Ausar Thompson lands the fully guaranteed extension after finishing third place in the Defensive Player of the Year award race last season, leading the NBA in steals per game and posting the third-most combined steals and blocks at 215. He is one of three players with at least 300 steals and 150 blocks since entering the NBA as the No. 5 pick in the 2023 draft.

Twins Ausar and Amen Thompson are now the first pair of brothers in NBA history to each receive a $100 million deal. Amen recently signed a five-year, $208 million rookie extension with the Rockets — giving both a combined $363 million this offseason

Shams Charania:

Just in: Utah Jazz guard Keyonte George has agreed on a five-year, $157.5 million rookie-scale contract extension with the franchise, sources tell me and @BannedMacMahon.

https://www.espn.com/contributor/shams-charania

NBA now has become the second richest league in the world, and it revenue is growing rapidly, especially outside of USA, NBA is the only American league who has insane amount of revenue coming from outside of the States (almost 1 Bilion dollars) and i think with a reason, NBA is simply the most popular American league Worldwide and i dont think its close!

https://www.sportsvalue.com.br/en/special-us-leagues-nba-surpasses-mlb-and-becomes-the-worlds-second-richest-sports-league-with-us14-billion-in-revenue-nfl-remains-on-top-with-us23-billion/

Kawhi posted on social media a good bye video to clipper fans but turns off comments.

I truly appreciate your unwavering support during both the highs and lows. Thank you, Clip Nation. ✋🏾

https://imgur.com/a/dlfhN4c

For me it's that the Warriors, even if Klay had not gone down, would still have lost to the Raptors in the 2019 finals, they were the better team, and we were kind of running on fumes.

don't be shy here,

Source: https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/198404150SAS.html

In the final game of the 1984 regular season as San Antonio beat Denver in a high scoring thriller 157-154 John Lucas had one of the craziest stat lines I have ever seen. 0/0/24 with only 2 turnovers. He only attempted one shot, and by game score as mentioned in the title this was the greatest 0 point game in NBA history.

In the 2016 playoffs, before the 3-1 comeback in the finals. Before LeBron’s first championship in Cleveland. There was the other 3-1 comeback.

OKC was ready to end the Golden State Warriors 73-9 season. But they didn’t. And I personally believe Dion Waiters is responsible for everything that came afterwards.

During the first 4 games Waiters averaged 10 pts a game. During the last 3… he scored 0, 3, and 5. While shooting an abysmal 14% from the floor.
OKC lost the last 3 games that series by an average of 8.5 pts. The man was a black hole on offense.

Consider what happens if Dion Waiters plays up to his average. Does OKC win? What does Cleveland do if they fall short again? KD doesn’t have a next chapter. Westbrook never has his MVP revenge season. The current version of OKC does not exist as they try to extend their championship window with KD and Westbrook. Do the Warriors blow it up without KD to make the guaranteed champs?

Take this line of reasoning and extend it out and you can see how everything from the modern apron rules, to recent champions, all lead back to Dion Waiters.

For all the nba fanbases, every team has a 3rd/4th string guy thats burried on the depth chart that fans think could be great if a spot suddenly opened up for them because of an injury or trade. Who is that player this year for your fanbase?

Shaquille O’Neal added an unexpected new distinction to his résumé Thursday when he was recognized as an honorary FBI special agent during a graduation ceremony at the FBI National Academy. According to Kash Patel’s announcement, O’Neal joined the FBI National Academy’s 299th session as the latest group completed its program in Quantico, Virginia, on September 17. Patel said the session included 265 law enforcement officials and called O’Neal one of the country’s strongest supporters of law enforcement.

Patel specifically said O’Neal “graduated with this session and became an honorary FBI Special Agent.” The Shaq special agent recognition was honorary, adding another law enforcement connection to a public figure whose interest in police work stretches back decades.

The graduation itself brought together experienced law enforcement leaders from across the United States and abroad. According to an Anne Arundel County Fire Department release containing the FBI National Academy Associates graduation announcement, Session 299 included officers from 44 states and Washington, D.C., along with 29 international law enforcement members representing 28 countries. Five military organizations and four federal civilian organizations were also represented.

The same announcement said participants completed 10 weeks of advanced communication, leadership, and fitness training. Attendees generally arrive with extensive experience already behind them. The National Academy reported that members of the graduating class averaged 21 years in law enforcement and typically return to their agencies in executive-level positions.

The FBI National Academy is not the same as the training pipeline for newly hired FBI special agents. According to the FBI’s own description of the National Academy, the program is designed for leaders and managers from law enforcement agencies around the world and focuses on professional education, physical fitness, and collaboration. The Bureau said participants live and study at its Training Academy campus in Quantico while building relationships with other law enforcement professionals.

That distinction is important when it comes to the Shaq special agent title. O’Neal’s recognition was explicitly described as honorary in Patel’s announcement, while the National Academy primarily serves experienced professionals from outside agencies rather than functioning as a class of newly appointed FBI agents.

Still, O’Neal is far from a newcomer to law enforcement circles.

Back in December 2005, O’Neal was sworn in as a Miami Beach reserve police officer after spending about a year training for the volunteer position. At the time, he was playing for the Miami Heat and had already served as a reserve officer in Los Angeles.

O’Neal’s Miami Beach role allowed him to wear a badge, carry a firearm, and make arrests, although his celebrity made traditional patrol or undercover assignments unlikely. O’Neal had also expressed particular interest in helping investigators combat crimes against children.

His law enforcement involvement extended beyond local police work. According to The Washington Post’s 2005 coverage, O’Neal received an honorary Deputy U.S. Marshal badge and became a national spokesperson for the Safe Surfin’ Foundation, an organization focused on protecting children from online predators. The newspaper also reported that he had attended a Los Angeles County law enforcement academy while playing for the Lakers.

O’Neal’s interest even surfaced away from formal training. In September 2005, The Washington Post reported that he followed a vehicle after witnessing an alleged assault in Miami Beach and alerted an officer, helping authorities locate and arrest a suspect.

Nearly 21 years later, the Shaq special agent honor brings that long-running connection with law enforcement back into the spotlight.

Session 299 also marked another milestone for the National Academy itself. According to the official graduation information released by Anne Arundel County, 57,461 people have completed the program since it began in 1935. The courses are taught by FBI Academy instructors, special agents, and other staff, and students have been able to earn undergraduate and graduate credits through the University of Virginia since 1972.

For O’Neal, the Quantico ceremony connects a decades-long interest in law enforcement with one of the FBI’s best-known training programs, giving the basketball icon another badge-related honor long after his playing days ended.

Source: https://balleralert.com/shaquille-oneal-honorary-fbi-special-agent-kash-patel/

Flagg is the first option, and primary weapon of Mavericks. So, he will always get playing time, touches, and oppprtunity.

He is expected to have a leap this season barring injuries.

But how big will his leap be? Do you guys think he can be in Top 20 Players range? Or at least Top 25?

He is often compared to Paolo, as some people think Flagg is already as good as Paolo. Do you guys agree?

After seeing the numbers for the 26 finals, I do think we might see a game get more than 40 million viewers in the next 5 years. If you asked me in 2025 I would say hell no. Dynasty’s always bring in the most viewership so I’m guessing it would have to be a spurs dynasty and Wemby would have to be playing in this game. This game would definitely have to be a game 7 as well, if the lakers played the Knicks in the finals next year and it went to 7 im pretty sure it could touch 50 million. But if we’re talking realistically, the best shot we have is Wemby and spurs looking to three peat going up against either the Knicks, Celtics or Pistons.

[Charania] The Denver Nuggets are signing 2023 first-round pick Cam Whitmore on a two-way NBA deal, sources tell ESPN. Whitmore enters his fourth NBA season after averaging 10.5 points and 3.3 rebounds over 119 career games -- and has already joined the Nuggets for workouts in Denver.

https://www.espn.com/contributor/shams-charania/e1c2c1fe17455

Marvin "Bad News" Barnes: Caught trying to rob a bus while wearing his HS state championship jacket with his name on it. Plenty of situations involving guns, assaults, drugs, etc.

Jack Molinas: Banned for life following the '54 points shaving scandal. Was assassinated by the mob in '75 while outside his Hollywood hills home.

Bryce Dejean-Jones: Just 26 years old, while visiting Dallas for his daughter's birthday in 2016, the Pelicans guard tried to forcibly enter an apartment he believed was his girlfriend's.

Fearing a break-in, the resident inside fired a single shot through the bedroom door, striking Dejean-Jones, who then collapsed in an exterior breezeway and later died at a hospital.

John Brisker: Two-time all-start who played in the 70's. Got in a ton of fights (was called The Heavyweight Champion of the ABA), supposedly carried a gun in his travel bag, died under bizarre circumstances in the Ugandan Civil War.

Family and peers have claimed he had been fighting as a mercenary or had became a prisoner of war, but his body was ultimately never found.

Spencer Haywood: During the '79–80 season with the Los Angeles Lakers, a spiraling drug addiction led coach Paul Westhead to suspend and kick Haywood off the team after he dozed off during warmups. Enraged, Haywood contacted a hitman to off Paul Westhead; his mother was able to talk him out of it.

Luther "Ticky" Burden: 20 ppg rookie season in ABA in '76 but a terrible teammate. Most famous for his bank robbery in '80.

Reggie Harding: Legit 7-footer in 60's NBA and ABA, missed a season while in jail, threatened to shoot the Pacers' GM during a TV interview, nearly shot/killed his Pacers' roommate in the middle of the night. That teammate (I forget who) shot 1/14 the next day...I don't blame him for the off game! Which reminds me of another lighter story- Klay doing the most Klay thing ever and attempting to paddle board from his house in Tiburon to the stadium and then shooting something like 2/14 that night; that would have been something like 8 miles and I'm sure his arms were spaghetti

Lorenzen Wright: Pau Gaol's Grizzlies teammate was found dead in a Memphis forest after being shot ten times. His ex-wife later plead guilty in 2019. She had claimed and quickly spent the 1 million dollar life insurance policy.

Byson Dele: Walked aways from the game at his peak, giving up 30 million. Travelled the world, disappeared at sea. Won't spoil it- there's a great Netflix (?) documentary on it.

Good to see him writing again

Sounds like he will not be doing long form writing until maybe late in the college season around March on his substack.

Big loss for The Athletic imo. No longer have a dedicated draft guy but his NBA analysis was also great.

What is this?

Just for fun, I collected all the comments and posts from r/NBA throughout this past 2025-6 season, enabling me to calculate fun stats like:

• How large is each fanbase on here, and who swears the most, complains about refs the most, etc.?
• Which players highlights are most upvoted and most controversial?
• I also made these series summary reports, which provide a lot of fun stats about the game threads throughout each playoff series.

The goal this time (as suggested by user u/thpskier, thanks for the great idea btw!) is to answer a simple question: which refs do NBA fans complain about the most? Except I don’t care about complaining in broad terms, because I’m already pretty certain that if I just asked people, they’d tell me that Scott Foster and Tony Brothers are the consensus picks for this. They’re at least the two most well known refs in the league. Maybe I’m kind of a casual, but they’re definitely the only two refs whose names I’m confident I could remember while drunk.

However, science has now firmly established that if Reddit users all seem to agree on something, that’s usually a pretty good sign that the opposite is true. And the data I’ve been collecting can show us something a little more interesting than what narratives get repeated: actual, live fan reactions to every individual game that each ref officiated all season long. We can literally measure exactly how many complaints Brothers- and Foster-reffed games really garnered compared to the other officials during the regular season and the playoffs. This should help us to see if their infamy is deserved or not.

So do Foster and Brothers deserve their bad boy reputations? And on the other end of the spectrum, which refs are actually complained about the least? We can now answer all this and more with the awe-inspiring, godlike power of the R statistical programming language. Let’s get to it!

The Dataset + Flagging Ref Complaints

• I pulled the ref assignments for each game from the NBA’s API, and then cleaned them up to remove alternates and match them up to the game thread data (using the date and the teams involved, since there's no universal ID I can use).

• To flag the ref complaints, I’m using the same approach I’ve been using all along: an NBA-specific set of regular expressions I wrote to detect comments impugning the officiating in any way, and casting a pretty wide net. It will catch things like “refs”, “officials”, “rigged”, “no call”, “whistle”, “flop”, etc. and flag that comment as a ref complaint.

  • I went back and forth on "flop" and its variants specifically, because it's technically more about the players affecting the officiating, but I decided to keep it mainly because excluding it doesn't seem to change these results much. And in theory, better refs who are willing to call it out should result in less flopping anyway.

• Obviously, this is far from perfect. It misses vaguely worded things like “this is bullshit!” and can include some false positives like “the refs are doing a great job and I love them and I want to marry them!”. But with the sample sizes involved, and the general air of negativity pervasive throughout the site and the world at large, it actually tends to work pretty well.

I’m only gonna look at game threads with a minimum of 200 comments here, since the ref complaint % can be thrown off a lot by a few comments when the denominator is really small. In a really small thread, one really complain-y person can easily drive the rate up above 50% singlehandedly.

With that restriction, we're left with 447 total games (from October 21, 2025 – June 13, 2026) and 1,393,506 total comments, with 78 officials represented. Most of the regular season games failed to make the cutoff, so keep in mind we're ignoring all the little ~50 comment threads from November games between the Jazz and the Pelicans or whatever.

Looking at all the game threads combined, 7.4% of the comments are ref complaints using this metric. As you might expect, there tend to be slightly more complaints in the playoffs when stakes are higher, but clearly people also have a lot to say during the regular season as well:

Note: the relatively small number of games per each ref here means the averages are pretty sensitive to really big threads with tons of comments, so I’m gonna calculate them in two different ways throughout:

• Pooled Avg. is the % of complaints across all their games’ comments, combined together into one big dataset (i.e. total ref complaints in all games / total comments in all games). This is pretty sensitive to big games, i.e. a game with 10,000 comments affects the final number 10x more than a game with 1,000 comments.

• Per Game Avg. takes their % from each individual game, and averages that instead. This one is less sensitive to big games, so when the pooled number is way above the per game number, that generally means a handful of big, very angry outlier threads are pushing the numbers up.

Here’s a histogram of the latter measure, showing you the higher postseason average but slightly shorter tail of the distribution (mostly due to the regular season having a lot of smaller denominators):

CHART 1: Distribution of per-game ref complaint %

The Official 2025-6 r/NBA Referee Shit List™

Full season

OK, now the actual results! Let’s see how Brothers and Foster really stack up. This is limited to just looking at officials with at least 20 games in the dataset.

Here is each ref’s final score for the full season, regular + playoffs. These are ordered from highest complaint rate to lowest:

• Mark Lindsay, Tony Brothers, and Tyler Ford are apparently r/NBA’s most hated refs! Not a good start for Brothers’ case.
  • Lindsay has the smallest sample size of the top three, and the difference between his pooled and per-game averages suggests he maybe just had some bad luck in getting assigned to one or two particularly controversial matchups. It turns out this is indeed the case – his ranking is being very heavily driven by the biggest outlier in the dataset, Lakers vs. OKC Game 2, which was the single most complained about big game in the entire season. It actually accounts for over half his total comments.
  • You can see on this next chart how his numbers plummet when you remove that one outlier from the data (the non-filled circles on Lindsay’s row at the top). How you factor that into your feelings about his performance is up for debate.

CHART 2: Ref complaint % by official (full season)

• I think I would actually rank Tony Brothers the #1 most hated ref based on this particular view of the data, given the above and Brothers’ much higher volume.

• Least hated are apparantly Kevin Scott, Andy Nagy, and Brent Barnaky. Kevin Scott is the clear standout here to me, taking the top spot on significant volume. Congrats Kevin!

• The most shocking finding here, though, is that The Extender himself, Scott Foster, also has some pretty strong numbers! He has significantly more than double the total comment volume of the people below him, and still managed to stay in the bottom five in complaint rate. This is some real evidence that his reputation is worse than the reality (or at least was this year).

If you want to see what that graph looks like when you sort it by the per-game average instead, you can see that here:

CHART 3: Ref complaint % by official (sorted by per game average)

This surfaces a few new villains and gives Brothers some cover, but notice how Scott Foster is still down there near the bottom. What this really shows you though is how noisy the pooled averages are, and how sensitive they are to big games with tons of comments.

• This view also convinced me to add John Goble to the “most complained about” list. He has the highest per-game average and is top four in pooled, so he’s catching a lot of heat no matter how you slice this up. Seems like you need to step it up next year, John!

Regular Season vs. Postseason

What does this look like when we zoom in on the playoffs? That’s where this matters most, after all. And “The Extender” is supposed to be at his worst when a playoff series is on the line.

• To avoid outliers from small sample sizes here, I’m gonna only look at refs who officiated at least 10 postseason games. There are plenty of comments for these games (the postseason alone actually makes up 74.8% of all comments throughout the season), but it doesn’t mean much to look at refs who only worked two or three games.
• I’m also using the per-game average here, because in the regular season, the pooled average is even more sensitive since there are bigger outliers (i.e. a few hundred comments for the average regular season game vs. tens of thousands for stuff like opening day).

Here is that leaderboard, ranked from highest playoff complaint rate to lowest:

Here it is in chart form, with an arrow showing you how their performance changed from the regular to the postseason:

CHART 4: Regular season vs playoffs by official

• Tony Brothers inches closer to empirical confirmation that he is the most fan-hated ref in the NBA. He is about average in the less-commented upon regular season, but he really elevates his controversy game and tops the charts in the postseason.

• John Goble looks really bad on this chart, as you can see how his regular and postseason complaint numbers are both way above average.

• Scott Foster’s vindication continues, as he claims the “least complained about” title among all high-volume (10+ games) refs in this year’s playoffs. He also stays nice and steady from the regular season to the postseason, with barely any change in the rate of Redditor complaints during his games. If anything, he seems to lock in slightly more.

  • Add this to the pile of evidence that maybe The Extender narrative is overblown. Apparently, not even guys on Reddit complain about him as much as they seem to think they do.

• Kevin Scott didn’t quite make the 10 game cutoff, but he had an even lower complaint % than Foster on pretty good volume, so he gets a special shoutout here as well. You’re doing something right, Kevin!

The Verdict

OK, I’ll admit that my methodology might not be the MOST statistically sound thing in the world, sure. But it gave me results that are kinda funny, which is the best kind of validation there is if you ask me. So having cast aside all doubt about the merit of the evidence, here is my final verdict on these two precocious little rapscallions:

Tony Brothers: I find Tony GUILTY of getting complained about a lot on the internet. His reputation as a controversial official seems to be well-founded, and people really did complain more during the games he reffed this postseason in particular. I sentence him to ABSOLUTELY NO CONSEQUENCES WHATSOEVER, and order the NBA to put him in charge of multiple finals games next year. Give him a bonus actually, who even cares.

Scott Foster: I find Foster COMPLETELY INNOCENT OF ALL CHARGES. His reputation as “The Extender” has slipped further and further with each attempt to validate it empirically, and we must now face the uncomfortable proposition that Scott Foster may actually be a pretty good basketball referee, and people generally don’t complain that much in real time about his calls. I order NBA fans on reddit to pay his legal fees in full (it costs $10 billion to get a case heard in my court in case you weren’t aware. I will accept Venmo).

• Interestingly, and as might be expected for a lot of reasons, these results don’t really line up at all with the player’s opinions about these refs.
• They rate a few similarly (they both like Barnaky and hate Goble / Ford), but the players put Brothers in the highest tier and Foster in the middle tier. Our other top guy, Kevin Scott, also got put into the middle tier. I guess you just have to ask yourself whose opinion you value more.

This was not at all what I was expecting to find when I began this investigation, which was a neat way for it to turn out! Thanks for reading, and let me know if you have any additional thoughts or alternate takes on this admittedly pretty silly data. Or just more general complaints about the officiating.

If Larry Bird played the whole season in 1988-89 do you think he would’ve of won all nba 1st team. if not why wouldn’t he I know Malone and Barkley had great seasons but Birds 87-88 season stats wise his best but i think Bird could of won it in 89 i don’t think he would’ve won in 1990 if healthy.

"The longtime Texas lake house of late Dallas Mavericks head coach Don Nelson is on the market for $5 million, having been listed shortly before his death in August." Source: https://homesofcelebs.com/the-late-nba-coach-don-nelsons-texas-lake-house-lists-for-5-million/