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The following contains spoilers for some of the episodes mentioned.

Recently, I tasked seven Atlantic writers and editors with selecting a perfect episode of TV. What emerged was a list that spans genres, generations, and cultural sensibilities. Their recommendations, which include the Veep episode “C**tgate” and a SpongeBob episode that examines “the empty promise of the good life,” are proof that identifying good TV is, at its core, a gut instinct. A perfect episode must find a way to burrow itself in the viewer’s mind, ready to be recalled in today’s crowded field of television.

When I posed the same challenge to The Daily’s readers earlier this week, I was met with enthusiasm and exasperation. “This is an impossible question,” Eden wrote back. “It’s like asking for the perfect song, the perfect movie, or the perfect book.” That being said, “I can think of five off the top of my head!”

Eden’s list includes “Forks” from The Bear, “Through the Looking Glass” from Lost, “The Suitcase” from Mad Men, and “Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us. And that doesn’t even cover “Friday Night Lights, or The Wire, or Insecure, or Derry Girls, or The Sopranos, or The Wonder Years, or My Brilliant Friend, or Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Eden added. I can sympathize—the breadth of options is dizzying.

Maybe some criteria would help. Our culture writer Sophie Gilbert wrote that “the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center.” Radio Atlantic’s podcast host, Hanna Rosin, argued that, “unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way.” And Suzanne, 59, offered her own formula: “The script must be: (1) tense or funny; (2) warm and loving to the viewers, performers, and crew; and (3) move the overall story forward.”

Of course, the benchmarks for what makes an episode perfect are as subjective and varied as viewers’ selections. But a thorough analysis of The Daily’s reader responses has uncovered some patterns. At least five people named a West Wing episode: Two readers nominated “Two Cathedrals,” which shows “the effects of death on time,” wrote David, from Chicago; L. Hawkins, 70, recommends “Noel,” adding that viewers should “listen for the sirens as the episode fades out.”

“Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us was mentioned by both Eden and Bob—it offers “a lesson that love may find you at any time, any place, and under the most unexpected circumstances,” Bob wrote. Two readers agreed with Atlantic film critic David Sims, who insisted in our recent roundup that “the richest cache [of perfect episodes] to search is the ‘case of the week’ entries of The X-Files.” Lisa, 47, wrote that she was thrilled to see “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” in our list (she also recommends the series finale of Derry Girls).

Other readers highlighted examples of good comedy. In only 22 minutes, “Remedial Chaos Theory” from Community “tells seven different stories, with each timeline building on the last,” E.F., 46, wrote. “The Ski Lodge” from Frasier stands out to Bruce, 52, who said that the episode is “riddled with quotable laugh-out-loud lines.” And L.M., 61, laughed until she cried watching a loopy Steve Martin in Only Murders in the Building’s “Open and Shut.”

For some, a perfect episode tells a story that reverberates throughout their life. Sharon, from California, wrote about an episode she remembers watching on Hallmark Hall of Fame, which follows a grief-stricken child who reads a story about magical silver shoes. To his astonishment, he finds skates that look identical, which he puts on to go skating in hopes of bringing back his dead parent. “As life went on and I became the mother of a child who lost his father in childhood, I’ve recalled the episode more than once,” Sharon wrote. “Now, at 80 years old, it still breaks my heart.”

Related:

Eight perfect episodes of TV The 13 best TV shows of 2024

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler The last days of American orange juice America’s “marriage material” shortage

The Week Ahead

Captain America: Brave New World, a Marvel action movie starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford (in theaters Friday) Season 3 of Yellowjackets, a thriller series about a girls’ soccer team whose plane crash-lands in the wilderness (premieres on Paramount+ Friday) Beartooth, a novel by Callan Wink about two brothers near Yellowstone who agree to commit a heist to settle their debts (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic

ADHD’s Sobering Life-Expectancy Numbers

By Yasmin Tayag

When I was unexpectedly diagnosed with ADHD last year, it turned my entire identity upside down. At 37, I’d tamed my restlessness and fiery temper, my obsessive reorganization of my mental to-do list, and my tendency to write and rewrite the same sentence for hours. Being this way was exhausting, but that was just who I was, or so I thought. My diagnosis reframed these quirks as symptoms of illness—importantly, ones that could be managed. Treatment corralled my racing thoughts in a way that I’d never before experienced.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

10 indie films you should watch for in 2025 A horror movie that already gave away its twist How the economists took over the NBA Music’s new generation is here. The modern voice of war writing

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The government’s computing experts say they are terrified. Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago. Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. How Trump lost his trade war

Photo Album

Naga sadhus, or Hindu holy men, arrive in Prayagraj, India. (ANI / Rahul Singh / Reuters)

Take a look at these photos of Maha Kumbh Mela, a religious festival in India that’s also the largest gathering in the world.

P.S.

I realize it’d be a bit unfair to make everybody else share their perfect episode without naming mine: the series finale of Fleabag. There are many good things I can point out about this episode—Claire’s mad dash to happiness, Fleabag’s final confession, the Alabama Shakes song that plays over the show’s last moments. But above all else, it moved me, reminding me that love can outlast the person who prompted it.

— Stephanie

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Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in NFL history (for now). He is not the greatest NFL broadcaster of all time (for now). So why is he calling the Super Bowl tonight, and why is Fox Sports paying him $375 million over 10 years—more than any other broadcaster in sports history—as if his excellence in the former job automatically qualifies him for the latter?

By the simplest conventional analysis, Brady’s initial returns make the contract look like a bad bet. His performance in the booth has received mixed reviews, to put things charitably. In a season when NFL ratings have declined overall, they fell more for games on Fox than on CBS, and more people tuned in to CBS on average to watch football than to watch Brady’s late-afternoon slot. In fairness, as Austin Karp at Sports Business Journal pointed out, the games on CBS this year happened to be closer in the fourth quarter, and many people watching Fox might have clicked away because the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Applying any normal ROI analysis to Brady’s contract is difficult for at least four reasons: He is not a normal person, “celebrity sports broadcaster” is not a normal job, the NFL is not a normal industry, and televised football is not a normal business.

For starters, Tom Brady is … uh, Tom Brady. (Yes, this is the high-quality analysis you come to The Atlantic for.) He is the GOAT of quarterbacks by conventional career statistics; he is also the most decorated quarterback in NFL history by championships, a part-owner of an NFL franchise, one of the most famous people in the world, and one of the most annoyingly handsome people alive. If you want somebody with this résumé (or, frankly, even trace elements of this résumé) to commit to working with you for a substantial period of time, you’re going to part with a gargantuan amount of cash.

[Read: How the economists took over the NBA]

Even when they’re not all-time talents with supermodel jawlines, NFL broadcasters are paid like kings. Al Michaels, the legendary play-by-play guy with Amazon, is reportedly paid $15 million annually. So is the nearly-as-legendary Joe Buck, at ESPN. Tony Romo, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback who provides occasionally oracular commentary for CBS, gets closer to $17 million a year. At $37.5 million a year, Brady’s salary seems eye-bleedingly high compared with basically any job, but in the context of other famous commentators, his salary is merely eye-watering.

Nor is Brady just an NFL broadcast personality; he’s a celebrity NFL broadcaster. Celebrity television hosts are mascots, emcees, and gold-plated utility players. For example, Jimmy Kimmel is not only paid handsomely to host a late-night show; he’s also well known within Disney for being the ultimate team player who’s game to schmooze a big advertiser in a pinch or to host the Disney “upfronts,” where the networks show off their upcoming programming to advertisers and media. Fox Sports can theoretically use Brady in a similar way. For their latest IndyCar promotional campaign, Fox taped a short cameo with Brady joking about his jawline. How much marginal ad revenue will the Fox Sports analytics department assign to that one Brady spot? I have no idea, but the very possibility of being able to deploy Tom Frickin’ Brady as a corporate asset is worth an amount of money that exceeds his immediate value as a broadcaster.

There’s another way that Brady’s value to Fox Sports might be greater off-camera than on. Ratings seem more sensitive to the quality of the matchup than to the quality of the commentary from the broadcast booth. At a time when the NFL is trying to expand to streaming—sending Thursday games to Amazon and Christmas games to Netflix—Fox needs every edge it can get to negotiate the best games. Brady, who might be able to leverage his deep connections to the league in a pinch, is the rarest asset. He helps Fox present its broadcast to the league in terms that no other network can match: “We have the GOAT. They don’t.”

[Read: A fake yellow line changed football forever]

Football bestrides American culture like nothing else. It is the last vestige of the defunct 20th-century mainstream and the keystone to the entire multi-hundred-billion-dollar cable bundle. Last year, the NFL accounted for 72 of the 100 most watched television broadcasts. The previous year, football accounted for 93 of the top 100. (Election coverage and an unusually high-profile World Series accounted for almost all of the difference.) Every year, Fox Sports spends about $2 billion every year for the rights to broadcast NFL games. Tom Brady’s contract is less than 2 percent of that annual licensing fee. Because protecting the relationship with the NFL is worth tens of billions of dollars, an understandable calculation from Fox Sports could be: Does it really make sense to play moneyball with the NFL, or should we just suck it up and pay a 2 percent GOAT tax to guarantee that the most famous person from the most important cultural industry is ours for the next decade, as streaming giants threaten to crash the gates?

Look at it one way, and Tom Brady is paid almost $40 million a year to provide a television service that doesn’t seem to actually drive television viewership. But look at it another way, and you can see Brady as a corporate mascot, a brand-marketing tool, a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency asset, and an affordable “tip” to pay the NFL on top of its licensing deal to secure the best football matchups, which actually do drive viewership.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump really knows how to sell someone on working for him. “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job at putting yourself out of a job,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office. That’s Linda McMahon, whom he’s nominated to lead the Department of Education. The president promised that he would abolish the department during the campaign, though doing so would require an act of Congress. But he’s been vague about what that would mean—and one reason might be that many people are a little vague on what the department actually does.

Republicans have been calling for an end to the Department of Education basically since it was established, in 1979. The specific arguments have varied, but they’ve usually boiled down to some version of the idea that education decisions should be made at the local level, rather than by the federal government. As President Ronald Reagan discovered when he tried to axe the department, this is more popular as a talking point than as policy.

Contrary to what some attacks on the department say or imply, it doesn’t determine curricula. Those are set at the state and local levels, though the federal government does sometimes set guidelines or attach strings to funding in exchange for meeting metrics. During the Obama administration, Tea Party activists railed against “Common Core” standards, which they said were federal overreach. In fact, Common Core was neither created nor mandated by the federal government. The Obama years actually saw the federal government step back from control by ending No Child Left Behind, a controversial George W. Bush initiative.

One of the Education Department’s biggest footprints nationally is as a distributor of federal funds. Drawing from its roughly $80 billion budget, it sends billions to state and local school systems every year, especially to poorer districts, via the Title I program, which aims to provide equal education through teacher training, instructional material, and enrichment programs. The department also provides billions in financial aid—both through programs like Pell Grants and, since 2010, by making student loans directly to borrowers—and it runs FAFSA, the widely used mechanism for student financial-aid requests. (Less than 5 percent of the federal budget goes to education.)

The Education Department also enforces rules around civil rights—most notably through Title IX, which prevents discrimination in federally funded education on the basis of sex and has been interpreted to govern issues including equality in athletics programs and how schools handle sexual harassment and sexual violence. President Joe Biden also expanded protections for transgender students by issuing rules through the department banning discrimination “based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics in federally funded education programs.” These powers have made the department a major target for conservatives. (The Trump administration promptly withdrew Biden’s rules.)

Trump’s platform called for the end of the Education Department, but in an interview with Time last year, Trump suggested a “virtual closure.” He was vague about what that would mean. “You’re going to need some people just to make sure they’re teaching English in the schools. Okay, you know English and mathematics, let’s say,” he said. “But we want to move education back to the states.” This doesn’t make clear how he’d manage this enforcement, nor what would happen to federal education spending. Federal funds accounted for about 14 percent of state and local education funding in the 2022 fiscal year, the most recent data available—a lifeline for many districts, and especially crucial in some red states that have supported Trump.

Some of the president’s allies have been more specific about their plans. Project 2025, for example, wants to dismantle the Education Department as well. The document suggests that the government could simply distribute education funding to states to use as they see fit, with no conditions. In practice, that would likely mean red states funneling more money into charter schools, religious education, and other alternatives to public schools. (Project 2025 is skeptical of what it calls “the woke-dominated system of public schools.”) The plan would return student lending to the private sector. But even Project 2025 foresees many of the Education Department’s functions, such as Title IX matters and the Office of Postsecondary Education, being dispersed to other parts of the federal government.

While Trump talks about getting rid of the Education Department, his actions say otherwise. “Trump says he will give power back to the states. But he has also said he is prepared to use executive power to crack down on schools with policies that don’t align with his culture-war agenda,” my colleague Lora Kelley reported in November. Yesterday, Trump issued an executive order banning transgender athletes in women’s sports. To do so, he’s using—you guessed it—the power of the Education Department.

Other conservative priorities, such as shutting down diversity programs, probing and punishing anti-Semitism on campuses, and attacking affirmative action in admissions, are being run through the Education Department. These functions could be shifted elsewhere, including to the Justice Department, but Trump is still actively pursuing them.

And there’s the rub. A president could, in theory, get rid of the Education Department, but most presidents, including Trump, can’t and don’t want to get rid of the things it does. The situation is reminiscent of the federal grant freeze last month. Trump campaigned on cutting spending, and many people cheered. But once his administration tried to do it, swift backlash—including from Republicans in Congress—forced him to retreat. Slashing government spending is a popular idea in the abstract. The problem is that at some point you have to start cutting off the specific programs that people actually like and need.

Related:

Trump wants to have it both ways on education. George Packer: When the culture war comes for the kids

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. Gazans don’t need a riviera. They need water. The spies are shown the door.

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily paused the Trump administration’s deadline for federal workers to accept a deferred resignation buyout. The Justice Department agreed to temporarily restrict Department of Government Efficiency staffers from having access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payment system. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that his plan for Gaza would involve Israel turning Gaza over to the United States after the fighting ceases. He added that no U.S. soldiers would be needed.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Parenting in America keeps getting more intensive, Kate Cray writes. The philosophy is hard on parents and children alike. The Weekly Planet: Trump is inheriting an environmental disaster, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Don’t Make Small Talk. Think Big Talk.

By Arthur C. Brooks

As a rule, I avoid social and professional dinners. Not because I’m anti-social or don’t like food; quite the opposite. It’s because the conversations are usually lengthy, superficial, and tedious. Recently, however, my wife and I attended a dinner with several other long-married couples that turned out to be the most fascinating get-together we’ve experienced in a long time. The hostess, whom we had met only once before, opened the evening with a few niceties, but then almost immediately posed this question to the couples present: “Have you ever had a major crisis in your marriage?”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

There is no real-estate solution for Gaza. Democrats wonder where their leaders are.

Culture Break

Illustration by Alex Merto

Examine. The economists have taken over the NBA, Jordan Sargent writes. Business regulations now rule.

Read. Up until 1968, government bureaucrats oversaw British theater. They censored countless works of genius—and left behind an archive of suppression, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When he was first hired as an intern for the New Jersey Nets in 1996, Bobby Marks was tasked with ferrying new head coach John Calipari around the team’s home base of East Rutherford. After proving his mettle with such menial jobs, Marks told me, he was eventually given a different but no less innocuous assignment: spend time brushing up on the NBA’s collective-bargaining agreement.

Commonly referred to as the CBA, the multi-hundred-page document is the bible that governs all aspects of the league, legislating major topics such as how the owners and players divide the league’s revenue, and continuing down to outlining punishment for minor infractions. When Marks entered the league, NBA franchises were lean organizations by modern standards, and keeping abreast of every clause and bylaw within the CBA wasn’t necessarily an in-house responsibility. Before giving the job to Marks, the Nets had simply outsourced this work to a law firm, he told me.

This scholarship would prove fortuitous when Marks, who eventually rose to the position of assistant general manager, left the Nets in 2015. He began posting regularly about basketball on X (then Twitter), leveraging his insider expertise to amass a small following, and worked his way up to a job discussing the NBA for ESPN, the largest sports-media organization in the world. Today, Marks’s face and voice are ubiquitous across the company’s coverage of the NBA. Where he once translated the financial intricacies of the NBA for executives inside the league, he now does so for those outside it. Marks is something of a pioneer, but he is far from alone—mainstream NBA analysis is now awash in breakdowns of how teams are handling their finances while maneuvering around the CBA’s gargantuan number of legal technicalities.

Why, exactly, does the basketball-adoring public need to hear from analysts whose specialty could reasonably be described as a form of code breaking? The easiest answer is that over the course of the past decade, NBA fandom has become strangely complicated. Closely following the sport now requires fans to have a passing knowledge of a 676-page labor agreement, an expansive vocabulary of business jargon, and a deep memory bank of contractual concepts. You can still enjoy the league passively, happily tuning in to big games and catching up on highlights through social media. But to love the NBA these days is to be drawn into a world where such simplicities, upon which sports fandom was founded, have begun to disappear.

To explain why a labor document has a stranglehold on the NBA, you would need to travel back to July 4, 2016, when Kevin Durant, one of the biggest names in the sport, announced that he was leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder and signing with the Golden State Warriors. This type of high-profile defection had happened before, in 2010, when LeBron James infamously left the Cleveland Cavaliers for “South Beach” (in actuality, the Miami Heat). But Durant’s switch went a step further. Unlike LeBron’s team in Cleveland, Durant’s Oklahoma City teammates were a group of young stars on the rise—and the Warriors were a loaded unit that, the season before Durant joined them, had won a record-breaking 73 games. Suddenly, the deck had been stacked in favor of one franchise, leaving fans across the country feeling like something was existentially wrong with pro basketball.

Whereas scorned supporters could protest Durant’s decision only by lighting his jersey on fire, the league’s owners were able to fight back as they and the players’ union renegotiated the CBA later in 2016. (Like many collective-bargaining agreements, the NBA’s is ratified for multiyear periods, and must be renegotiated before the current contract’s expiration.) The owners’ main goal was to ensure that if a team like the Thunder did end up drafting a player like Durant, they would have a built-in advantage when trying to keep him. In order to do this, they instituted a clause colloquially referred to as the “supermax,” which allows teams to offer a select number of their own players more money than their competitors. Because these deals can be signed years before a player’s current contract expires, this meant that nearly all of the NBA’s best players were taken off the open market.

[Read: The science behind basketball’s biggest debate]

Instead, when attempting to acquire a household name, teams now must typically resort to trading for one. This can become a problem because the NBA employs a draconian set of rules surrounding trades, often turning the process of swapping a few players into the equivalent of sorting out a 1,000-piece puzzle set strewn across a table. The league does not allow a team to trade its first-round draft pick—which provides access to the most talented amateur players in a given year—in consecutive seasons. Modern-day franchises have figured out how to get around this stipulation by resorting to something called “pick swaps,” which allow a team to exchange its own pick with that of a team that ends up having a better one on draft night. Over time, teams have graduated to the practice of swapping swaps, essentially passing around the potential rights to possible future picks among one another. Chains of custody—simply knowing which teams control which draft picks—have become nearly impossible to follow.

In July, for instance, the Brooklyn Nets completed a trade with the rival New York Knicks that was nominally about sending the star forward Mikal Bridges across town. But the trade had a secondary function for the Nets, in that it also allowed them to reacquire draft picks and draft swaps they had previously traded to the Houston Rockets. At The Athletic, the veteran writer John Hollinger, who previously worked as the vice president of basketball operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, could go only so far when dissecting the trade; his breakdown brought to mind crisscrossed threads connecting photos and Post-its plastered all over a police evidence board. “The Rockets exchanged a 2025 pick swap with the Nets for a more complicated (and less alluring, I should say) pick swap that likely will let them swap Oklahoma City’s 2025 first (which they already own) for Phoenix’s,” he wrote. After noting this “swap of swaps,” Hollinger asked his readers, in a parenthetical, “You following this?”—a rhetorical question, one assumes, because the one possible answer is “Well, not really.”

Such analysis, if you do want to know the context of why important moves in the NBA are being made, is vital. But it also carries a distinct air of absurdity, trapping the reader inside a hall of mirrors.

At ESPN, it is Marks’s job to play navigator not just for the network’s audience, but also for its journalists. One of his duties includes maintaining a spreadsheet with crucial information on each NBA franchise, such as an  accounting of player salaries spanning current and future years, and which draft picks are owned by—and owed to—each team. Marks compiles the document by talking to his contacts across the league; his sourcing is so strong, he told me, that he regularly publicizes information on contracts and trades before some teams become aware of what their competitors are up to.

“I’m able to have access to information that maybe other people don’t have,” he told me. “There’s some teams that say, I have somebody who works in our front office, who basically collects all of your tweets and your information, and we have a meeting about it.” He compared his position to an election analyst, someone like NBC’s Steve Kornacki. During hectic times of the NBA schedule—such as the beginning of the offseason, when players are first changing teams—Marks often appears on ESPN in front of a large touch screen, drilling down on a team’s balance sheet in the same way Kornacki might with a Wisconsin swing district.

Some on this beat, such as the ESPN reporter Tim Bontemps, believe that the broader landscape may be different in the new few years. In an interview, Bontemps stressed to me the degree to which the coronavirus pandemic affected team finances. Nearly all NBA contracts are based on built-in, year-to-year raises for players. This structure is meant to mirror the upward movement of the salary cap, which determines how much teams can spend before incurring financial penalties. The league’s revenue typically rises every year—and the salary cap, by design, increases along with it. But the pandemic halted this gravy train: ESPN has cited sources saying that the league lost more than $1 billion in the 2019–20 season, which depressed the salary cap in the following years. This meant that teams were paying their players more than they had been, while also having less money available to improve their rosters.

This untimely convergence of the pandemic with the latent desire, on the behalf of team owners, to crimp the flow of player movement around the league has “created a world where there hasn’t been a lot of free agency,” Bontemps told me. The question of whether cash flowing back into team coffers will act as a league-wide decongestant will “be one of the bigger long-term questions to watch” over the next few years. If free agency again becomes a viable method for players to move around the league, teams would be able to improve their rosters without resorting to the elaborate, and often desperate, machinations we’ve seen in recent headline trades.

In the short term, though, the NBA may only get more mystifying for fans, who are now watching star players be shuffled around the league because owners are afraid of their hefty longterm salaries. The latest CBA, ratified last April, features even tighter trade restrictions and its harshest-ever penalties for the biggest-spending teams, including the dreaded “second aprons” that have already started distorting the motivations of the NBA’s best teams. The Minnesota Timberwolves, coming off their best season in decades, traded Karl-Anthony Towns—a homegrown star they’d signed to a supermax in 2022—because his contract was suddenly going to become onerously expensive. The Dallas Mavericks recently shocked the sporting world by trading Luka Dončić, widely agreed to be one of the best young players the NBA has ever seen, in large part because of a belief that his poor conditioning made an impending $345 million contract extension untenable for the franchise. Bontemps was one of several commentators who pointed out that trading a player of Dončić’s caliber, in his mid-20s, mostly because of future financial concerns, had never happened in league history.

The NBA is far from the only sports league where owners are pressing their teams to do more with less. The concept of Moneyball—cribbed from Michael Lewis’s best seller about the cash-strapped and efficiency-obsessed Oakland A’s—has long since permeated pro sports. Still, the problem may be most acute when it comes to the modern NBA, which is nearing the end of a golden age fueled by megawatt personalities such as James, Durant, and Steph Curry. Winning teams with marketable stars are what captures the public’s imagination, yet the league is unintentionally kneecapping successful, and thus expensive, teams. It is doing so while engaged in an unprecedented fight for attention among not just competitor sports, but also emergent entertainment across various streaming platforms: not just TV shows and movies, but live sporting events like the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight. As the NBA fights this battle, it’s hard to stomach the notion that a player such as the Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards, one of basketball’s brightest young players, must stand by and watch his team be made worse purely for preemptive financial reasons.

Some journalists appear to be concerned, at least on behalf of the sport’s fans. Last summer, at a press conference in Las Vegas, league commissioner Adam Silver was asked whether the new CBA, with all its attendant jargon, was making the league too difficult for the layman to follow. “Life is complicated, and the systems become inherently more complicated,” he said. “But we’re paying a lot of attention to it, and we’ll see.”

Sports fans seeking fewer complications in their life may choose to seek more easily digestible fun elsewhere. On a November episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Kirk Goldsberry, an NBA analyst at The Ringer who also spent years working for the San Antonio Spurs, lamented the CBA’s role in the Wolves’ trading of Towns, referring to the labor agreement as “the boring character” we’re stuck with in the ongoing “saga” that is the NBA. This character has always affected the league, but it is now hogging the spotlight, nudging established stars to the side of the stage. The question now is how long fans must wait until it’s put back in its rightful place: behind the curtain, unseen and unheard.

The All-Star guard will form one of the NBA's best 1-2 combinations in San Antonio, teaming up with Victor Wembanyama.

The US national anthem is booed at an NBA game in Canada after President Trump announced tariffs on Canadian goods.

Five-time NBA All-Star Luka Doncic joins the Los Angeles Lakers in a huge three-way trade deal.

The Los Angeles Lakers postpone Friday's NBA fixture against the Charlotte Hornets amid ongoing wildfires in the region, while Los Angeles Kings do the same for their scheduled NHL game.

Stephen Curry scores 30 points as he makes all eight 3-point attempts in Warriors' 139-105 win over 76ers.

LeBron James becomes the first person to play in the NBA as a teenager and past the age of 40.