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Naoya Inoue is boxing’s fixer. The peerless 122-pound Nippon warrior shows up after one-ring circuses soil the fight game, as last week’s hyper-moneyed breaking of Jake Paul's jaw surely did, to remind fans how pretty this most brutal of sports can sometimes be. On Saturday night in Riyadh, Inoue artfully pummeled previously unbeaten David Picasso about the head and breadbasket for 12 near-perfect rounds while retaining his undisputed super-bantamweight championship and enhancing his aura of indomitableness.  Picasso, a 25-year-old Mexican fighter who entered the ring with a 32-0-1 record, had noticeable height and reach advantages over Inoue, and attempted to put them to use throughout. But it was clear from the opening bell that Picasso was no match for the Tokyo-based Inoue, 32. The Monster’s body attack was particularly ruthless and effective; at several points in the fight Picasso clearly gasped after taking an Inoue left hook to the right kidney. The DAZN microphones in Picasso’s corner picked up his admitting to his trainer/father, Chingo Picasso, between rounds that the body shots were hurting him bad.

Once upon a time, there was a man who felt no fear. His name was Jacksonville.  Things that scared other people did not scare Jacksonville. When Los Angeles came over, people said, "Watch out, those Chargers are tough!" 

This is what the Defector staff read and enjoyed in 2025. The Trials of Gabriel Ward Murder Mystery Series, by Sally Smith

Brandy Jensen: Hello Kelsey, I hope you had a lovely Christmas. Kelsey McKinney: Hello, Brandy. If by “Christmas” you mean “the season finale of the hit show Heated Rivalry starring Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams which aired on Dec. 26,” I sure did!! 

My mother sent me many beautiful gifts for Christmas, including lovely ones that she made herself. I will cherish them. However, she also sent one utterly confounding gift, which overshadows the others by sheer force of its strangeness. It's a game, which is generally a good gift, because I like games. I especially like ones that are easy to understand and do not have whole booklets of rules and requirements. When I first unwrapped this game, I figured it couldn't possibly be complicated, because it was so small.

It is to our sorrow that even though the magnificent and manic Timberwolves-Nuggets hoop orgy started later and had a 50-point(!) overtime to sustain its value as post-holiday entertainment, the news of the day was earlier, far more mundane, and could not even cover you through peak family burden time. In that way, at least, the NBA regained the upper hand on Christmas from the ever-rapacious NFL. This probably isn't sustainable, to be fair, because the NFL is a remake of The Blob, swallowing and smothering every part of every broadcast and streaming day—a far more terrifying version of Stranger Things: The Musical. But the league tripled down on Christmas this year with its tentpole not being the ever-tedious Dallas Cowboys but everyone's preseason darlings, the Detroit Lions. What they got instead were the drab, almost paralytic pre-Campbell Lions of yesteryear, the equivalent of wool socks with the elastic stretched beyond utility. Despite being granted the coveted watch-during-family-dinner spot on Netflix, the Lions were forcibly removed from our sight by the profoundly inertial Minnesota Vikings in a 23-10 wastebucket of a game that seemed to undo all the goodwill the Lions had earned the previous two calendar years.

Game Of The Year is a designation that inevitably gets handed out several times a year, and not always with good reason. Recency bias can be a malign influence, it can be hard to stay objective in the moment, and the season moves so fast that it's difficult to remember what happened even a few weeks ago. But at 1:48 a.m. ET on Friday, as I finally laid my head on the pillow after watching the Denver Nuggets defeat the Minnesota Timberwolves 142-138 in overtime, only one thought was in my head: That was the Game Of The Year. The thought was still there when I woke up a few hours later, and you know what? I'm leaving it there. Game Of The Year! The box score leaves little room for argument in the other direction. It's hard to craft a better basketball game than one that features one star (Nikola Jokic) putting up a 56-15-16, another (Anthony Edwards) punching back with 44 points, and both teams combining to score 50 points in a five-minute overtime period. More importantly, this game had what every potential Game Of The Year needs, which is minutes-long stretches of pure mania.

I wasn’t sure, at first, that I wanted to read Heated Rivalry, or the rest of the novels in Rachel Reid’s best-selling “Game Changers” series. I had thoroughly enjoyed the first of Reid’s two standalone hockey romances, Time to Shine, which takes place in an imaginary world where homophobia doesn’t meaningfully exist, and prominent male hockey players are out and unfussed about it. The conflict in the book revolves around the potential pitfalls of the main characters being teammates, and deeply unequal ones: one a wealthy star, and the other a backup goalie newly called up from the minors.  The “Game Changers” books, I knew, were set in a world more like ours—one where no NHL player, active or retired, has ever come out publicly as any flavor of queer. In 2021, Luke Prokop became the first out player under contract with an NHL team, and later the first out player to be active in the minor-league AHL. His NHL contract has since lapsed, and in August he was signed to a one-year contract with the Bakersfield Condors. 

For the third time this December, the San Antonio Spurs have beaten the otherwise barely beatable Oklahoma City Thunder. Each win showed off a different Spurs strength, with the first two being headlined by Victor Wembanyama's vertical pressure and the team's scoring depth, respectively. San Antonio's Christmas Day win was all about De'Aaron Fox, who has had a cool season for the league's coolest team. Fox came into the season under the most pressure of any San Antonian this side of Mitch Johnson. The former All-NBA point guard is one of the Spurs who matters who's in his prime, which made him, in some ways, a curious fit on a team populated by youngsters. Clearly Wembanyama was going to make the Spurs too good to spend any more time losing after last season, though the Fox trade represented a sudden acceleration of the timeline. After playing five games together last year, Wemby was ruled out with a blood clot and Fox was shut down shortly after. Then, over the summer, Fox was given a max extension and the Spurs drafted another highly regarded lefty point guard in Dylan Harper, two moves that simultaneously secured Fox as the immediate future of the team and in theory made his skills somewhat redundant. The Fox skeptic might wonder whether a one-time all-star with exactly one good season of three-point shooting was really worth all that money, and the opportunity to expend the team's considerable arsenal of picks on a better player. That person might point out that the Harper pick would allow the Spurs to more comfortably prepare to compete during Wembanyama's prime.

This is what the Defector staff listened to and enjoyed this year. From the Pyre, by The Last Dinner Party