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By the standards and practices of the Vegas Golden Knights, John Tortorella had it coming. His first three-game losing streak as the team's head coach was enough for Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon to decide he'd seen enough, and the fact that the three losses in question came in the Stanley Cup Finals mattered not. Team policy is team policy. Gerard Gallant, the team's first coach, got it after a four-game losing streak in 2020. Peter DeBoer, who replaced him, got it after a win that came after a three-game losing streak, but it still counts because the win came in the team's final game that season. Bruce Cassidy got canned with eight games left after a three-game losing streak. And now Torts. No wonder the Knights have the reputation they have. In fairness, this might have been predetermined, that Tortorella, who lives in Florida, was called out of three years' quasi-retirement to replace Cassidy and didn't want to relocate to Nevada. Maybe McCrimmon told him ahead of time this would be a temporary assignment, and sent him home with a lot of hoodies and tees and maybe even a souvenir skate sharpener for the grandkids. But Torts did say during the Finals run that he would like to coach in the NHL again, and the only open jobs are in noted hockey lunatic asylums in Edmonton and Toronto, and Tortorella would barely reach Christmas before pulling off his own head in a post-practice scrum and coating the gathered reporters in plasma. That's no way to go out, even for someone as polarizing as him.

If everyone in the United States weren't living downstream from its consequences, it would be a pretty good tragic flaw that Donald Trump wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf. If assessed from a sufficient remove, the spread between the opening proposition—the man who knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it, because he is just that much of a natural talent—and the relentlessly oafish output is a great bit, if admittedly also a bit one note. Lots of awful people are like this, and a great percentage of the degenerate gentry that is Trump's truest and most durable base is extremely like this. Dumb old bullies all grandiose and soft from golf and infidelity; illiterate real estate types with detailed opinions on The Differences Between The Races; the luridly unemployable adult children of car-dealership guys; anhedonic beneficiaries of a good investment or two who have, through sheer restless indolence and various dull biases, backed into some truly berserk and totally bespoke authoritarian worldviews. Aging phone addicts who think the country "needs a pharaoh." Ruddy tax evaders who fear cities and are insecure about their boats. None of these people really do things especially well, and all of them are visibly getting worse, but they are all far enough from experiencing any kind of consequences that they can't really imagine failing at anything they try. This mindset scales all the way up to some of the most powerful people in human history, but it is the same all the way down. It amounts to the belief that only these particular wimpy pink goofs, each one the protagonist of reality, can be entrusted to run things, and that any problem can be solved by telling some underling to handle it, and also to the idea that such an order becomes a glorious and vindicating solution immediately after it is issued. Nothing that follows will ever be their fault. Provided you do not care about or pay attention to the world, this worldview absolutely rocks.

I haven't watched a single game of the World Cup yet. Not because I don't want to, but because the part of my brain reserved for paying attention to sports is still recovering from the NBA Finals. My wish for the New York Knicks to lose just enough to extend the series to a full seven games—I never know when to leave a party—did not come to pass. So it's only a matter of time before I learn who's playing in the tournament and let a vague sense of geopolitics guide me to the right plucky underdog.  For now, my relationship to the spectacle consists of the whiplash between horrible news of immigration shakedowns and World Cup Racial Harmony videos. I consume the latter greedily, sending them out to friends with a promptness you might expect from a newswire. Occasionally I behave like a one-person propaganda office for the concept of soccer-based multiculturalism. It is simply quite funny to watch a video titled something like "Spain National Team Arrives In Chattanooga, Tennessee." There is apparently no limit to the number of times I can enjoy clips of Korean fans binge-drinking alongside Mexican ones. A deli is just a deli until you hear "Can I get a chicken parm with vodka sauce?" in a London accent, and a thick New Jersey one coo "I'll make it beautiful for you" in response.

For one night, you could be forgiven if your failing eyes confused Pete Crow-Armstrong for the ghost of Hack Wilson stepping up to the plate at Wrigley Field. Actually, scratch that. Most nights you could be forgiven for confusing Pete Crow-Armstrong with a ghost. Frankly, I’m not quite convinced that he isn’t, especially with some of the defensive gaffes he made earlier this season, where the ball seemed to slip through his fingers as if he was fighting to remain on the plane of the living. But I digress. Last night, PCA became the 13th player in Cubs history to complete a cycle, hitting a single, a double, a triple, and a homer in one game. But PCA only took four plate appearances to complete the achievement, and he did so in a way no other Cub has done before.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UlEIBrbMgM

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 Graham Platner (ugh), the World Cup, imperfect movies, and more. PROGRAMMING NOTE: I'm off to the beach next week. But we'll have a guest host manning the post to answer all of your Funbag questions while I'm out, so go ahead and email them here. Who will be our mystery writer? I do not know. Why? I cannot say. How? I do not know how to answer that. Let's move on. Your letters:

For nearly as long as Canadian homes have had televisions, hockey fans have been able to spend their Saturday nights watching the country's teams on the public broadcast channel CBC. Initially a branding for CBC's radio coverage of the NHL, Hockey Night In Canada debuted on TV in 1952, and since then it's become a national institution—think Monday Night Football crossed with Jeopardy!, times two. But starting next season, the Saturday night hockey tradition will be a shell of its old self, because the games will be entirely behind a paywall. No more CBC broadcasts that you can pick up with just an antenna, or free over the internet within the country's borders. It'll be just cable and streaming games exclusively on the Rogers Media–owned Sportsnet. https://bsky.app/profile/rickspringhetti.bsky.social/post/3mog5cp2l322m This disappointing news is a long time in the making. While CBC has carried these games for generations, they've been doing so for over a decade as a kind of hanger-on while live sports rights fees zoom past the territory of the embattled budgets of public broadcasters. In 2014, Sportsnet began its multi-billion dollar contract to broadcast the NHL nationally in Canada, and in doing so they worked out a simulcast agreement with CBC for Hockey Night and their NHL playoff coverage to quiet any outcry about taking away such a beloved program. With an even more lucrative deal about to begin next season, however, there is no such reverence for the old way of watching. On Saturday nights, or during the postseason, it's now Sportsnet or bust. And while CBC is trying to positively spin the change as an opportunity for them to broadcast other sports, potentially making ad money that doesn't go straight to Rogers, I'm more than a little dubious at any implication that they're happy about their last ties to their most iconic program being severed. It feels like justifying getting dumped by saying "Well, now I can focus more on my painting."

For many players, just lacing up the boots and throwing on the national team jersey for a World Cup match marks the pinnacle of their career. Even in an expanded tournament field of 48 teams, the percentage of the population that gets to say they played in a World Cup is astronomically low, and so simply being there is reason for celebration. Just see how much one goal in a 7-1 loss meant for Curacao, or what a stunning draw against Spain meant to Cape Verde. It's the World Cup, and everyone wants to be a part of it, to soak in the world's attention, and to make their mark. This is all to say that the Iran national team should be flying high after not just playing in the World Cup on Monday night, but taking part in the best match of the tournament so far, a 2-2 draw against New Zealand that had gorgeous goals, back-and-forth trips to the fireworks factory, and the kind of white-knuckle intensity that is unique to this tournament. Twice, Iran went down a goal, and twice it tied the game back up, the second time from one of the best and most accurate crosses you will ever see, with Ramin Rezaeian finding Mohammad Mohebi's head in the box in perfect position to equalize. The match, which took place in Los Angeles, was a beautiful thing to watch, a reward for the late-night soccer sickos (at least on the East Coast and beyond) who love the World Cup almost as much as the players. Following that draw, and the crucial point that goes with it, Iran should have been able to celebrate as a team and with their fans. Instead, the other side of this specific World Cup reared its ugly, embarrassing head.

SAN ANTONIO — "Wow … more Knicks fans?" said a local child, dejectedly, as he rounded a corner on the River Walk, only to encounter a cheerful man wearing a "Nueva York" edition David Lee jersey. Saturday morning, before Game 5 of the NBA Finals, this child's Spurs team still had life in it yet. But from the tone of his voice, it was clear that he had lost some emotional battle already. Presumably this child had heard the visiting fans calling out "Knicks in five" from the guided river boat tours, like a flotilla of insurgents. He'd seen them traveling in packs on foot, downing margaritas, turning his sweltering city walkable by force of will. He knew the enemy was in his midst and there was nothing to be done about it. When I heard his voice, I began to consider the comic-book supervillainous aspect of a fanbase that can simply pick up and drop a borough's worth of its bravest—or most unwell, or least fiscally responsible—soldiers onto any city in the country. Then I remembered that the Knicks still had a game to win. If turning a road game into a home game by sheer invasion would help finish the job, after 53 years of waiting, then so be it. Sorry to that child. He'll get his in time.

The New York Knicks are NBA champions. That meant Harry and I had to bring back regular guest Giri Nathan onto Nothing But Respect to talk about what it felt like to watch his team win a championship, Jalen Brunson's big-ass head, and James Dolan's performance on the championship podium. Unlike last time around, his power did not cut out at the last second, so this was a real success! Everyone should also please go read Giri's excellent Finals coverage. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!

Well, that embarrassing 21-minute conference-room chat sure ended up being a big waste of everybody's time. Brendan Sorsby, the Texas Tech quarterback who admitted to placing over 9,000 bets on college and professional sports—including at least 40 bets involving Indiana football while he was on the team—has decided to give up his fight to remain a college football player. He will now attempt to enter the NFL via the supplemental draft. The NCAA declared Sorsby ineligible to play soon after his betting activity was discovered, but the quarterback won a preliminary injunction against the NCAA in a Texas court on June 8, which restored his eligibility and opened the door for him to play in the upcoming season, before any appeal from the NCAA would have time to be ruled on. What followed was an embarrassing week where Texas Tech, happy to have a transfer quarterback they paid $6 million for back in the fold, went on an extended PR campaign to make the case that letting a compulsive gambler who had already made bets involving his own team back into their program was actually the right thing to do. Texas Tech's yapping only seemed to antagonize the rest of the Big 12, and so on Monday the conference, ignoring a stupid and stern warning from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, filed for a federal injunction to restore its right to suspend Sorsby under conference rules. At the same time, the NCAA asked the appeals court to expedite its appeal of the June 8 ruling. All of this suddenly became too much of a headache for Sorsby and Texas Tech, and on Monday the university's board of regents released a statement announcing that Sorsby will be leaving the football program and setting his sights on the NFL.