrown Hegseth into a debilitating bout of dysmorphia. Defector pays for a subscription to Getty Images, though, and is happy to try and shed more light on the situation by examining the photos they published from the March 2 press briefing.

Bam Adebayo scored 83 points against the Washington Wizards Tuesday night. The Wizards spent a portion of the fourth quarter of the game selling out anything recognizable as a basketball principle in an effort to prevent Adebayo from breaking a scoring record. They sent panicked triple- and even quadruple-teams, they warped and broke their defensive shape to attempt exaggerated ball-denial schemes, and they finally resorted to intentionally fouling Adebayo's teammates. What they didn't do, because they couldn't, because as a team-building strategy it opposes their organizational goals, was put better players onto the floor. They simply do not have better players. They do not have combinations of players available to prevent a motivated opponent from scoring 83 points. The version of basketball played by the Heat in order to facilitate Adebayo's record was like something out of a fever nightmare, but also: Miami won the game, and scored 150 points, and beat the Wizards by 21. This was accomplished—the second-most points the Heat have scored in a regular-season game in their history—despite all but a couple of Miami's starting-grade players missing the game due to injuries and rest. Looking at their lineups, it's hard to know where shots were supposed to come from, if not from Adebayo. After the game, Wizards head coach Brian Keefe was begrudging in his assessment of Adebayo's performance. "You've got to give him credit in the first half, he shot the ball terrific, he scored the ball really well," said an affectless, dead-eyed Keefe, a placeholder non-entity who has the unbearably miserable job of keeping a bunch of mismatched bozos motivated for several more weeks of this shit without even the slightest remote chance of any tangible reward. "He came out and had a little bit in the third, too, but they obviously kept him in the game and there were a lot of fouls called, you know, 16 free throws in the fourth quarter. Just trying to take the ball out of his hands, he still got some free throws 40 feet from the rim. I can't explain some of those calls. That's all I've got to say on that."

It’s Monday morning and I’m ready for the start of NFL free agency. The window to sign players doesn’t officially open for another two days, but Monday represents the start of the league’s open tampering period, which comes on the heels of the league’s actual tampering period, which begins sometime over scotch and sodas at Prime 47 during the NFL combine. There are deals already locked and loaded, ready to be formally announced the second the tampering window cracks open. And I am ready for them. In fact, I’m so hyped for free agency that I slept poorly the night before, which means that my wife slept poorly too. She’s not happy about that. But you have to understand, my darling … no reasonable person can get a good night’s rest if they don’t know which midlevel center will be playing for their team next season. Today I’ll finally get some answers. Or at least, vaguely worded dispatches from Josina Anderson that may or may not ramp up the process of guiding me toward an answer. The wheeling and dealing already began in earnest days earlier. The Rams decided to fuck them picks in order to get stud Chiefs CB Trent McDuffie. The Bills fucked them picks by trading for Bears WR D.J. Moore, whose contract runs through the year 2046. And the Ravens SUPER fucked them picks in order to snag Raiders edge Maxx Crosby, a move certain to shift the balance of power in the AFC so long as there are no snags with Crosby’s impending physical (OOP-DEE!!!). That’s all the hot stove action I need to get my nipples poking out. I have to work today, but my head isn’t in my work. It’s in my phone, where I’m already swiping down constantly to refresh my Bluesky feed for news. I’m also toggling over to our company Slack’s football channel (named #clumpdogs) to see if one of my co-workers has dropped in a nugget that I would have otherwise missed. I do a little work, then I check again. I do a little more work, and then I check another time. When I refresh my Bluesky feed, nothing has changed, same as when I last refreshed less than a minute earlier. I’m still seeing the same post about Trump doing evil Trump shit. I hate this single micropost now. It’s holding back the impending flow of NFL information, and in the rudest possible manner. I think about muting that account just so that I have something new to get pissed at on the next refresh.

A little over three months from today, on June 13, the Boston metropolitan area is set to host the first of its seven 2026 World Cup matches, a group-stage clash between Scotland and Haiti. Despite kickoff being that close, local officials face an alarming number of unanswered logistics and funding questions, the sort no city should still be dealing with this close to such a big event. The case of Boston—well, Boston and Foxborough—is extreme, though not unique, making it a useful window into the busted logistics of the 2026 World Cup. The trouble first came to light last week after a meeting of the Foxborough Select Board, the council representing the town where the games will be played. At the heart of the issue is a missing $7.8 million needed to cover security, and the town's withholding of permits for hosting the games over that money. Foxborough heard out a proposal from lawyers representing the Boston 2026 host committee, Boston Soccer 26, asking the town to cover the bill in exchange for a promise that it would be reimbursed by the host committee later. The committee lawyers also said that the Kraft Sports Group, which owns the stadium slated to host Boston's World Cup matches, would backstop any extra costs. Yet Foxborough officials were not happy: They want the issue sorted now, without having to either front the cost or wait forever for things to be resolved. Local cops and firefighters were annoyed with a June 1 procurement deadline—less than two weeks from that first match—which they said was way too late. "We do not wait 'til the week before and then force the board and public safety to cancel an event because we can't settle the matters … when we should be settling now," Foxborough PD chief Michael Grace told the Boston Globe. "We are 99 or 100 days away from hosting the largest sporting event in the world, and we're deciding, or can't seem to find, necessary funding for necessary equipment that's been identified in over a year-and-a-half of planning with thousands of hours in 14 working groups throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The solution is very simple: Fund what we need funded and this issue is over tomorrow."

Look at it this way: Now Maxx Crosby doesn't have to write one of those treacly letters to Las Vegas Raiders fans thanking them for their love and devotion and swearing eternal fealty to them, before heading off to work for another fan base that he will learn to love just as much. Now he can just saunter back into the house and act to the neighbors like he never intended to go anywhere at all, no matter what that moving van in front seemed to indicate. In one of the great "How can I miss you when you won't go away" moments of the modern NFL, the Baltimore Ravens backed away from the blockbuster deal they made two days ago to acquire the Raiders' defensive game-wrecker, ostensibly because Crosby's post-surgical knee wasn't healed enough to pass the team's physical, but maybe because the Ravens rethought the loss of the two first-round draft choices they had committed to sending Las Vegas in exchange. Because these are the Raiders, we are treated to a fresh round of "Well, of course it's the Raiders. Did you expect it to be normal?" That isn't entirely fair in this case, to be honest, but the circular logic of failure based on past failures is also very much part of the Raider ethos. They have been intrepid, bold, and free-spending in the free agency period which technically starts later this afternoon. The last bit is a mockery of verb tenses that only makes sense in a world in which deadlines are mostly suggestions, but commitments are definitely commitments, and while the contracts aren't official yet, the Raiders will now have to fit them into cap space that Crosby's return has tightened significantly.

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. And yet there is no timeline long enough that could have prepared me for Bam Adebayo scoring 83 points in an honest-to-goodness NBA game before I, personally, died. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfHhcjfalgs So where were you when Adebayo scored 31 points in the first quarter of the Miami Heat's home game against the Washington Wizards Tuesday night? I was at my computer, playing Slay the Spire II and following the game on my phone when I got a couple of texts: "Bam is going crazy," one read. "Bam has 20 points in the first," read another. In what would become the theme of the night, the third just read: "What the fuck?" I tuned in just at the tail end of Adebayo's 31-point first, which was already historic and the fourth-highest quarter total in the last 30 years. I figured, with the Heat up 11 and the Wizards actively looking to lose, that Adebayo might score something like 40 points then rest the whole fourth quarter. When the game went to half with him at 43 and the Heat up 76-62, I smiled and prepared myself for a boring second half that I would only sort of bother to watch. I was so fucking wrong.

The crack of the bat. The smell of the grass. Hasty, scrawled attempts to understand and calculate a run-quotient formula. The romance of baseball is rarely felt as keenly as when it requires math. But those are the Wednesday night plans for Team USA, which after losing to Italy in a massive upset will be counting on help to decide whether it advances to the World Baseball Classic's elimination rounds, or whether it goes home in shock and disgrace. More to the point, because recrimination is America's true pastime: Did manager Mark DeRosa think Team USA had already qualified? And did he construct his lineup accordingly, benching some of the U.S.'s best hitters in a game he didn't realize he needed to win? It is extremely not clear. First, the baseball. The Espresso Boys knocked around Nolan McLean and Ryan Yarbrough to take an 8-0 lead by the sixth inning on the back of home runs from Kyle Teel, Sam Antonacci, and Jac Caglianone. Michael Lorenzen pitched four and two-thirds innings of two-hit ball. Team USA clawed back six runs and sent Aaron Judge to the plate as the tying run, but closer Greg Weissert got him swinging.

Part of the charm of the World Baseball Classic is that it takes your favorite athletes and places them in different arrangements. It answers fantastical questions: What if all the members of the Los Angeles Dodgers played on different teams? What would it look like if you put together a lineup containing Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Juan Soto, Julio Rodríguez, and Fernando Tatis Jr., on a team managed by a glassed-up Albert Pujols? Sure, why not. If the WBC has the same vibes as taking your dolls and making them kiss, Cal Raleigh and Randy Arozarena are enacting the equivalent of when you take your dolls to the courthouse and have them stage a messy and public divorce. When Arozarena first stepped up to bat during the United States–Mexico game Monday night, he offered a handshake to the catcher, his Seattle Mariners teammate Cal Raleigh, who refused it and instead said something to Arozarena, who bent down to listen. It was not the first time that a catcher has declined to shake an opponent's hand this tournament: Australian catcher Robbie Perkins previously declined to shake the hand of Czech hitter Milan Prokop. It was also not the first time Arozarena has been snubbed by a Team USA catcher during the WBC, though in 2023, the snubber was not his own teammate. Back when Will Smith declined Arozarena's handshake, Arozarena brushed off the matter straightforwardly, saying, "He left me hanging, but I'm not going to cry. I kept going and hit two doubles." Arozarena was less blithe about Raleigh's snubbing, leaving an extended comment to Mexican journalist Luis Gilbert, helpfully translated in full by Twitter user Master Flip:

In what could very well go down as the biggest upset of the season, San Antonio Spur and intermittent blogger Luke Kornet somehow has successfully blocked the Atlanta Hawks' attempt to honor an iconic local institution: Magic City strip club. In response to the handwringing engendered by Kornet's completely random Medium post against the event, the NBA announced on Monday that it has canceled the Hawks' planned Magic City night. In his post, Kornet called out the partnership and the league, stating: "The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently every day to make this the best basketball league in the world. We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and partners that we know and love." In response to the NBA's cancelation, the Hawks released their own statement, saying, “While we are very disappointed in the NBA’s decision to cancel our Magic City Night promotion, we fully respect its decision. As a franchise, we remain committed to celebrating the best of Atlanta – with authenticity – in ways that continue to unite and bring us all together.”

If your workplace has Slack, you know that it is designed to make remote office communications easier and more convivial, which is all well and good as long as you don't actually use it. The wise Slack user will have the discipline to read rather than contribute, and understand that their contributions are optional at best, a work-creation scam at worst, and that the middle ground is mostly sighs and eyerolls. The truth is that anything you say on there can, will, and should be held against you, possibly by someone with the power to assign stories. A case in point is a recent conversation that led to your itinerant typist drinking James Harden's J Harden-label red wine, watching a terrible game which featured the J. Harden in question, and thinking about the NBA commissioner's first truly forceful act of the season, which was to come out against the Atlanta Hawks entering a promotional partnership with a local strip club. Let us begin at the beginning, though, which in this case is last Wednesday. One of our number found an image of a promotional flyer of James Harden holding an autograph session in suburban Cleveland (he is a Cavalier for the moment) at which the one rule was that he would only sign bottles of his wine. Why this was important to our enterprise's news gathering process is a matter between that comrade and their version of God, so we won't speculate. Since few people walk around carrying wine bottles (they normally are found sitting in a park, with the bottle in a bag), this was clearly a work designed to get people to buy his stuff. Harden had gotten into wine several years earlier as part of sizable number of players dabbling in oenology, a movement that was almost certainly inspired by longtime San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, whose affinity for the grape was devout and refined, and who would always select the wine at any dinner as long as it met three criteria—devotion to craft, taste, and a cost-per-glass equivalent to a mid-size car payment.  Harden joined with an Australian company called J Shed and lent his name to three varieties: two reds and a prosecco which, like most proseccos, is kidding itself by even worming its way into a bottle. Your author knew a deeply committed Harden apologist and decided to buy a bottle of each to gift to said friend at an appropriate future date, but when that date came, said friend declined because he was "celebrating" Dry January, the sap. We were stuck with three bottles that we couldn't give away, didn't have any burning desire to open ourselves or the impetus to find another Hardenophile upon which to foist the goods.