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These are the best days of Macklin Celebrini's life—not just so far, but likely forever. The world is all possibilities, without the vaulted ceilings of reality or the low chandeliers of expectations. In hockey terms, he is Auston Matthews without the crushing burdens of being a Toronto Maple Leaf. He is not new to you, constant readers. He is currently on a seven-game scoring bender—five goals and nine assists in those games—and at the I'll-need-to-see-your-ID-son age of 19, his consistent persistence and occasional genius puts him on a list of teenagers who averaged more than a point per game, a list with wall-to-wall Hall of Famers. And not just outer hedge Hall of Famers, but the Hall of Fame of Hall of Famers, like Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Dale Hawerchuk, and Steve Yzerman, and active A-listers like Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid, and Steven Stamkos.

Maybe you've heard this one before: The Pittsburgh Steelers lost a game they were highly favored to win, against one of the dregs of the NFL, blowing their chance to clinch the AFC North title. Now, whether or not the Steelers make the playoffs will come down to their Week 18 game against the Ravens. It was all set up for the Steelers on Sunday. They faced a Cleveland Browns team that was 3-12 coming into the game and quarterbacked by Shedeur Sanders, who doesn't currently seem capable of throwing for more than 200 yards. Without DK Metcalf, suspended after hitting a fan last week in Detroit, the Steelers seemed resigned to scoring fewer than 20 points, which they did, losing 13-6. Pittsburgh's offensive gameplan was so anemic and confounding that Myles Garrett is out here proposing a theory about the Steelers caring more about preventing him from getting the single-season sack record than they did winning the game.

We're ending the month—and the year!—with a challenging themeless puzzle. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Greg is a dad with three small kids and a hedge fund accountant from South Orange, N.J. He was the captain of his high school soccer and track teams and can’t stop bragging about it. Glenn is a reformed sports blogger now working in the non-profit space. He and his wife live in New Jersey with two human children and two cats. He hopes this puzzle will be more fun than a football in the groin. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.

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.