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As the dust settles following the NBA's obliteration of the Clippers over the Kawhi Leonard–Aspiration scandal, one of the more interesting vectors of fallout is on the media side. After all, the scandal kicked off following a series of reports from podcaster Pablo Torre, who is mentioned in the first line of the official investigation's report, and was later stage-managed for the public several times over by ESPN, Torre's former employer. Despite the company's status as the big dog of sports journalism, it bungled the biggest NBA story of the year at every stage. ESPN is where Clippers owner Steve Ballmer went to plead his innocence two days after Torre broke the story last September. It's also where the most seemingly authoritative piece of reporting on the scandal emerged in the weeks before the release of the league's report. That story, from Aug. 17, has aged horribly, as its framing was that the investigation would clear the Clippers of wrongdoing; two weeks later, they were clobbered. So what are we to make of this sequence of events? In the aftermath of the NBA handing down its punishment, criticism of ESPN's story has tended to take a certain shape: The once-proud Worldwide Leader in Sports has shamed itself, having abandoned quality journalism in favor of Pat McAfee. While broadly correct, that critique doesn't really apply here. One might assume the Aug. 17 story had been riddled with factual errors, but that isn't entirely correct. The story—triple-bylined by Don Van Natta Jr., Baxter Holmes, and Ramona Shelburne, with additional reporting credits for Shams Charania and Bobby Marks—wasn't exactly wrong on the facts. The crux of it was that the league's investigation had found no evidence of Ballmer having "funneled money through team sponsors to pay Kawhi Leonard in order to circumvent the salary cap." Rather, according to the ESPN story, the investigation was focused "on whether the team's introduction of Leonard to team sponsors constitutes a violation of the league's rules prohibiting salary cap circumvention." That's basically coherent with what's in the report, produced by the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz law firm.

Some people are fans of the New England Patriots. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New England Patriots. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: The New England Patriots, who are just outside of frame here. I swear it.

For all the fulminations about the million-ton craphammer dropped on the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer for trying to evade the NBA salary cap, almost nobody has yet identified the situation as the entertainment bonanza it is about to become. Yes, it's time for another edition of the game show to end all game shows, and maybe also to end everything else: Billionaires Eating Billionaires. You've seen it, because it airs reruns on basically every channel. A bunch of insanely wealthy people get in their feelings about another colossally wealthy person who has gone rogue on the herd, and lash out accordingly; the gameplay generally unfolds as a series of lawyergasms across the continent and ends with some competitors going home naked and battered, all of it richly deserved. It's Turbo Survivor, only with bloody retributions handed out to all the contestants, even the winners, as well as the hosts and production team; even the intrepid team of reporters and researchers who started all this hilarity a year ago will take home a black eye for their trouble. That last group is Team Torre, named for its front man, Pablo Torre, whose name is on the door of the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. It was that program's collective team of researchers and newsjackals who found a disgruntled insider willing not only to expose the salary-cap games being played by the Clippers, but to provide the first few documents of proof that ultimately led to Ballmer and the Clippers being publicly pantsed for paying Kawhi Leonard under multiple tables. They will be part of the legal mess about to unfold—the heated letter the Clippers sent to the league after Wednesday's punishment came down sniffily referred to the malfeasance Torre et al. exposed as "podcast allegations"—and unlike all the other combatants, don't necessarily have tens of millions of dollars on hand to pay for it. Their sponsors, Meadowlark Media and through them DraftKings, do. So that'll be a hoot, too.

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: Week 0 is behind us, as well you might want it to be if you watched South Carolina State beat Savannah State 87-0 in Saturday. There will be more of that this week, undoubtedly, and every one of those games will serve as blessed relief from the hailstorm of turgid analyses about North Carolina being 1-0 without Mike Lombardi and TCU being 0-1 without the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (and yes, there may be lessons in those disparate things for all of us). But we have miles and thousands of administrative outrages to go before we sleep, starting with five days of ball glut as the industry tries to keep up with the NFL's new promotional masterstroke of Extreme Calendar Glut. But here's something to make your blood run cold this early in the year: Bill Belichick is the only coach who could conceivably win the season's opening and closing game, and if that happens, spring will next emerge in 2183, at which point Punxsutawney Phil will have been replaced by an eye-clawing psychobadger from the 11th dimension.

We can officially stick a fork in the fallout stage of former Athletic reporter Dianna Russini's long and handholdy relationship with Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel. Russini resigned in disgrace and remains unemployed, while Vrabel suffered absolutely no professional consequences. And now The Athletic has completed its five-month review to determine whether her work was up to the company's ethical standards. Spoiler alert: It was mostly fine. The review was published Thursday morning and conducted by Mike Semel, editorial director for standards and quality at The Athletic. There are few revelations in the details of Russini's relationship with Vrabel, but she was found "noncompliant" with the outlet's standard of conduct for employees for not disclosing the relationship to her editors. Most of her reporting was found to be sound and ethical. However, two of Russini's pieces have now had editors' notes attached: a video in which she speaks glowingly of Vrabel breaking up a fight in training camp, and an item in a notebook column that contained an unattributed but highly detailed description of Vrabel's thinking and also dinner order. How did Semel determine all this?

Earlier this year, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons became young Hollywood phenoms in quick succession. An actor and sketch comedian, the 26-year-old Barker wrote, edited, and directed Obsession, which is the story of a meek romantic who uses a magical novelty toy to make his crush fall in love with him with predictably disastrous results. Parsons, at 21, directed Backrooms, a feature-length adaptation of his own creepypasta-inspired web series about a labyrinthine extradimensional space that serves as a bizarre simulacrum of the real world. Both films were released two weeks apart in May and broke multiple commercial records. Having made half a billion dollars, Obsession is not just one of the highest-grossing movies of the year but one of the most successful horror films of all time. While Backrooms might trail Obsession as merely the second-highest grossing horror feature of 2026, it’s also the fifth-most profitable independent feature in history; Parsons became the youngest director ever to helm a studio-backed film, besting even Orson Welles. Baker and Parsons got their start with popular YouTube channels, which has led agents and producers to scour the internet for the next young, digital-native filmmaker with a built-in following and an original story that might become an enormously profitable feature. That search is ongoing, but another twenty-something filmmaker with roots in the internet has recently released his debut feature, It Ends, a horror-ish film with a distinctly existentialist bent. His name is Alexander Ullom.

A nightmare has happened. Maybe you were minding your own business in the office when an earthquake hit, or maybe you were spelunking in some wretched cave never meant for humans to enter. Yet regardless of how you got here, you are now trapped and in need of urgent medical attention. There's too much debris to clear before a paramedic would be able to reach you ... a human paramedic, that is. But this guy? This guy eats rubble for breakfast. This is a giant burrowing cockroach, and it is approximately as long as a lime. It lives and burrows in—you guessed it—Australia. In the wild, the giant burrowing cockroach mostly stick around their burrows. They can live up to 10 years. The roaches only come to the surface at night, gathering leaves, twigs, and bark from the forest floor to feast on later, back underground. In other words, regular giant burrowing cockroaches do not have jobs or any semblance of medical training. Regular giant burrowing cockroaches would be ill-equipped to save you in an emergency situation. But this is not a regular roach. It is a cyborg roach, the fusion of an actual insect and a robot. The researchers behind this creation have dubbed it the paraborg, per a paper recently published in the journal Advanced Science.

The 35-page report released on Wednesday by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which contains a great deal of evidence that Kawhi Leonard and the Los Angeles Clippers circumvented the NBA's salary-cap rules, makes for some surprisingly fun reading. It includes some juicy and/or embarrassing emails and text messages sent by some of the parties involved in the Clippers' scheme, and my favorite part of the report is this one: In December 2021, Mr. Sanberg discussed with senior Aspiration executives his desire for the company to enter into an endorsement agreement with Mr. Leonard on the terms described above. Mr. Sanberg did not have the authority to sign such an agreement on Aspiration’s behalf and, according to internal Aspiration emails, the reaction among its C-suite executives who did have this signing authority was swift and uniformly negative: “I have no idea why we’d do this,” wrote one senior executive; “this is not a good investment of our capital [...] It’s $48M over 4 years for Kawhi, who is not a big name [...] Not sure why we would make such a commitment considering we are already paying a huge sponsorship fee to Clippers,” wrote another.When these concerns were conveyed to Mr. Sanberg, he told the Aspiration executives that “the Clippers are asking us to do this with Kawhi Leonard” and that the team would provide additional business back to Aspiration to help offset the financial impact on Aspiration. In an email exchange among Aspiration’s CEO, CFO, and general counsel, one wrote, “[Mr. Sanberg said] that the Clippers are promising to increase the amount they pay us per quarter in line with what we pay this guy [i.e., Mr. Leonard].” Another responded: “Thanks for verifying. ... We should be fine if it’s cashflow neutral.” This excerpt is one of several within the report that could be described as a "smoking gun." Here you have Aspiration co-founder Joe Sanberg, who pleaded guilty to felony charges for defrauding all sorts of people while running Aspiration, hinting at the purpose of the company's endorsement deal with Leonard, only for his CFO, CEO, and general counsel to then describe the scheme in plain language: "[Mr. Sanberg said] that the Clippers are promising to increase the amount they pay us per quarter in line with what we pay this guy [i.e., Mr. Leonard].”

Tom Dundon and the Portland City Council remain in a standoff. In early August, the city approved a $120 million expenditure of public money for renovations of the Blazers' longtime home arena, located in the city's Rose Quarter entertainment district. The city's proposed terms included a new 20-year lease, a $3 million annual payment to the city (compensation for property taxes the team avoids by playing in a publicly owned arena), and for the team to commit to using unionized labor. Dundon's response, as delivered by underlings at a July public meeting, was a resounding Hell no. Portland is too crummy a town, says Dundon, to expect those kinds of compromises. It is beset by a "stagnant business climate, high income taxes, and [a] divisive political environment," and Portland's civic leaders need to get serious about what constitutes a "market-rate deal" for such a place. Dundon's title is "controlling governor," and he is the face of the team's new ownership group, which bought the Trail Blazers in March 2026. But he is not the all-powerful franchise owner in the way we tend to think about sports owners. In order to purchase the team from the Allen family, Dundon had to pull together a team of investors and pool their resources, and as a consequence of that arrangement, there are only so many things he can do unilaterally. Defector spoke last week with a Blazers source familiar with the ownership group's decision-making process and was told that on the matter of, say, relocation, there would be a vote of governors, and in that process Dundon's vote would count the same as anyone else's. Dundon puts a Darth Vadery countenance on decisions made by this group of governors, but he is not absolutely empowered to dish vengeance on the city for opposing him too strenuously in arena negotiations. For that, he would need the support of at least two of his four fellow co-owners. That is probably encouraging to Blazers fans, especially because there is another guy out there, with the job title of "alternate governor," who is putting a different kind of face on the new ownership group. His name is Sheel Tyle, and in a profile in The Athletic published back in early April, when the ink on the team's bill of sale had not yet dried, Tyle is depicted as a happy-go-lucky, hoops-loving, regular-type Joe, who lives in Portland and is friends with Damian Lillard. Better yet, he is described in the profile as a "local Blazers co-owner" and as "one of the only Oregonians to own a share of the team," one whose "local presence" will "give Portland a voice" if Dundon ever broaches the topic of relocation.

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.