Before the Los Angeles Lakers’ 22-point loss to the Detroit Pistons on Tuesday, head coach JJ Redick knew exactly how things would play out. Prior to the contest, Redick warned that, “[The Pistons are] going to foul on every possession, probably three or four times.”
“I think there’s probably a level of frustration when you’re turning the ball over and you’re feeling like you’re getting fouled,” Redick said. “There’s frustration there, for sure. But I mean, again, I said it even here, we said it this morning: They’re going to foul every possession. It’s just, you got to play through it.”
Lakers star Luka Dončić agreed with that sentiment, saying the refs allowed physical play during the contest. Dončić didn’t necessarily express frustration over being fouled, but he said the Lakers needed to match Detroit’s physicality once it became clear the refs weren’t going to penalize it.
“We’ve got to definitely match their physicality,” Doncic said. “That’s the whole point. We got to match how they play. You saw the refs let it go, so we should play [with] physicality, for sure.”
Dončić led the Lakers with 30 points, but he was also responsible for eight turnovers in the loss.
A total of 50 fouls were called during the contest, though they were split evenly among both teams. The Pistons were called for 26 fouls on the night. The Lakers received 24 fouls.
But it was a chippy game overall, as the Pistons were called for one flagrant foul and one technical foul and the Lakers were called for two technicals.
Unlike Dončić and Redick, LeBron James — who turned 41 on Tuesday — declined to take the bait on whether he believed the refs called the game properly, saying, “It’s not my lane to talk about how it was officiated or not.” He finished with 17 points.
With the loss, the Lakers dropped to 20-11 on the season. While the team still sits in the thick of the playoff race in the West, things haven’t gone well for the Lakers lately. Los Angeles is just 1-4 over its last five games, with Redick calling out the team’s defensive effort during that stretch.
Following Tuesday’s loss, the Lakers’ next three games will come against the Memphis Grizzlies (twice) and New Orleans Pelicans. Both teams are below .500, with the Pelicans having one of the worst records in the NBA.
That should give Los Angeles a few opportunities to get back on track before a Jan. 7 matchup with the upstart San Antonio Spurs.
Before the Los Angeles Lakers’ 22-point loss to the Detroit Pistons on Tuesday, head coach JJ Redick knew exactly how things would play out. Prior to the contest, Redick warned that, “[The Pistons are] going to foul on every possession, probably three or four times.”
“I think there’s probably a level of frustration when you’re turning the ball over and you’re feeling like you’re getting fouled,” Redick said. “There’s frustration there, for sure. But I mean, again, I said it even here, we said it this morning: They’re going to foul every possession. It’s just, you got to play through it.”
Lakers star Luka Dončić agreed with that sentiment, saying the refs allowed physical play during the contest. Dončić didn’t necessarily express frustration over being fouled, but he said the Lakers needed to match Detroit’s physicality once it became clear the refs weren’t going to penalize it.
“We’ve got to definitely match their physicality,” Doncic said. “That’s the whole point. We got to match how they play. You saw the refs let it go, so we should play [with] physicality, for sure.”
Dončić led the Lakers with 30 points, but he was also responsible for eight turnovers in the loss.
A total of 50 fouls were called during the contest, though they were split evenly among both teams. The Pistons were called for 26 fouls on the night. The Lakers received 24 fouls.
But it was a chippy game overall, as the Pistons were called for one flagrant foul and one technical foul and the Lakers were called for two technicals.
Unlike Dončić and Redick, LeBron James — who turned 41 on Tuesday — declined to take the bait on whether he believed the refs called the game properly, saying, “It’s not my lane to talk about how it was officiated or not.” He finished with 17 points.
With the loss, the Lakers dropped to 20-11 on the season. While the team still sits in the thick of the playoff race in the West, things haven’t gone well for the Lakers lately. Los Angeles is just 1-4 over its last five games, with Redick calling out the team’s defensive effort during that stretch.
Following Tuesday’s loss, the Lakers’ next three games will come against the Memphis Grizzlies (twice) and New Orleans Pelicans. Both teams are below .500, with the Pelicans having one of the worst records in the NBA.
That should give Los Angeles a few opportunities to get back on track before a Jan. 7 matchup with the upstart San Antonio Spurs.
The Giants appear to be adding additional arms to the starting rotation.
San Francisco is close to signing right-handed starting pitcher Tyler Mahle to a one-year contract, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Shayna Rubin reported Wednesday, citing a source.
Source: The Giants are close to signing right-handed starter Tyler Mahle to a one-year deal.
Mahle, 31, posted a 6-4 record with 66 strikeouts, 29 walks and a 2.18 ERA in 86 2/3 innings pitched for the Texas Rangers last season.
A seventh-round pick by the Reds in 2013, Mahle debuted with Cincinnati in 2017, and spent five-plus seasons with the team before the Reds traded him to the Minnesota Twins before the 2022 MLB trade deadline.
Mahle spent an additional season with Minnesota before signing a two-year, $22 million contract with the Texas Rangers in Dec. 2023.
After a strong 2025 season with Texas, Mahle now appears close to joining a Giants starting rotation that was in need of multiple arms at the start of the offseason, and already has added veteran Adrian Houser.
The Giants are adding additional arms to the starting rotation.
San Francisco agreed to a one-year free-agent contract with right-handed starting pitcher Tyler Mahle, MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand reported Wednesday, citing a source, after the San Francisco Chronicle’s Shayna Rubin was first to report that the two sides were nearing an agreement.
Tyler Mahle has agreed to a one-year deal with the Giants, per source. Physical is complete and the deal is done. @ShaynaRubin was on it.
Mahle, 31, posted a 6-4 record with 66 strikeouts, 29 walks and a 2.18 ERA in 86 2/3 innings pitched for the Texas Rangers last season.
A seventh-round pick by the Reds in 2013, Mahle debuted with Cincinnati in 2017, and spent five-plus seasons with the team before the Reds traded him to the Minnesota Twins ahead of the 2022 MLB trade deadline.
Mahle spent an additional season with Minnesota before signing a two-year, $22 million contract with the Texas Rangers in Dec. 2023.
After a strong 2025 season with Texas, Mahle now appears close to joining a Giants starting rotation that needed multiple arms at the start of the offseason, and already has added veteran Adrian Houser.
The Philadelphia 76ers keep looking like they have something on their hands with rookie VJ Edgecombe.
The third overall pick of the 2025 NBA Draft continued a clutch run to open his career with a game-winning 3-pointer in overtime against the Memphis Grizzlies, snapping a six-game losing streak for Philadelphia. The 20-year-old had five points at halftime and finished with 25.
Edgecombe already entered the game shooting 61.9% from the field and 55.6% from deep in clutch situations, with the Sixers outscoring teams by 43 points in 75 minutes with him on the floor. This wasn’t the first time he saved them from a crushing loss.
The effort was buttressed by 34-point nights from both Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. Embiid also had 10 rebounds, 8 assists and 2 blocks, while Maxey had 12 assists and 2 steals. Those two and Edgecombe combined to either make or assist on 40 of Philadelphia’s 51 baskets.
The game had previously been shaping up to be Ja Morant’s night. The All-Star point guard finished the night with 40 points on 16-of-22 shooting and almost singlehandedly dragged Memphis to overtime.
Edgecombe wasn’t the only rookie to come up big either, as Cedric Coward, the draft’s 11th overall pick, continued a strong rookie year with 28 points, 16 rebounds and 4 assists. You can probably bet on seeing him and Edgecombe in the NBA for a long time.
Josh Giddey’s career season will be put on pause for a significant amount of time.
The guard has suffered a left hamstring strain and will miss at least a few weeks, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania. Even a three-week absence would mean 12 games missed.
Giddey sustained the injury early in the third quarter of the Bulls’ 136-101 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Monday. A seemingly benign play ended in him grabbing at his hamstring and gingerly walking off the court.
The Bulls currently sit at 15-17, good for ninth in the Eastern Conference, and many of those wins are attributable to a breakout performance from Giddey so far this season. At 23 years old, he is averaging career highs across the board and ranks third in the NBA in assists per game with nine, behind only Nikola Jokić (11) and Cade Cunningham (9.6).
Sometimes, you get a paradigm-changing superstar who uplifts your franchise to the promised land (e.g. Shohei Ohtani, Corey Seager, Max Scherzer). Other times, you get a guy who never quite reaches the highs of his previous years but manages to be a legitimate MLB player for at least a few years (e.g. Xander Bogaerts, Albert Pujols).
But rare is the contract in which, almost from the get-go, the player ceases to be a starter-quality MLB player, if he’s playing at all. At the very least, you should be getting a guy who can immediately be an acceptable addition to the lineup or rotation. You can count on one hand the list of big contracts that failed to meet that standard.
So it’s quite surprising when two of those contracts contain the same terms and involved players originally from the same team.
The 2019 Washington Nationals’ dilemma was doomed from the start
Rendon spent all of 2025 recovering from hip surgery and is still owed $38 million for 2026. It’s unclear how much of that money Rendon will receive, but it will be paid out over the course of the next three-to-five years. Because he has nearly all of the leverage in buyout talks, he likely got most of that money in exchange for freeing up some 2026 cash for club and ending an Angels career that became a distracting fiasco.
Let’s now rewind back to the end of the 2019 MLB season. The Washington Nationals had broken through for their first World Series title, featuring an array of veterans and young stars. As they entered the offseason, they had two clear items at the top of their to-do list: Re-sign Rendon and World Series MVP Stephen Strasburg.
It was a tough decision. Rendon, at the time, was one of the best third basemen in MLB and theoretically a better long-term bet, despite past injury issues. He had just slashed .319/.412/.598 while leading the NL in doubles (44) and RBI (126). He had also played at least 130 games the previous four seasons.
Strasburg, meanwhile, had just posted the best season of his career and had the emotional factor of being the first overall draft pick who marked the beginning of the Nationals’ new era. He had been a face of the franchise since he was selected in 2009 and had just led the NL with 209 innings pitched while displaying his usual post-Tommy John surgery effectiveness.
The Nationals would’ve liked to retain both players but ultimately reached an agreement with only Strasburg, for seven years and $245 million. Coincidentally, those were the same terms Rendon agreed to with the Angels only two days later.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that the ideal outcome for Washington would’ve been signing neither of them. Because the identical deals turned out to be arguably the worst deals any MLB team has ever made from a financial perspective.
Only one other contract compares to Anthony Rendon’s and Stephen Strasburg’s
At the top end is Juan Soto’s record 15-year, $765 million deal with the New York Mets. At the bottom end is Matt Olson’s eight-year, $168 million extension with the Atlanta Braves.
Among those 50 players, Rendon ranks 41st in Baseball Reference’s calculation of Wins Above Replacement, and Strasburg is 46th. That doesn’t sound extravagantly disastrous, but consider that three of the deals (Cease, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Garrett Crochet) haven’t started yet, so those ranks are actually out of 48 players. And it takes only one good season — such as Max Fried’s 2025 — to rank 39th, where Fried is now.
Then consider that of the five non-Strasburg players below Rendon, three signed their deals in the past two years: Willy Adames, Aaron Nola and Corbin Burnes. It’s far too early to judge them.
That basically leaves two candidates to compare with Rendon and Strasburg for the worst ever: Miguel Cabrera’s eight-year, $240 million extension with the Detroit Tigers and Kris Bryant’s seven-year, $182 million deal with the Colorado Rockies.
At the risk of hand-waving, we can at least say Cabrera had a Silver Slugger-level year in 2016, the first year of that contract, and he’ll go into the Hall of Fame as a Tiger. The Tigers could’ve spent that money more wisely, yes, but Cabrera doesn’t fit in with this group.
That means that among the 50 largest MLB contracts ever, we’re left with Rendon, Strasburg and Bryant as the least rewarding from a financial standpoint, team-wise. All three are players who got enormous paydays — even bigger than Chris Davis’ infamous seven-year, $161 million deal, which might have been the previous low-water mark as far as value — and simply failed to stay on the field with any regularity.
In the case of Rendon, you have a player who started well — but only in the COVID-shortened 2020 season, in which he slashed .286/.418/.497 in 52 games. Since then, well, he still has yet to play more than 60 games in a season with the club while slashing .231/.329/.336 in 205 games from 2021 to 2025. There was a season-ending hip injury in 2021, a nearly season-ending wrist injury in 2022, a season-ending fractured tibia in 2023, a hamstring tear and oblique injury in 2024, and the hip surgery in 2025.
Strasburg was even more injury-ravaged. Following that 2019 season in which he led the NL in innings pitched, he made seven starts total, across which he posted a 6.89 ERA. That’s worth repeating: seven starts, or the number a pitcher usually makes over the course of less than two months. He experienced a nerve issue in his pitching hand in 2020, then was diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome (TAS) in 2021. There might not be a more dreaded issue for a pitcher than TAS, from which successful returns are few and far between. Strasburg never adequately recovered and retired after negotiating a buyout last year.
Bryant’s contract was odd from the start. When the Rockies signed him, he was being sold as a middle-of-the-order bat who could play five different positions. Colorado, in its finite wisdom, decided he should instead be a full-time left-fielder. Like Rendon, the first year was fine when he was on the field, with a .306/.376/.475 slash line in 2022, but back and foot issues limited Bryant to 42 games.
How do you compare these three? That’s ultimately up to you, but let’s say Strasburg is the worst because, again, the Nationals ended up paying nearly that entire $245 million for seven overall bad starts. And the contract was reportedly not insured, so they were on the hook for the full sum minus whatever they saved in the buyout. Rendon and Bryant had similar arcs with good-but-limited first seasons and then a full injury breakdown, with Rendon playing 205 games in five seasons and Bryant playing 128 games in three seasons.
In other words, Rendon has barely played since 2020, hasn’t played well at all since 2020 and has played a central role in the Angels becoming the complete laughingstock they are now. To us, that sounds like a contract worse than Bryant’s, even if the latter is worse by total WAR.
As for other candidates, there are deals such as Davis and Ryan Howard, who got their paydays and simply ceased to be replacement-level players, but they at least stayed on the field. There’s also Josh Hamilton, whose disappointing Angels tenure ended two seasons in after he unfortunately relapsed with his addiction issues. But that’s a very difficult comparison for these purposes, especially when his contract came in tens of millions of dollars less than the three discussed here.
This is all admittedly harsh. None of these players has control over their health and to judge a person by the ratio of their labor to their cost is inherently dehumanizing. These were all good players at one point, and all three have well-deserved World Series rings. They just also happen to be major reasons so many fans get antsy when their teams actually commit to spending in free agency.
So congratulations, 2019 Nationals. You will be remembered for reasons beyond a cathartic World Series title. And those reasons are now beyond mitigation.
—Grant King poured in 29 points, but Caledonia fell to talented West Salem (Wis.) 93-79.
—Southland received 28 points from Tate Goergen and 20 more from Henry Wiste to sprint past Baldwin-Woodville, Wis., 79-56
NON-CONFERENCE
—Maggie Dyer and Amelia Mills each tallied 21 points as Class 4A, No. 5-ranked Mayo had little trouble with Brainerd in a 73-53 win. Dyer knocked down three of Mayo’s eight 3-pointers.
—McKenzie Perry led the way with 19 points to help Century come away with a 59-41 victory over Robbinsdale Armstrong.
—Aubrie Klug nailed seven 3-pointers en route to a game-high 38 points in Caledonia’s 84-48 defeat of West Salem (Wis.). Nicole Banse added 20 points as part of a potent Warriors’ attack.
—Chloe Henn scored 16 points, and Elyse Ryan was right behind her with 15 in Zumbrota-Mazeppa’s 51-33 win over Blooming Prairie.
LEWISTON AUTO HOLIDAY CLASSIC
—Brooklyn Mitchell finished with 18 points to help La Crescent-Hokah beat Galesville-Ettrick-Trempealeau 61-40.
Man United shortcomings exposed as Wolves secure hard fought draw
Man United held as Wolves end long wait for points
Wolves brought an end to their 11 match Premier League losing run with a hard earned 1-1 draw against Man United at Old Trafford, a result that earned Rob Edwards his first point in charge and drew boos from the home crowd at full time.
Man United, missing eight senior players through injury and international duty, edged in front midway through the first half when Joshua Zirkzee’s effort deflected past Jose Sa in the 27th minute. It proved to be a fleeting advantage on a night where structure and control again proved elusive for Ruben Amorim’s side.
Wolves grew in confidence as the half progressed and their pressure told before the interval. After Senne Lammens denied Hugo Bueno, Ladislav Krejci was afforded too much space at the far post and headed home from eight yards to restore parity.
Wolves resilience rewarded at Old Trafford
The visitors carried that momentum into the second half. Lammens was required to keep Man United level, first parrying Krejci’s low effort and then reacting quickly as Yerson Mosquera threatened on the rebound.
There was a moment of anxiety at the other end when Mosquera glanced a header towards his own goal, only for Sa to scramble back and prevent a costly own goal. Sa was also involved in a rare officiating moment when referee Thomas Bramall penalised him for holding the ball longer than eight seconds, just the third time the rule has been enforced this season, though Man United failed to capitalise from the resulting corner.
Wolves nearly found a late winner when Jhon Arias fired narrowly wide following a deflection. Man United thought they had snatched victory in the final minute, but Patrick Dorgu’s finish was ruled out for offside after a lengthy VAR review.
Man United shortcomings laid bare again
For Man United, the draw summed up a frustrating campaign. With Mason Mount joining Bruno Fernandes, Bryan Mbeumo and Amad Diallo on the absentee list, creativity was scarce. Amorim later reflected on the display, saying, “Man Utd lacked imagination in ‘strange’ game”.
Ball progression was slow, attacking runs were ignored and the side struggled to build sustained pressure. Zirkzee’s goal owed much to the driving run of Ayden Heaven, who carried the ball from halfway before feeding the forward. Zirkzee was substituted at half time, replaced by 18 year old Jack Fletcher, underlining the lack of impact up front.
The result ensured Man United ended the year in sixth place, missing the chance to move into an unlikely fourth.
Survival concerns persist for Wolves
While the point does little to ease Wolves’ relegation fears, leaving them 15 points from safety, it represented overdue reward for travelling supporters who have remained vocal throughout a difficult season. Edwards acknowledged their backing, saying, “A point the least Wolves deserved”.
With upheaval continuing off the pitch and major decisions looming for owners Fosun, the immediate task is maintaining the organisation Edwards has instilled. For now, Wolves have a platform, and a point, to build upon.
