David Roth
The Least Important Important Thing
I would not and should not be writing about sports if I didn't think they were a way to better understand and enjoy a complicated moment-to-moment existence—not to mention a pretty righteous excuse to tell that existence to fuck off for a couple hours...
The Joyless Joy of Bad Baseball
Watch a lousy team on a losing streak, though, and you'll eventually see what baseball skeptics see whenever they watch: a game that’s aimless and dull and stilted and long, and which isn't even quick about it. But for months we settle in, drink down...
Leave Derrick Rose Alone
Derrick Rose, who won an MVP award in 2011 then wrecked his ACL and has been out for a year, has spent the last week getting kicked around by tough-guy sportswriters outraged that he's not back on the floor in his Chicago Bulls' series against the...
The Last Kings of Sacramento
On Monday, the Maloofs will find out which of two potential buyers will pay them for the privilege of taking over the Kings, one of the NBA's worst franchises. So let's say goodbye, finally, to this family of avaricious, spray-tanned ghouls.
Why Sports Help
There is nothing out there on the internet, nothing useful to learn about the Boston bombings, only more of the guilty inertia that leads us to put this shit on in the background in the first place. There’s nothing here for us, at the moment. So I’m...
Building a Better NFL Draft
The NFL draft takes three days and involves some of the dumber shout-machines on American television applying the same five adjectives to various muscular men over and over. It is very bad. But it can be better, if only because it can't be worse.
Horrible Bosses
Rutgers men's basketball coach Mike Rice abused his players. He called them nasty names, hit them, threw balls at their heads, and was a generally awful human being. Now he's fired, and for good reason, but that he was more or less allowed to do these...
Meet the Satire Called the Mets
Mets fans are not notably smarter or dumber, more or less entitled, or even sadder than the fans of any other flailing team. But thanks to their owners, the Wilpon family, the team's narrative is less a standard Shitty Owner Ruins Team story and more...
Neon Waters Run Deep
adidas's new college basketball uniforms are just a dumb thing to look at and crack some jokes about. But the only compensation the athletes wearing them get is the enjoyment of the enhanced comfort provided by the breakthrough wicking polymers.
That's So Jordan
Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever, and that being more or less beyond dispute does not make it something basketball fans are less excited to talk about. But in the decade since his last NBA game, talking about His Airness has become...
The Lakers' Unreality Show
There’s a certain ugly thrill in watching these Lakers fail, but it’s not a lot of fun—it’s tough to take much joy from watching all these great players playing so poorly and unhappily, even with the leavening knowledge that their ill-tempered...
Hall of Lame
Like talk-radio types, Baseball Hall of Fame voters are blithely holding others to impossible standards in the most self-righteous way possible, and define “getting tough” as “accusing people you barely know of being cheaters instead of dealing with a...