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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, Albert answers a question about kids and lying.

Technically, the Chicago Sky are not the worst team in the WNBA right now by record; that honor would belong to either of the teams with one fewer win, the Connecticut Sun or the Seattle Storm. But after Monday's WNBA slate, which featured the Sky's 92-63 loss to the Sun, and Seattle's much more competitive 112-110 loss to the Dallas Wings, the distinction feels like one without a difference. What do you call a team that loses to the worst team in the WNBA by 29 points? The Sky have been bad for the better part of four years now, but for a hopeful sliver of this summer, they weren't. Last year's roster had been overhauled, the bad vibes cast aside by trades and free agency. If the big picture was a little hazy, the names weren't: A trade for Rickea Jackson quickly filled the star vacuum left by trading Angel Reese; veteran free agents Skylar Diggins and Natasha Cloud gave the team some needed depth at point guard; signing Azurá Stevens promised more spacing for Kamilla Cardoso. Their season began with four straight games on the road; they returned to Chicago an impressive 3-1, with wins against the contending Valkyries and Lynx. Still, the homecoming was bittersweet. Minutes into the final game of the road trip in Minnesota, Jackson had torn her ACL. The Sky did rally to win that game, even down their leading scorer. They've won just one of their 12 games since.  This is the Chicago Sky's story at its simplest: a promising team aimless without its star, derailed by plain misfortune. It might well be the story that grants general manager Jeff Pagliocca and head coach Tyler Marsh more time in their jobs. But every night the Sky play, it gets harder to believe the story is true. In the history of basketball, you will find many good teams that have sustained good play in the absence of a top scorer. Often the reason those teams are good is because they are not so otherwise flawed as to immediately be felled by one player’s absence.

The San Francisco Giants have permission from Major League Baseball to wear Pride-themed gear. This was explained by commissioner Rob Manfred in a recent letter to Josh Hawley, Republican senator from Missouri. The Giants and Dodgers have a special exemption: Other teams have only the 12 league-wide special uniform events, but these two teams can print and wear (and, of course, sell) Pride gear. As part of the deal, it is the responsibility of the Giants, as a condition of their special exemption, to "speak to the players to make sure they [are] comfortable with the apparel," and to make it clear that they are not required to wear it. Here is how the Giants and Major League Baseball intend to dart out from under the towering victimhood of Hawley and the hordes of deranged evangelical bigots that he represents: According to Manfred, what happened on June 12, when three Giants pitchers scrawled bible versus onto their Pride caps and were subsequently scolded by the league office, was a simple and innocent miscommunication. "Unfortunately," says Manfred, "this year the Giants communication with players was inadequate and not clear." This won't survive very close scrutiny. For one thing, all three of the offending players—Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker—were on the Giants last season. For another, this was not a spur of the moment thing, undertaken in the confusion of unclear expectations: Giants players told the San Francisco Chronicle last week that there "were conversations in the days and weeks leading up to the Giants’ Pride Night" about how exactly the small group of dissenters would protest the event. Finally, per the same Chronicle report, none of the three players who were scolded by MLB for writing on their Pride caps felt pressured by the team to wear them in the first place. They knew they had the option to wear normal caps—Sam Hentges, the fourth Giants pitcher to protest the event, wore a standard Giants cap and kept it unmarked—but wanted to make a statement.

In 2018, I became convinced that flamenco had South Asian origins. I hadn’t listened to much flamenco, if any at all, until my roommate Jake introduced me to Rosalía. I watched her dance—using her feet to strike the ground, making an instrument of her body, raising her arms in intricate flourishes—and I thought … I’ve seen this before. It looked so Indian to me.  Jake and I used to argue about it whenever we watched her music videos, which means we argued about it constantly. Me: “Romani people are from Rajasthan and there is no flamenco without Romani people!” Him: “Bitch, you can’t even spell flamenco.” We didn’t go anywhere without first downing black cherry White Claws and watching the “Con Altura” music video, mimicking her stomps on the brown carpet of our living room. I think I still have the whole thing memorized.  Even though Rosalía experienced success early in her career—her debut album was beloved by critics—it took some time for pop fans to catch up. I remember going to Lollapalooza in 2019 and begging my high school friend to ditch a white rapper named “Yung Gravy” and come with me to catch Rosalía instead. She did, and she thanked me afterwards. 

NEWARK, N.J. — I went to Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE jail, for the second time on June 12, three weeks after 300-plus detainees initiated a hunger and labor strike. The strikers’ demands include an audience with Governor Mikie Sherrill, the release of vulnerable inmates, better living conditions, the end of pressure tactics to sign self-deportation orders, and progressive release and fair reviews of their immigration cases. It was 95 degrees with 57 percent humidity when I arrived. The air around the jail smelled of sewage and animal fat rendering plants. They used to make Agent Orange here. Inside Delaney, behind barriers, fences, barbed wire, and enforced windows that bleach the silhouettes of prisoners to nuclear shadow, there is no air conditioning. At the time of writing, there was no visitation. GEO Group, the private prison company that received $1 billion in government contracts to operate Delaney, arbitrarily suspends visits. Detainees also report GEO feeding them rotten, infested food; denying them medical care; forcing them to work for pennies, if they’re paid at all. ICE and GEO also reportedly meet rebellion—including waving at protestors—with taunts, beatings, and pepper spray. It is functionally a concentration camp. In the strike’s first week, hundreds rallied outside to amplify striker demands, show support for detainees, and attempt to obstruct transport convoys. Numbers dropped after an army of local and state police and illegally masked ICE agents beat, teargassed, and shot protesters with rubber bullets—but people are still on the ground. And detainees persist despite reported dispersals and life-threatening abuses. ICE has transferred many of the original strikers; exact numbers are hard to verify, since transports often leave at night and cases take days to update in the system. Advocates report 90 people transferred out the week of June 7, and up to 300 in the days prior. But on June 11, women detainees at Delaney issued a new set of demands, including to restore visitation, provide safe drinking water, and fire a GEO guard allegedly sexually assaulting them. There is no reason not to support them. There is no reason Delaney Hall should exist.

For a little while there, it looked like Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby was going to wriggle out of this jam. After committing the historically career-ending sin of gambling on his own team, he won a preliminary injunction against the NCAA, overturning their ruling that made him ineligible to play college football. When Texas Tech's embarrassing PR campaign wasn't enough to fend off further legal challenges from the NCAA and the Big 12, Sorsby decided to hit the eject button and head for the NFL via the supplemental draft. Well, so much for that. Sorsby received a letter from the NFL on Tuesday, informing him that the league will not be holding a supplemental draft this year. That leaves him ineligible to play college football and unable to enter the NFL until the 2027 draft. The NFL's letter, published in full by ESPN's Adam Schefter, is more cutting than you might expect. This was clearly written by someone who was deeply annoyed at how close to the deadline Sorsby submitted his application for the supplemental draft, and at how sloppy his work was: We are in receipt of your Petition for Special Eligibility, dated June 16, 2026 (“Petition”). As announced earlier today, the League has elected not to conduct a Supplemental Draft this year. Under our Collective Bargaining Agreement, the League retains sole discretion to determine whether it is appropriate to conduct a Supplemental Draft in any given year. The League has not conducted such a draft for several years and, prior to your submission, the League had no plans to do so this year, as no other player has sought entry. Your Petition—filed three business days before the deadline, without any supporting information or documentation, and only after abandoning your recent litigation efforts to avoid NCAA sanctions—does not provide a basis for the League to alter those plans. The issues presented by your Petition are too significant, and too closely tied to the League’s core integrity interests, to permit meaningful review within the timeline presented. The sole reasons identified in your Petition for seeking entry into the Supplemental Draft are that you have been “declared ineligible” by the NCAA, have “exhausted all of [your] avenues to continue in the NCAA,” and “want to now play in the NFL.” The Petition provides no information regarding the basis for, or timing of, the NCAA’s decision. Public sources, however, indicate that in May 2026 the NCAA issued a determination declaring you permanently ineligible from participation in college athletics, based on a sustained pattern of improper gambling activity during your collegiate career at three different universities. The League does not have the complete record of the NCAA’s investigation, and you did not provide any such materials with your Petition. Available information nonetheless indicates that, over the course of your collegiate career, you knowingly engaged in repeated and significant violations of NCAA rules designed to preserve the integrity of athletic competition. Reported conduct includes placing wagers on your own team and teammates and, to avoid detection, establishing or funding accounts in the names of intermediaries who placed bets on your behalf. There are also reports that you may have violated state criminal law. Your Petition does not address these matters. Nor does it demonstrate accountability for your conduct or indicate whether, or how, you would adhere to the League’s rules and policies governing the integrity of competition. Instead, even after receiving notice of the NCAA’s decision rescinding your college eligibility in May, you sought to avoid the consequences of that determination through litigation rather than accepting responsibility for your actions, and you pursued entry into the NFL only after abandoning those efforts. As Commissioner Goodell has emphasized, participation in the NFL is a privilege that carries with it significant responsibilities, including accountability. By all accounts, you are a talented player with the potential for future success. We encourage you to focus on preparing for possible entry into the NFL through the 2027 NFL Annual Draft.

Miami has been of two minds on the anti-aging serum that is Pat Riley for about a decade now, roughly since LeBron James pissed off back to Cleveland. This is mostly because 1) Riley was getting old, except of course facially, where he's been 45 since he was 20, and 2) because he didn't get another generational player to replace LeBron. The Miami Heat reached two NBA Finals in that intervening decade, as a five-seed and an eight-seed, with Jimmy Butler as their best player, and that is not nothing. But Riley's apparent reluctance to swing from his ass for one last megascore became a prime talking point on South Beach as the team gradually receded into the thick Southeast Division underbrush; this did not make for a flattering contrast with the Florida Panthers slapping together two championship parades, and more recently cornering the market on Tkachuks. The Panthers were the team that Went For It Without Fear, and the Heat were either too sclerotic or too committed to their specific bit to do the same. No longer. Today, Riley is the CEO of Team LFG, screwing up his 81-year-old courage and throwing a slew of picks at the comically desperate Milwaukee Bucks for Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bobby Portis. While guessing at the mortality of others is a particularly crass way to make a point, it is fair to say that Riley views this as quite likely his last chance to be Shohei Ohtani. Whether his feelings today include finding satisfaction in bumping Panthers GM Bill Zito down to the Kyle Schwarber tier is a matter for the Giannis presser, but that must surely count too. Either way, he's swinging for the fences. The gamble is clear enough. This is a turbo-all-in by a team that has gotten rather further than it had any right to think was possible by not doing that, and largely by doing a lot with less. But history gets old fast, and the two Finals appearances in 2020 and 2023 might as well have been 1951 and 1954, when the Rochester Royals and Syracuse Nationals were the zenith of New York basketball. In the last three years, the Heat have not only not advanced out of the first round but have been passed in the Southeast standings by first Orlando, then Atlanta, and most recently Charlotte. The only team left is Washington, and being worse than the Wizards is a call from the clinic.

As if they were trying to win the 2019 NBA Championship seven years too late, the horrible Washington Wizards made two of the most interesting moves at the deadline last year, relieving the Dallas Mavericks of Anthony Davis in exchange for basically one good first-round pick, and taking Trae Young off the Atlanta Hawks' hands for some expiring contracts. Despite Young's considerable flaws, the deal was a fine one for the Wizards, since they didn't surrender any real assets, happily allowing the Hawks to salary-dump their former franchise cornerstone. But after what the Wizards did this week, the trade looks more like a disaster than a happy flier. A day before they will make the first overall pick in Tuesday night's draft, the Wizards reportedly signed Young to a four-year, $212 million deal. Signing a tiny, perpetually injured, rapidly obsolescing point guard in a league that is increasingly hostile to that player type's existence is, to put it charitably, a bad idea, as is extending a player that a rival team salary-dumped. If you squint to the point of shutting your eyes and seeing photonegative stars, you can make an argument that Jalen Brunson's Finals MVP run marked a turning point in the saga of the tiny guard, disproving the Hammon Corollary once and for all and justifying 53 million American dollars per season for a guy who stands 6-foot-1 and somehow defends a foot shorter. The Brunson comparison falls apart instantly under examination, as Brunson is a non-disastrous defender who is also capable of using his body to create space. Is Trae Young bashing people out of the way with his battering-ram head? No. His only relationship to contact is seeking fouls that the league has legislated out of the game.

The first round of the NBA Draft is tonight! Who will go first overall? Will any of the top four teams deviate from consensus? In what order will the huge swarm of point guards go after the fourth pick? On this week's Nothing But Respect, we answer some of these questions, but we also get into larger-order matters of draft philosophy, scouting, and why draft people use such crazy language. Our guest this week was David Lee, the writer and analyst, not the former NBA All-Star. We also discussed Harry's new podcast/magazine project, TRANCHE 001. He put together five one-off podcast episodes with smart, interesting people from around the internet on such topics as the Palantir chore coat, Chaotic Good and the question of the Geese psyop that drove people crazy, and the history of the word "based." It's only $5, which is a steal.

Thanks to the luck of the draw and the blessing of the soccer gods, Monday was the second matchday of this World Cup in which all three of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland took the field in back-to-back-to-back matches. Thanks to sheer superhuman talent on display from the trio, Monday was also the second matchday of this World Cup in which all three of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland scored at least two goals each. If the World Cup is a global celebration of soccer, then the 2026 World Cup Golden Boot race is a localized celebration of superstardom, a triple showdown that could even blossom into a four-way melee (Harry Kane plays his second game on Tuesday after scoring a brace of his own in his first against Croatia) heading into the final group-stage round. Just when one guy has seemed to pull ahead, the other two have caught up immediately after, and only one goal separates the current leader from his two much younger challengers. That current leader is, of course, Messi. After picking up two more goals on Monday against Austria, he has scored all five of Argentina's goals at this World Cup. Noted Messi worshipper Billy Haisley already covered the D10S's feats, so instead I will just highlight Messi's touch to control the ball ahead of Monday's second goal, and then move on. But seriously, what a touch: