Indiana Pacers backup guard T.J. McConnell exemplifies a type of basketball player I generally regard with disgust: the Skittering Little Rat Guy. This is the frenzied little gremlin always very visibly going 40 percent harder than anybody else at every single moment, constantly poking for steals, throwing himself theatrically to the floor (on his back to draw charges against better players, on his front after every halfway-loose ball he can turn into a monument to his own commitment), fouling a degree too hard, sprinting and yelling and gesticulating. Slapping the floor, even. Skittering Little Rat Guys are far more common in college basketball than in the NBA—some mid-major colleges start entire lineups of fifth-year Skittering Little Rat Guys—but they are found at all levels of the sport.

I regard the Skittering Little Rat Guy as basketball’s most objectionable player type, both ethically and in simple visceral terms. For one thing, the Skittering Little Rat Guy’s whole deal, his very presence on the court, is antithetical to the best, most breathtaking basketball stuff—and to the very idea of basketball as a stylish, expressive, creative game. He gunks up the works. He is an intruder into the cool sport from Mike Krzyzewski’s vision of what it should be; not coincidentally, some of the most hateful Skittering Little Rat Guys in living memory—Bobby Hurley, Steve Wojciechowski, Grayson Allen—made themselves famous at Coach K’s Duke program.

Coaches love the Skittering Little Rat Guy, for his total personal sublimation into the numbers on the scoreboard, for his utility as a cudgel against the reserve and self-respect of the other guys on the team. In his practice habits he is Martin Prince, forever asking Mrs. Krabappel for a pop quiz. Match his effort, Capable Scorer and Ball-Handling Wizard, or he will take your minutes.

The Skittering Little Rat Guy by his nature invites a certain stripe of viewer to see him as a vessel for basketball sanctimony; it’s hard at times to resist reading that sanctimony into the Skittering Little Rat Guy himself. After all, all he’s really doing out there is going insanely hard, with total focus and commitment and exertion, for every second he is on the floor. Look at how red he is! By contrast, everybody else on the floor can seem as though they’re playing at half-speed, half-attention, half-desire. The Skittering Little Rat Guy offers those certain viewers an opportunity to go “If [so-and-so star player] competed like the [Skittering Little Rat Guy], he’d average 50 points a game and his team would never lose … but he doesn’t want it enough!” From there, this certain fan is a short transit from issuing takes about star players being overpaid, and then it’s a gentle right-hand turn to using the words “winner” and “coddled,” and then he’s talking up how the college game—the highest level 999 out of 1,000 Skittering Little Rat Guys will ever reach—is more pure, and if you have not bailed by then he would love to talk to you about the scourge of “reverse racism.”

Among the many things that certain stripe of viewer can’t or won’t understand is that the Skittering Little Rat Guy’s whole style of play depends upon him occupying a specialized niche on a team with better players handling the more important stuff. This is especially true in the NBA, where Skittering Little Rat Guys as a rule cap out as role players. Over the course of a game, the Skittering Little Rat Guy will play like 18 fewer minutes than the guy the team depends upon for both voluminous scoring production and the decisive plays. Over the course of an 82-game regular season, that adds up to a couple dozen fewer 48-minute games of basketball than the guy carrying the team’s championship hopes on his back. The Skittering Little Rat Guy’s express job is to wear himself out in a modest portion of playing time—a portion of playing time delimited by how long it takes him to wear himself out.

Put another way, if everybody in the NBA went that hard at every minute, the Skittering Little Rat Guy might very well be an assistant on his dad’s high-school coaching staff. With few exceptions, the Skittering Little Rat Guy brings little else to the court that stands out nearly as much as his sheer intensity. He is less an NBA player plus maniacal focus and intensity than he is an NBA player because of maniacal focus and intensity.

Credit the Skittering Little Rat Guy with knowing this, and for embracing the deal available to him. If he did not, he would chill out a little bit, like an ambitious baseball pitcher who, hoping to rise above the station of a seventh-inning flamethrower, learns to take a couple miles per hour off of his standard four-seamer so that he can throw 70 of them in an outing instead of 15. This is why Jalen Brunson, a literal coach’s son and fanatical dark-artist whose movement style certainly calls the word skittering to mind, is not really a Skittering Little Rat Guy: He chills out, relatively speaking, on defense, saving his legs as best he can for hunting buckets at the other end. He values buckets more highly than he values Grind; moreover his ability to provide buckets is of vastly greater value than whatever increased number of steals and charging fouls he could produce by sprinting around like like a madman on defense. His Knicks and Villanova teammate Josh Hart, though? At the very least he is Skittering Little Rat Guy–adjacent.

The Skittering Little Rat Guy, that is to say, is above all else an attitude, a martial disposition toward the game, most distinctly but not exclusively found in short-armed, hyper-competitive little bastards, the type who were lauded as “floor generals” in high school and then found they did not have the juice to be more than Basketball Tracy Flick when they got to the sport’s highest levels. Many of them skitter as a movement style; all of them skitter as an approach to basketball, darting around in the game’s crannies and unwatched hinterlands, shaving an advantage here and there through wily opportunism and sheer exertion and then, well, skittering back into the shadows. The Skittering Little Rat Guy does not value dignity; his terms are those of total warfare. The mark his meager abilities leave him unable to put on the box score or in the highlight reel he will die to put on the standings chart.

In many respects Chris Paul could be considered the patron saint of Skittering Little Rat Guys, with his infamous zeal for diving and crotch-punching; his aggregative, Tom Thibodeau–ian approach to competition; his total war mentality. Paul’s career accomplishments testify to Skittering Little Rat Guy attributes more than those of perhaps any other genuinely great NBA player, ever. Had he not also been one of the best ball-handlers, playmakers, and orchestrators of his or any generation, he certainly would have settled for the life of the itinerant shrimpy shithouser, hanging onto pro basketball’s ass end with his teeth, and he likely would have excelled at it.

But Paul can’t be considered a true Skittering Little Rat Guy. His mastery of the skills and nuances of basketball puts him in a different category. By perfecting the art of controlling the game’s tempo and flow, during his peak years he if anything played the game at far lower levels of minute-by-minute cardiovascular exertion than most of his peers. The true Skittering Little Rat Guy doesn’t have that, and can’t; his mode is not control but chaos.

As a category, the Skittering Little Rat Guy is one of the chief beneficiaries of the space the sport’s dumber rules carve out for try-hard goons specializing in stuff that annoys the hell out of everybody else. By treating open retaliatory shoves as tantamount to murder, the NBA has made an actual valuable skillset out of the type of bullshit that draws those retaliatory shoves, and then a brick-handed asshole like Matthew Dellavedova can scrabble together an entire career out of diving through people’s legs and thwacking them in their crotches. In this respect, T.J. McConnell stands out from most of the other Skittering Little Rat Guys: For as annoying as he can be with the full-court pressing and flinging himself after inbound passes and diving after every loose ball with total abandon, he has never earned a reputation for dirty play. That is commendable and also, in its way, pretty impressive.

Nevertheless I have mostly been grossed out by McConnell in the decade he’s spent redly skittering around the NBA, harrying ball-handlers the length of the floor, Nash dribbling in tiny-radius curlicues around the restricted area. For a while there, even I regarded him as maybe my least favorite basketball player ever—more despised even than other notable Skittering Little Rat Guys like Patrick Beverley, Austin Rivers, and the above mentioned Duke pricks. I think what has bothered me the most about McConnell is what fans of his, in Philadelphia and then Indiana, have tended to admire: There is something unseemly, undignified, vaguely weedlike about a shrimpy little college guard of plainly modest skills flailing and thrashing around out there among bigger and better players, nipping at them like a high-strung little terrier. Fans see an indefatigable underdog refusing the game’s agreed-upon terms, the Little Engine That Could chug-chug-chugging up that hill; I, by contrast, see the exact same thing, and simply want him to fuck off so that the actually cool players can test their otherworldly abilities against each other instead of dealing with friggin’ Rudy Ruettiger over here.

Very probably I will go back to despising T.J. McConnell, as soon as next season. But I must admit: Over the course of this spring’s playoffs, he won me over a bit. I even shifted into Hell Yeah Teej mode a few times as he helped Indiana give hell to the heavily favored Oklahoma City Thunder in the Finals. The key thing, I think, is his fit with the Pacers, whose entire team-wide approach matches his: On a team dedicated to stomping on the gas pedal at all times and defying the opposition to keep up, McConnell’s personal frenzy blends in instead of distracting.

In that light, I could more comfortably appreciate that this Skittering Little Rat Guy is NBA-good at some actual basketball stuff. He’s nails from the middle of the lane, both for his diminutive size and just for a guard in general, with that high-release jumper/floater thing of his and the quick spin-gather he uses when a defender beats him to the spot where he wants to take that shot. For key stretches of hard-fought Finals games, his value to the Pacers—and for more than just racing around like he’d had a bowl of NoDoz for lunch—was undeniable.

After Indiana’s Game 6 win, in which McConnell posted 12 points, nine rebounds, and six assists, his father and (naturally) former coach crashed the postgame interview on NBA TV. What followed was a set of interactions the likes of which load the term “coach’s son” with so much sickly meaning: When asked what he thought of his son’s performance, the first thing out of the elder McConnell’s mouth was disappointment that T.J. had missed his first two free throws in the game. The segment ended with the old man reminding everyone that while T.J. had lost the state championship in high school, his sister, Megan McConnell of the Phoenix Mercury, won it.

The younger McConnell punctuated this display with a few sardonic looks at the camera, which effectively cut the tension but also—or maybe I imagined it—seemed to reveal some real angst behind the eyes. For the first time it occurred to me that T.J. might be just as tired of being a Skittering Little Rat Guy as I am of watching them.

Anyway, I have said and written many mean things about T.J. McConnell over the years, so I figure I owe him equally vocal credit where it’s due. The ornery li’l hobgoblin had a hell of a series. There! I said it!

A new company at Eurobike, S Rower, is aiming to turn your existing smart trainer into a smart rower, with its bolt-on attachment that works with pretty much any direct drive smart trainer. The company unveiled itself (and its product) here at Eurobike 2025, with a hardware accessory that takes advantage of the relatively universal standards of smart trainers, including both hardware attachment points as well as software control.

I had a chance to briefly look at the two pre-production units they had brought to Eurobike, which were mounted to both an Elite Suito smart trainer, as well as a Tacx NEO 2 smart trainer. What’s notable is that neither of those smart trainers are new or high-end by today’s standards, with the Suito being 7-8 years old, and the Tacx NEO 2 being about the same.

Ok, so starting off with the hardware first. The unit is an aluminum beam, currently as one giant piece. It sounds like for production they’ll likely aim to break it apart into two pieces with some sort of attachment coupling mechanism in the middle, mainly to simplify shipping, but storage as well. In any event, today you’ve got the main beam, and then it attaches to the head-unit component at the top.

Of course you’ve got your seat that rolls along the beam, along with a spot for pedals to be installed.

So, moving upwards towards the smart trainer, we’ve got the S Rower ‘head unit’, or main module. This attaches to your smart trainer via its cassette. It uses a standard bicycle thru-axle to attach to the trainer just like your bike would, except that instead of a chain, it locks onto the cassette’s outer most gear:

Then, inside the S Rower module (the case looking part), there’s a belt drive that connects to a wheel, which in turn connects to the rower handle. Note that it is indeed a belt drive, not a chain drive. Thus, it’s totally silent.

Atop that you see a small display, that’s just a simple tablet placed up there in a groove. You can attach any tablet you want, though I suspect the exact specifics of that little grove will change slightly by the time it ships.

Meanwhile, the tablet is running whatever smart trainer software you want. That’s because the S Rower doesn’t actually care what software you have, since that’s between your app and the smart trainer. Sure, they have a demo application here, in which case it’s using Bluetooth FTMS to control the trainer’s resistance level, but it could be any application.

For example, in chatting with the icTrainer app folks shortly after this, a few booths over, they already support structured workouts for rowing, and they already support every smart trainer on the market (and it costs a mere $29/year). Seems like a pretty obvious future pairing.

But again, that’s the cool part of standards – it doesn’t matter. The S Rower is leveraging cycling axle & cassette standards that work on every direct drive smart trainer ever made. And in turn, whatever app the user ultimately uses for the rowing portion is also leveraging with ANT+ FE-C or Bluetooth FTMS standards that have also been on every smart trainer made in the last 12-15 years. Again, standards are fun.

In any case, on to the most important: pricing and availability. Right now the company is aiming to start delivering products in Q2 2026 (so next spring), and the units will be produced in Italy. The units will be priced at $695USD, though you can pre-order today and there’s a discount down to $520USD.

To me, that seems ($520) incredibly reasonable compared to full blown rowers (normally $1,000 for non-smart integrated ones, such as the Concept 2). If you added the cost of a budget smart trainer ($400), or a secondhand one ($200-$300), you’re still talking substantially less than most smart rower setups (many of which don’t fold away very easily). Assuming the company can manage to deliver on the availability, and most critically, what rowers think of the rowing feel/inertia, I suspect they could be a runaway success.

But as always, time will tell. I suppose we’ll have to see next Eurobike, in late June 2026, whether or not they’ve hit their goals.

With that – thanks for reading!

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RICHMOND, Ky. – The Eastern Kentucky University men’s golf team has announced its 2025-26 season schedule on Wednesday, per head coach Pat Stephens.
 
The slate of competition will feature 10 regular-season competitions with five in the fall and five in the spring ahead of the ASUN Conference Championship (April 22-24) and the NCAA Regionals (May 12-14).
 
“I am very pleased and excited about our 2025-26 tournament schedule,” said Stephens. “We added several new events to the schedule this season.  The team will be tested against great competition and even better venues. Finishing the fall season in Hawaii and beginning the spring season in Puerto Rico will create a lot of excitement for the team and a motivating factor to make these trips.”
 
The Colonels will begin the season at the Joe Feaganes Marshall Invitational (Sept. 8-9) at the Guyan Golf and Country Club in Huntington, West Virginia.
 
EKU will then host its lone home tournament of the season in the Colonel Classic (Sept. 20-21) at the University Club at Arlington, looking to defend its title from last season.
 
September action concludes in the Keystone State at the Nemacolin Collegiate Invitational (Sept. 29-30) hosted by West Virginia at the Pete Dye – Mystic Rock Golf Course.
 
They will return to action in the Bluegrass at the Cullan Brown Collegiate (Oct. 6-7) hosted by Kentucky at the Lexington Country Club, the Colonels’ lone tournament in October.
 
The fall slate wraps up with a return to the Kapolei Invitational (Nov. 4-6) hosted by Hawaii at the Kapolei Golf Course.
 
After two months off, the Colonels start the spring in Puerto Rico for the Palmas Del Mar Collegiate (Feb. 8-10) hosted by UNC Greensboro.
 
March will feature three tournaments beginning with the Babygrande Donald Ross Collegiate (March 9-11) hosted by George Mason, Seminole Intercollegiate (March 15-17) hosted by Florida State at the Seminole Legacy Golf Club in Tallahassee, and finally the Memphis Intercollegiate (March 30-31) at the Colonial Country Club.
 
The regular season ends with the Bluegrass Collegiate (April 13-14) at the University Club of Kentucky – Big Blue.
 
EKU then prepares for the ASUN Championship in Valdosta, Ga. at Kinderlou Forest Golf Course beginning on April 22.

Summer is officially here so it’s not surprising to see a slightly quieter month ahead for Netflix releases.

But that certainly doesn’t mean that there’s nothing exciting coming out in July.

Nearly 30 years after the original, the highly-anticipated Happy Gilmore 2 will finally be released on July 25.

You don’t have to be a sports fan to be looking forward to the iconic golf movie’s sequel, but sports fans might just be excited about season three of Quarterback coming out on July 8.

If you’re looking for non-sports, non-fiction content, there are quite a few documentaries coming our way and that includes continued weekly episodes from the streaming services Trainwreck series.

There are several new series debuting in July, but the only notable returning show is The Sandman, as season two will be released in two parts at the start and end of the month.

Apart from Happy Gilmore 2, there are also a handful of other Netflix original films dropping in July that might pique your interest.

Here’s a full list of content coming to Netflix Canada in July 2025:

July 1

• Attack on London: Hunting The 7/7 Bombers — Netflix Documentary
• Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel — Netflix Documentary
• Cobweb
• Heat
• Legends of the Fall
• Moms’ Night Out
• The Random Hearts
• The Roommate
• Tom at the Farm

July 2

• The Old Guard 2 — Netflix Film
• Jaws
• Tour de France: Unchained: Season 3 — Netflix Documentary

July 3

• Countdown: Taylor vs. Serrano — Netflix Sports Series
• Get Rich or Die Tryin’
• The Mummy
• The Sandman: Season 2 Volume 1 — Netflix Series

July 4

• All the Sharks — Netflix Documentary
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

July 5

• Forrest Gump
• The Summer Hikaru Died — Netflix Anime

July 7

• Suicide Squad
• War Dogs

July 8

• Better Late Than Single — Netflix Series
• Nate Jackson: Super Funny — Netflix Comedy Special
• Quarterback: Season 2 — Netflix Sports Series
• Trainwreck: The Real Project X — Netflix Documentary
• What Men Want

July 9

• 1923: Season 1
• Building The Band — Netflix Series
• The Gringo Hunters — Netflix Series
• IF
• Under a Dark Sun — Netflix Series
• Ziam — Netflix Film

July 10

• 7 Bears — Netflix Family
• Brick — Netflix Film
• Leviathan — Netflix Anime
• Off Road — Netflix Series
• Sneaky Pete: Seasons 1-3
• Too Much — Netflix Series

July 11

• Aap Jaisa Koi — Netflix Film
• Almost Cops — Netflix Film
• Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano 3 — Netflix Live Event
• Sideways
• Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Destination Wedding — Netflix Film

July 13

• WWE Evolution: 2025 — Netflix Live Event

July 14

• Apocalypse in the Tropics — Netflix Documentary
• Sakamoto Days: Season 1, Part 2 — Netflix Anime

July 15

• Black Hawk Down
• Trainwreck Balloon Boy — Netflix Documentary

July 16

• Amy Bradley Is Missing — Netflix Documentary

July 17

• Catalog Community Squad: Season 2
• Dawn of the Dead
• The Firm
• Untamed — Netflix Series
• Thanksgiving

July 18

• Almost Family — Netflix Film
• Delirium — Netflix Series
• I’m Still a Superstar — Netflix Documentary
• Superstar — Netflix Series
• Unbroken
• Vir Das: Fool Volume — Netflix Comedy Special
• Wall to Wall — Netflix Film

July 19

• Justice League

July 22

• Trainwreck: P.I. Moms — Netflix Documentary

July 23

• Critical: Between Life and Death — Netflix Documentary
• Letters From The Past — Netflix Series

July 24

• A Normal Woman
• Hitmakers — Netflix Series
• My Melody & Kuromi — Netflix Anime
• The Sandman: Season 2 Volume 2 — Netflix Series

July 25

• Happy Gilmore 2 — Netflix Film
• Trigger — Netflix Series
• The Winning Try — Netflix Series
• Yesterday

July 29

• Dusty Slay: Wet Heat — Netflix Comedy
• Trainwreck: Storm Area 51 — Netflix Documentary
• WWE: Unreal — Netflix Sports Series

July 30

• Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes — Netflix Documentary
• Unspeakable Sins — Netflix Series

July 31

• An Honest Life — Netflix Film
• Glass Heart — Netflix Series
• Leanne — Netflix Series
• Marked — Netflix Series
• The Sandman Season 2: Special Episode — Netflix

Here’s everything leaving Netflix Canada in July 2025:

• Grown Ups 2 (July 1)
• Loudermilk: Seasons 1-3 (July 1)
• New Amsterdam: Seasons 1-5 (July 1)
• She’s All That (July 1)
• Step Brothers (July 1)
• Call My Agent!: Seasons 1-4 (July 22)

The Albuquerque Police Department released bodycam footage from the scene of a February accident that they allege UFC star Jon Jones fled and then threatened a public safety aide over the phone.

The footage, obtained by the Albuquerque Journal, is related to the criminal complaint accusing Jones of leaving the scene of the crash involving an unnamed woman, which was filed last Tuesday in Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court.

An Albuquerque police officer responded to a traffic incident and discovered a woman in the front passenger seat of one of the cars “exhibiting signs of significant intoxication and lacking clothing from the waist down,” the complaint stated, per the Albuquerque Journal.

The woman told the officer that Jones “was the one driving” her car and handed him the phone to speak with Jones.

Police said Jones, “the fighter,” threatened a safety aide over the phone, according to the outlet.

Jones wouldn’t answer questions about his identity from the officer, and it’s unclear exactly what was said.

The officer was heard saying Jones was “making threats” over the phone.

He “appeared to be heavily intoxicated and made statements implying his capacity to employ lethal force through third parties” to the public safety aide, the court record stated.

“My car is wrecked,” the woman added.

According to the Albuquerque Journal, Jones said during an interview with police days after the incident that the woman had left his house earlier in the day intoxicated and called him after getting in the crash.

Jones added that the person the woman handed the phone to “immediately opened the conversations with unprofessional language, which led him to doubt the legitimacy of the individual’s claim.”

The star fighter, who confirmed his retirement Saturday at the age of 37, has been charged with misdemeanor fleeing the scene of an accident, and his bond arraignment hearing is set for July 24.

Jones’ attorney denied his client was driving the car, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

It’s unclear if the situation is linked to Jones’ retirement.

UFC president Dana White did not mention the legal matter when he revealed Jones’ retirement during a press conference Saturday, saying that Tom Aspinall is the new heavyweight champion.