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It's unlikely that you spend much time thinking about the New Orleans Pelicans. However, as a New Orleans resident for whom ball is life, I am rather fixated on them. This team is far stranger than you may have previously understood. They suck in a singular way, and I’ve convinced myself to love them for it. No one else is doing it quite like this. Any attention that was paid to the Pelicans by the broader NBA community last season was a result of one of the strangest trades in NBA history. This, you probably are familiar with: During the 2025 NBA draft, freshly installed Pelicans executives Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver traded an unprotected 2026 first-round pick in order to move up 10 slots and take Derik Queen at No. 13. The Pels could have picked Queen at No. 7, which would have aligned with the organization’s internal valuation of him, but instead they decided to give up an extremely valuable future pick for a smiley, versatile big man who absolutely cannot play defense. The pick they gave up almost became a top-three selection for the Indiana Pacers in a consensus three-player draft in 2026, but thanks to some ping-pong balls, it instead became the eighth pick and remained with the Atlanta Hawks. So who’s laughing now?  The Weaver-Dumars partnership is a particularly thrilling thread of this team’s current construction. Dumars—who last held an operations job for an NBA franchise in 2020, when he performed several jobs for the Sacramento Kings—worked at the NBA’s league office in Secaucus until the Pelicans hired him in 2025. In Detroit, where he last held a GM role, he flamed out spectacularly. Weaver also previously held the GM job in Detroit, and while he and Dumars never worked together, they arrived together in New Orleans as a kind of package deal. As GM of the Pistons from 2020-24, Weaver built rosters that compiled a 74-244 record. On his Hollinger & Duncan podcast, John Hollinger has called Weaver a “subcontractor” in the Pels' GM job, effectively just being the right arm of Dumars.

The Cleveland Guardians will not win the World Series this autumn, just as they have not in any of the last 78 autumns. They were eliminated Monday night by the Tampa Bay Rays: outslugged, out-small-balled, and outlasted. Thus ends what was, by regular-season record, an uneven and dreary but still somehow typical year for the Guardians, who have won between 46 percent and 63 percent of their games every season for 14 years running. In terms of proximity to a championship, this was the most successful Guardians season since 2016, when they made the World Series and fell in seven games to the Chicago Cubs. "We won another division," said a gloomy Austin Hedges after his Guardians were eliminated Monday night. "That's really cool. We won a playoff series. That's really cool." Hedges was hurting, and his point was that the objective coolness of these accomplishments would eventually penetrate his disappointment and give him a sense of satisfaction. Unfortunately for Hedges, almost nothing about the Guardians can be honestly described as "cool." In the realm of aesthetics and vibes, let me say this much: I am glad I do not have to watch any more Guardians games between now and next summer. It's not that I bear them any specific ill will: Unlike at least one of my Defector colleagues, I am not pursuing an active personal vendetta against Steven Kwan. But as the Rays ascended in this ALCS—and as a consequence of the particular way that they ascended, by being better than the Guardians both where the Guardians are weak (hitting the ball hard, hitting the ball in the air) and where the Guardians are strong (posting crooked numbers without ever making solid contact)—they began to exude what I think of as the good kind of inevitability. Tampa Bay's guys were cool and cocky, they seemed downright saturated with juice, and at regular intervals they did bitchin' things. They seemed dialed to the moment, which is to say like a team that belonged in the World Series.

Five years ago this fall, The Athletic published a feature in which NWSL players Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly opened up about their abusive former Portland Thorns coach, Paul Riley. The story prompted an investigation into how the NWSL handled reports of abuse, and by the end of that year, half of the league's head coaches either resigned or were fired, along with league commissioner Lisa Baird. I met Shim while on tour for Normal Gossip in 2023, and I was curious to talk to her about how she made the decision to go public with her experiences when there are so many reasons not to, like the fragility of the then-nascent league and the potential repercussions she might experience. And there were the identity questions. She had dedicated her entire life to soccer, so what happened when she decided to walk away? How did she find her way back on new terms after everything that had happened? This season finale of Try Hard is a bit heavier than the other episodes this season, but I wanted to end on it because I was so inspired by Shim's courage, not only to make herself vulnerable by speaking up, but in daring to imagine a new version of her life after spending so many years chasing a singular goal.

SAN FRANCISCO — Like its sludgy predecessor and by design, Game 2 of the WNBA Finals was played as if in the mud. Clean dribbling of the ball was prohibited, the two participants collaborated on 32 turnovers, and the Atlanta Dream finished one missed three-pointer beyond joining the Golden State Valkyries with an identical, gross 21-for-61 shooting night. Ballhalla's famous resolve was tested as its stars spent the night dribbling sideways for 23 seconds before hoisting terrible shots. But through it all, directly in the middle of the fray on both ends of the court, there was one player who gradually revealed herself to be the game's protagonist, the one gleefully forcing the Valks down into the mud. There was Angel Reese, dominating the biggest game of her career and seizing control of the WNBA Finals for her team. The stats tell some of the story: Reese finished with 30 points, 16 rebounds, and two blocks, got to the line 11 times, and finished as the only Atlanta player who made at least half their shot attempts. But the way her dominance was felt in the building was truly remarkable. Reese may as well have been the only player on the court. The San Francisco crowd puts a little extra energy into booing Reese, not out of a sense of culture-war conscription the way, say, an Indiana crowd would, but rather because she causes them the most pain. Both these Finals teams are set up with the primary objective of preventing opponents from playing basketball, which played out for everyone in Game 1 and for the Valkyries in Game 2. Reese was the one player who was getting anything easy: If she got a touch with momentum or against anyone who wasn't Kiah Stokes, she was getting to the rim. If she pulled down an offensive rebound, the Valks may as well have started setting up their offense at the other end. In a series otherwise entirely populated with people moving sideways, Reese is direct. When she's on the court, she demands attention.

For nearly three weeks, a real bet a person could place on the Polymarket gambling app was on "Any of the Cornell 7 charged with a felony sex crime?" The Cornell 7 refers to seven defendants in a civil lawsuit filed last month by a former Cornell University student who said she was gang-raped by several fraternity members. No criminal charges have been filed, but after the lawsuit drew national attention, a local prosecutor said on Sept. 28 that his office would reopen the criminal investigation. Two days later, on Sept. 30, a market opened up on the popular gambling platform (though technically it is a "prediction market") to bet on the results of the investigation. The market was not available to bettors in the United States version of the app, but the bet itself was very easy to find. I just punched "Cornell 7" into the search bar and found it pretty easily.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we're talking about hockey, Jane Austen, Steven Spielberg, how to start dating, and more. Drew is off this week, and I'm your substitute. I write about hockey, baseball, and a bunch of other stuff here at Defector. I also just published a book of essays about the movie It's A Wonderful Life, called Every Time A Bell Rings, which I co-wrote with the amazing critic and novelist Emily St. James. It's a great gift for Christmas, but there is no greater gift than being able to answer your letters. So let's get to it. Ryan:

Without knowing for sure whether this is actually true, we can still surmise that the Washington Commanders felt better about losing Monday night's game than they did about their delightfully grotesque tie against the Giants in Week 5. And we are almost certain the San Francisco 49ers felt worse in victory. Their record stayed spotless, but in making their escape, they caught a glimpse of the grim future that is in their front yard. If you chose to avoid last night's Commanders–49ers game in the shadows of Hell's Substation, you are finding out today what happens when the scoreboard lies, and also when it becomes permissible to lie about the scoreboard. The practical truth is that the 49ers won 23-17, and remain one of the NFL's three undefeated teams. The victory broadened their lead in the NFC West to half the schedule—a margin of three games over the barely tenable Seattle Seahawks after six weeks of action. The math here is nearly unassailable, but hold on a moment while we assail it. By losing, the Commanders managed not only to drop from 1-4-1, the fourth-worst record in the sport, but to complete a second consecutive week of winless football from the entire NFC East. Those divisional rivals pulled together to lose six games outright and tie a seventh in humiliating fashion. This is the first time an entire division has gone without a single team winning in back-to-back weeks since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, and almost certainly the first time ever, though we suspect nobody is bored enough to give that research a go. Only one team in the division, the New York Giants, has a winning record, and none of them have a positive point differential. After six weeks, the NFC East has fashioned itself as a hideous homage to the American League West, the new standard for no standards at all.

After listening to a critique of the Miss America pageant on a public radio station, Barbara Hammer declared herself a feminist. Then she left her husband. Then she became a lesbian. This was the early 1970s, and it wasn’t long before someone gifted baby gay Hammer a Super-8 and she commenced pointing it—lovingly, relentlessly—at every human crease and crevice in her life. Around this time, Hammer started writing down her name and address and placing them in balloons for others to find. “Otherwise I’d be lost in the world,” she said of the practice in an “exit interview,” given just before she died in 2019.  Brydie O’Connor’s Barbara Forever  is one of these balloons; a documentary worthy of its iconic subject, that captures and arranges fragments of Barbara for us to turn over in our hands. It’s a devoted, sincere ode to the avant-garde artist, who, as she put it, made movies out of sex and life. More than 80 of them, to be a little more precise, over the course of half a century. Hammer filmed herself and her personal relationships obsessively, creating the vast archive that serves as the basis of Barbara Forever. At the beginning of the film, there’s a series of images of Hammer pointing a camera into a passing window, or the rearview mirror of a car or motorcycle, her left eye squinting, her right looking into a viewfinder. We often see Barbara holding and speaking directly to the camera in the documentary, creating the uncanny sense that she made it herself, from beyond the grave.  Though Hammer narrates the entire documentary, the narrative is pieced together from various sources. Babara’s voice will sound effortful and aged at one moment, then youthful and mischievous in the next. O’Connor also replicates her subject’s love of a match-cut, folding together images from throughout Hammer’s career. The result is not the chronology of a life, but the story of a filmmaker—starting when Barbara first picked up a camera, and ending with who she became to others. It’s a story of self-creation and self-plunder, of Barbara inventing herself and using her life as the raw material of her artistry. 

A Weird Star is a classic place-setter in fiction. Put a Weird Star in the sky, even if it never has anything to do with the plot, and you know we're somewhere different and alien. Anything that's clearly not our Sun, and you're cooking with gas. Maybe it's a binary system, and there's two suns. Maybe it's large and looming. Maybe it's even flickering, like Jack Vance used, to excellent effect. But rarely do authors fuck around with color. A star is white, or red if it's going out soon, or, if the planet is question is truly fucked, the star is blue because that's the hottest color there is. Those are the colors of stars, we figured. Not even sci-fi authors could conceive of a mechanism to get some new tints in there. As is often the case, the real universe turns out to be stranger than imagination. Stars, under the right circumstances, can appear to observers on their orbiting planets in a wide spectrum of colors, from hot pink to the green of cucumber lime Gatorade. "Imagine standing on a planet and looking up at a green star," said Mark Hollands, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick and lead author on the study. I'm imagining it, Mark! It rocks! The paper, published last week in RAS Techniques and Instruments, doesn't rely on having found some new stars lit up like Christmas lights. Instead, it's a breakthrough in modeling. Traditionally, stars are modeled as putting out black-body radiation. Black bodies are mathematical conveniences, idealized objects: perfectly opaque and non-reflective, and emitting light in all wavelengths. Black bodies do not actually exist, but stars are close enough to that the models work for most purposes, which is the important thing. In black-body radiation, light will only ever vary depending on the temperature of the object, going from red to white to blue as the object gets hotter. Play around with the burners on your stove to grasp this immediately.

For a moment there, it was getting a bit sleepy. In the bottom of the seventh inning, the Tampa Bay Rays were up 3-1 on the Cleveland Guardians: a lead, but not an insurmountable one. Each of their three runs came from plinking away at the Guardians' relievers—the Guardians were reduced to a bullpen game to fend off elimination—in the second and third innings. Then, up came Junior Caminero with a runner on. After that, it was impossible to drowse off. https://youtu.be/h60gtkCBMBc The numbers on the home run themselves are not very impressive, nor was the timing particularly special. Caminero just dinked the foul pole; Statcast indicates that it would have only been a home run in Houston, New York, and, indeed, Tampa. Speaking purely in homer quality, it paled in comparison to his teammate Yandy Díaz's next-inning dagger. But absent the aesthetic appeal of a no-doubter, or the narrative sway of a game-winner, what made Caminero's home run incredible was Junior Caminero.