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The New York Liberty have decided to get rid of head coach Chris DeMarco after one season, as first reported Tuesday by ESPN. It may come as a surprise to some, since the eighth-seeded Liberty swept the top-seeded Minnesota Lynx in the first round of this year's WNBA playoffs. Looking at the bigger picture, however, this firing was deserved. After that historic playoff upset, the Liberty hit their heads on the ceiling in the semifinal round against the Atlanta Dream. New York was swept in three games, but Game 2 ended in controversy because DeMarco did not use his team's reset timeout to set up a good look at a potential game-tying shot. Instead, Breanna Stewart settled for a heave, and her team lost in overtime, 101-98. After the defeat, both Stewart and DeMarco said the officiating crew incorrectly told them that the Liberty had no timeouts remaining. (Stewart handled most of the explanation, with DeMarco weighing in toward the end.) The WNBA eventually admitted that the refs screwed up, in the most passively worded statement—"a misunderstanding amongst the various parties"—but the league did nothing further to remedy the situation. It merely shifted Fatou Cissoko-Stephens and Kevin Fahy, the two officials in question, to Game 3 of the Valkyries-Aces series, which ended in a less controversial sweep by Golden State. Although the refs deserve the blame there, DeMarco still should have had a coaching staff member assigned to keep track of the timeouts so that he could at least assertively advocate for his own team.

A frog's eyes are the window to a frog's soul.

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 about democracy, belts, bar soap, optimal diner orders, and more. Happy Election Day, everyone! I hope you voted early and often. I know I did! Your letters:

They say that shooting a basketball starts in the legs, especially in the case of free throws. You bend your knees and use the greater, more controlled power source of your legs to generate the force of a shot, only finishing the motion off with a flick of the wrist. That's the theory, anyway. South Florida big Kendall Puryear shoots forth in defiance of that orthodoxy. Puryear shot and missed two free throws in her USF debut on Monday night, though "shot" and "missed" are insufficiently descriptive verbs for whatever the hell is going on here. https://twitter.com/carterl0we/status/2117471478535139531 You'd never teach anything Puryear's doing here: the way she brings her shooting motion to a full halt at the top of her rise, the way she cocks back the ball in one hand as if quivering an arrow, the way she hucks it in a soaring arc as if it's a projectile weapon. One potential explanation for Puryear's form is that she was a champion shot putter throughout high school, winning plentiful district and sectional titles in Missouri. Being good at shot put isn't the sort of thing that necessarily breaks one's form like this, but it feels like a start. She shot 58.1 percent from the line through her first two seasons at Purdue, which isn't great but isn't game-killingly terrible.

The artist in the video is elfin, mischievous. Even at nearly 80, she is taller than many of the assistants who join her, chopping lettuce at a long counter. Her index finger is bandaged, perhaps from an earlier chopping incident. In the video it is a cold, wet day in 2012 on New York City’s High Line, and Alison Knowles cheerfully narrates the question she assumes passers-by are posing as they walk past this remounting of her most famous work. “You’re making a salad outdoors and in the rain?” she asks. Then she answers: “This must be an art event!” That a theoretical passer-by might reasonably leap to that conclusion—that a half-dozen cooks preparing a tarp-sized salad in a public park is an “art event”—is in no small part thanks to Knowles, who in her six decade-plus career did as much as anyone to expand the boundaries of artistic work. Likely no retrospective could fully capture her capacious artistic practice, but By Alison Knowles, a retrospective show open at the Grey Art Museum at New York University, serves as an invigorating introduction to a creative force whose questing imagination seems, a year after her death at 92, both sui generis and like a blueprint for the future. Alison Knowles was born in 1933 in Scarsdale, New York. She studied painting at the Pratt Institute, where her father was an administrator, and was on her way to being, in her words, “the next Helen Frankenthaler” when she took a summer course with Josef Albers at Syracuse. Exiled to the basement of the building because of her refusal to follow Albers’ strict instructions, Knowles vowed to stop pursuing “the traditional methods of artmaking,” as she later told an interviewer. One of her early paintings, "Taxis and Busses" (1959-60), hangs near the entrance to the retrospective; it’s a lively mix of oil-painted circus designs and screen-printed commercial logos. It’s one of only two early Knowles paintings that survive; she burned all the others on the beach just a few years later.

Jumping spiders in the genus Portia are sometimes called "eight-legged cats" for their large, almost feline eyes. Just like a cat, Portia spiders rely on their eyes to find, track, stalk, chase, and jump on their prey. While other spiders trap food in their webs, Portia spiders hunt insects and even other spiders and their eggs. (The spiders' unusual intelligence inspired Adrian Tchaikovsky's novel Children of Time, in which Portia spiders evolve and develop civilization on another planet.) So perhaps it is unsurprising that when fringed jumping spiders, or Portia fimbriata, take time to rest, they resemble cats, too. The spiders, whose bodies are around the size of Cheerios, first search for a safe spot. Then they spin a silken hammock, and groom themselves, cleaning every leg. Then they settle, become motionless, and droop. Their legs curl and occasionally twitch. And they even have little eye movements. Now a group of scientists has proven that these spiders do not just rest, but actually fall asleep. The spiders even experience a stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movement, or REM, which is the stage of sleep in which we have our most vivid dreams. Their research was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Tell me this does not look like a cat!

Nothing sticks out quite like an All-Pro defensive lineman suddenly landing on a good team. For most football fans, Jeffery Simmons has been one of the league's best defensive tackles by reputation only. A run of playoff appearances to start his career in Tennessee gave way to a handful of lost seasons, in which he continued to anchor the Titans' defensive front while the losses piled up around him. Last night, however, we got to remember what it's like to see Simmons play in a game that matters. The Chicago Bears traded for Simmons last Thursday, which didn't leave him much time to integrate with the team ahead of a Monday night showdown against the Seattle Seahawks. "My first day in, I was in the building until dang near 10:00 at night, trying to get the playbook," he told the ESPN broadcast after the game. No matter. As J.J. Watt pointed out, it doesn't take long for a defensive lineman to get up to speed. One has the same job in Chicago as he does in Tennessee: Shove the big guy in front of you out of the way and go tackle the guy with the ball. Simmons did plenty of shoving during Chicago's 34-17 win, and in the process may have proven that the Bears now have a whole new way to win football games. Simmons got his first sack as a Bear on the Seahawks' fourth play of the game, ghosting right past his blocker and dragging Sam Darnold down with one arm. He would finish the game with six tackles (two for a loss), a sack, and a pass deflection.

Saul “Canelo” Alvarez won another title over the weekend while making a ton of money and looking damn good in the ring. So why is it so easy to feel sorry for him?  The deserving Mexican legend got past a quick start from reigning WBC super middleweight champion Christian Mbilli, then pounded the essentially unknown underdog champ’s will to win out of him and took his belt via unanimous decision on Saturday in front of a disinterested crowd in a small arena in Riyadh. The start of the fight was delayed for about an hour, reportedly because Turki Al-Sheikh, the Saudis’ sweet science point man, couldn’t be bothered to show up on time.  When the opening bell finally rang, Mbilli started strong. The undefeated 31-year-old Frenchman, who won his first belt last year with a vicious first-round knockout of Maciej Sulecki, was not only younger, bigger and faster than the grizzled veteran, he was also busier. Mbilli was shoving Canelo into corners and throwing punches in bunches. Canelo was accurate with his counters, but Mbilli was more than holding his own early on. In the third round, when Canelo had his back against the ropes, he began pounding his own chest and inviting Mbilli to take more shots at him. Canelo had made the very same gestures during a 2022 loss to light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol, perhaps to fire himself up, but in that case ended up bringing himself more pain. 

SAN FRANCISCO — Every championship is different, though they're all composed of the same emotional materials. A champion is supposed to have overcome circumstances, smelting the raw materials of loss and pain into a durable alloy of resolve. For fanbases, titles are redemptive, victory transmuting heartbreak into joy. The form can accommodate many particularities, but whatever the preceding heartbreak, a championship's message is always the same: It was all worth it. This template breaks down in the case of the Golden State Valkyries. They haven't had to overcome anything. They've enjoyed ubiquitous, unqualified adoration from the entire region since they flashed into existence two years ago. As I watched the confetti rain down on the freshly crowned WNBA champs and 18,000 screaming fans in San Francisco on Saturday night, I was struck foremost by a sense of surreality. None of this was supposed to happen. Owner Joe Lacob made waves by boasting that the Valks would win a title within five years, only for reality to prove a then-bold prediction needlessly conservative. This championship redeemed no visible struggle; there was no narrative convention to adhere to. So how do you make sense of something this unexpected? I think the place to start is with the fans, the bloc of people who expected it the most. One of the more remarkable early developments of the Valkyries' rise was the immediate coherence of a huge fanbase. You'll see in every writeup that the Valks have sold out every single game of their existence, at an NBA arena no less. That only hints at the broader dynamics that have made this team so beloved since before there were players on a team to even love in the first place. The ongoing women's sports boom started booming away from the Bay Area, leaving people in the region to look enviously over at their counterparts in Los Angeles or Portland and wonder when it would be our turn. The NWSL's Bay FC started playing a year before the Valkyries, though they were all the way down in San Jose, an hour from either San Francisco or Oakland, and therefore have never been as easily integrated into the cultural fabric of the region.

Everyone in Detroit has a responsibility to keep Haley Stevens away from the Gordie Howe Bridge today, because at the rate she's going, she'll burn that one, too. An outgoing House rep and failed Democratic candidate for Senate who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in a hotly contested Michigan primary earlier this year, Stevens has made the news cycle in the lead-up to Tuesday's general election all about her. While she initially absorbed her August primary defeat without entering into a gigantic public meltdown, over the past several days she has shuffled, then walked, then full-on sprinted toward Republican candidate Mike Rogers, officially endorsing him to the ire of Dems everywhere. Even Chuck Schumer, who never met a centrist he couldn't make excuses for, called it a "despicable betrayal." What exactly happened to cause Stevens to explode like this? An easy target for blame here is Stevens's delectably named fiance, Jason Turkish, who has gone on a media tour of his own, trying to tie El-Sayed's campaign to antisemitism. But Stevens is 43 years old, so the "it's because of a boy" excuse feels insufficient, and downright rude for depriving her of agency when it comes to detonating her career. A more compelling, though still quite sad, explanation is just that she's a sore loser who thought she was owed a Senate seat, and still can't accept that she didn't get it despite tens of millions of dollars backing her in the primary. In this view, her crash-out is not just malicious—though it definitely is—but also immature. In an Anderson Cooper CNN interview Sunday evening, Stevens seemed like she was thinking through her ideas about 10 seconds after they left her mouth. She somehow attempted to square the idea that she wanted Democrats to win control of the Senate, even while rooting and voting against El-Sayed in a critical election to that whole endeavor. This interview was nothing close to an ambush, and yet Stevens, given repeated chances, couldn't come up with a message that made even a lick of sense. That nasally Michigander accent sure sounds a lot better when I hear it at Culver's than when it's being used to try to sabotage the future of the country.