Russell Westbrook: A player of consequence, who comes with consequences — and who never learned how to be anything else.

As the league shifted toward restraint and efficiency, Westbrook kept charging forward, raising floors, shaking ceilings, and daring everyone involved to live with the results. This is what happens when a player defines his values as non-negotiable, even as the game adapts around him.

Teams have rivalries. Fanbases have trauma. Tottenham just found a new way to combine both: their manager sipping coffee from a mug with rival Arsenal’s logo on it like it was no big deal. Torsten explains why “it’s just a mug” is the first lie Rome ever told itself, and why sports are basically religion with worse outfits. Also, Salma Hayek is involved. Long story.

Sit down, have a beer. Just don’t drink it out of enemy drinkware.

The tux was pressed. The spreadsheets were ready. Reality showed up drunk and threw a chair. Torsten breaks down his fantasy football season — what actually worked, what exploded on the launchpad, and how he still managed to stumble out of five leagues with enough cash to briefly consider being a better person.

The tuxedo’s psychological warfare is undefeated.

Results may vary.

From 2004 to 2007, the Seven Seconds or Less Suns played basketball the way jazz works: fast, collaborative, alive, in the moment. Mike D’Antoni set the tempo, Steve Nash read the room, and the rest followed instinct inside structure. Nothing was scripted, but nothing was accidental either. This second entry in Those Who Would Run the World looks at why the Suns’ ideas live on long past their championship window closed.

Trash talk has a line, usually found somewhere between ‘your mom smells of elderberries’ and ‘your mom is the village mule,’ since everybody’s had a ride.

What follows is Torsten’s confessional about his own brush with extracurricular justice in a high school soccer match involving a fast striker, a slow referee, and an insult so nuclear it triggered a response normally reserved for nature documentaries.

Torsten builds the Mount Rushmore of the greatest smack-talkers across sports history — the artists, the sociopaths, the philosophers, and Philip Rivers.

Look, none of us woke up this morning expecting a eulogy for Tron to end up being a prescient handbook for NBA system design, but here we are.

Once you start comparing Users to superstars, Programs to role players, and rim running to recognizers the whole thing becomes disturbingly coherent. Mostly, coherent in a way that makes you question your life choices and why you know this much lore about both Tron and the 2024 Knicks.

Greetings, programs — welcome to the unholy crossover where Grit and Grind meets The Grid.

There are bad beats, and then there are the ones that make you suspect fate is running a side hustle against you.

We’re talking about losses so absurd they violate math, time, space, and whatever gods supervise fantasy football. Weeks where projected wins evaporate, touchdowns get erased, and your QB rewrites the laws of statistics in the worst possible direction. You sit there asking, “Why me? How did everything that could go wrong invent new ways to go wrong?”

This is where those stories live. Bring your trauma. Share your story. The Hall of Fame is open.

The best courts in the world are barely courts at all. A driveway that tries to kill you on the way down. A rim that hates you in Harlem. A dirt field where dribbling goes to die. And a balcony in Tokyo that sends every miss into a neighbor’s living room. The surfaces change; the stubbornness doesn’t. That’s the real game — the beautiful, ridiculous urge to keep shooting anyway.

Silicon Valley’s founding myths and the NBA’s great reinventions share a structural twinship — the sprint toward a vision the rest of the world can’t yet see. One side builds devices and ecosystems, the other builds spacing, timing, and flow. Both chase elegance. Both weaponize pace. Both rely on teams who believe in the impossible long before the world catches up.

Those Who Would Run the World begins here, the opening chapter of a nine-part journey through the ideas that rewrote basketball’s DNA. This project traces the lineage of rebels, engineers, and madmen whose courage to accelerate reshaped the sport itself. These weren’t people waiting for a green light.
They ran — and the game had no choice but to follow.

Every December, Team USA walks into the Mosconi Cup hoping this is the year the math changes. It never does. Europe doesn’t just win — they colonize.

Fourteen titles in sixteen years, and this year’s lineup might be their cruelest yet.

Torsten breaks down the five-man wrecking crew that turned a pool tournament into an annual hostage situation.

The U.S. Mosconi Cup billiards team is basically a Hollywood script that refuses to read the room.

Five perfect American archetypes. The tortured genius. The young phenom. The beer-soaked captain with a heart of gold. The grinder who “just wants his shot.” The chaotic wildcard who was “born for this moment.” It’s all there — every trope, every beat, every setup for triumph.

But the script never changes: the Americans rise, rally, roar… and then the cue ball betrays them, physics files for divorce.

This article is the autopsy of a franchise that keeps expecting Hoosiers and keeps getting Requiem for a Dream.

Every empire falls the same way. First, sell the lie. Then build the dome to echo it. Ballmer’s Clippers are the latest sermon on the cost of ego and the myth of control. We take you through Steve’s alibi, how it was potentially destroyed this week, and then show that this isn’t new. This is just the same old Ballmer.

Heroes get murals. The rest get receipts from the bullpen bar tab. Torsten raises a glass to the guys who weren’t supposed to be there — Klein, Henriquez, Rojas — the ones who turned “oh God no” into “holy hell yes!” Because every World Series needs its saints, and somebody’s gotta clean up after them.

Once upon a time, refs made bad calls and life went on. Now we stop the game for six minutes to find out whose pinky brushed the ball at 1/16 speed. The TSA of Basketball is an indictment of the over-officiated era — where the NBA swapped rhythm for red tape.

After years of promises, surgeries, and luxury tax therapy sessions, the Clippers have driven one loyal fan to the brink. What started as devotion ends as detachment — and maybe freedom. “We Need to See Other People” is the most tender breakup you’ll read all season.

What happens when a basketball analyst, his co-writer, and his wife test a fantasy model built for chaos?
Explosions, obviously. Yahoo High Score rewards heat checks, not consistency — so we tracked every pick, every questionable decision, every statistical betrayal. This isn’t just a fantasy draft; it’s a referendum on luck, love, and math under pressure.

Social media didn’t just ruin sports discourse — it nuked the last shred of empathy left in the bleachers. Reiner de Ridder fought through illness and broken bones, and the internet called him soft. Every coward with Wi-Fi became a warrior. This isn’t analysis anymore — it’s a mob.