Tim Taylor

Quick notes on Heat-Hornets, where the Hornets earned a win with three great quarters before the Heat finally showed some life in the 4th Q before falling to 0-3. -Honestly, I think Miami's problems are a blend of typical new team stuff and some scheme stuff that probably mesh together. -On the new team front, it just feels very obvious to me that these guys aren't wildly comfortable playing together yet. They blow a ton of coverages in communication on defense. At 9:09 of the 1st Q, Wiggins and Mitchell weren't sure if they were switching or playing straight up and recovering. Early in the second quarter, Wiggins and Portis blew an off-ball action where they both went to Reid. At 7:47 in the 2nd, Portis and Wiggins weren't sure if they were switching or going under on a screen coverage and it led to Kalkbrenner getting an easy layup. At 2:58 in the third, Conwell and Hardaway screw up a coverage where Hardaway thinks it's a switch, Conwell thinks he's fighting over the top. Then when they were switching everything late, Mitchell got caught on a switch with Reid and they didn't know where to send help from, so both Bam and Giannis ended up triple teaming Reid and it led to a wide open Miller 3 that he missed. There are others. You can just feel it's a team that doesn't have any continuity. -I wonder if that's why Miami has not been all that creative in mixing and matching coverages yet. Kind of "if you aren't comfortable running our base coverage, do we think you can mix and match already?" Again, that's new team stuff. Also though, it was abundantly clear that when they started mixing and matching in the 4th quarter and started playing with urgency, sometimes blitzing, sometimes just switching, that they played drastically better on defense and became more unpredictable for Charlotte. They also just played harder and more aggressive. It shouldn't take going down 20 in the 4th to Charlotte for that to happen, but it did and it led to Miami's best quarter of the year. -Giannis only took 11 shots and it felt like it was much more Miami's decisions there versus Charlotte's. It's a back-to-back obviously, so maybe he was wiped. But yeah, I think he didn't get a real halfcourt offensive touch until four minutes into the game, which is bizarre. They made an effort to get Bam going and to try to get Klay going. I also didn't think Giannis was moving super well tonight. Looked a bit stiff on defense. Same could be said of Wiggins. Back-to-back obviously, but yeah. -I remain of the belief that Klay might not make it out of the month starting for this team over Larsson, who is drastically better on defense and gave them something on offense tonight, too. He was good, dropping 15/7/4 and I'd probably be aggressive and move him to the starting lineup. -I thought Davion Mitchell was pretty rough for the first three quarters but he's the entire reason Miami got back into the game. He scored 12 points in six minutes in the 4th, gave them all of the energy you expect and was awesome as an attacking offensive player. Literally did everything for them in the 4th Q. He got a little bit more cooked defensively in the first three quarters than you expect, but because of the fourth quarter he was clearly their best player tonight. They needed an energy boost and he gave it. Had 22 and 10 assists with only two turnovers. -Great first three quarters from Charlotte. The offensive rebounding battle doesn't look that bad but I thought Charlotte was just first to the ball for those first three quarters. They battled for extra possessions and did the little stuff. Well-earned win. -Miller was great. Wasn't wildly efficient but they ran a ton through him and he was great at consistently hitting big shots. He made a few shots aroudn the rim and consistently drew fouls with his aggression. He was a +20 tonight and you could feel like he was the fulcrum. Without Miller on the court it felt way too hard for the Hornets to initiate anything. -Good Ryan Kalkbrenner game. Did his job as a garbage man finisher with the couple of chances he had, and was really good on the interior as a rim protector. Well-earned that he closed the game. -Reid has been terrific so far as a mismatch scorer. Just really hard to switch against him. Had 23 points and his ability to dribble, pass and shoot at this size is a serious weapon within this offense. Just a much better dynamic for this offense than Bridges was giving them. -Grayson Allen and Dennis Schroder were such great depth pickups for this team and tonight was the prime example of how getting those two allow Charlotte to survive nights where two of their three best perimeter players, Coby White and Kon Knueppel, are out. Allen drilled four 3s and was great attacking closeouts to pass to his teammates. Schroder was just cooking guys in space, particularly Wiggins. -Look, again, the Charlotte scheme under Charles Lee will get you. They operate in oceans of space and actually run organized offense where the goal is to find shots at the rim and catch-and-shoot 3s. Miami right now feels way too random on offense. They're way too willing to settle in the midrange, and it feels in part to me like it's because they don't have enough structure with secondary actions where guys like Giannis and Bam feel like they'll have another good option come up. In the fourth, it felt like they went to more empty stuff and more organized offensive actions, which in part led to their success. I think they need to probably move away from the LaRoche stuff and move more toward that, but honestly that could just be my own biases and preferences for more structured, organized offense talking.

Got to ref a college team 😂 @HoHighlights

This is why social media was created, harmless hilarious fun

Two grocery workers recreated The Prodigy’s “ Firestarter” WTF did I just watch 😧😳🫣😂

The Norwegian Consumer Council made a video about enshittification and got 2.5M views and 168K likes on IG. (If the style feels familiar, it was created by NewsLab, the same advertising agency that made the brilliant Visit Oslo video from a few years back.)

New ad by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products.

oh my Lord, I love this. I love this. I love this.

A golden retriever suffering from seizures seemingly lost her spunk — until one day her owners brought home a miracle cure — a duck named Louie. @SteveHartmanCBS is On the Road.

I can't stop listening to this song. Best thing that came out of the World cup being in the United States this year. 🇺🇸 Watching this compilation of fans from all over the world at the 2026 World Cup in America is so heartwarming. USA USA USA 🇺🇸

Yo am I crazy or did Adidas just drop a Scotland hype video/ad based on Trainspotting? Absolutely love it….might be rocking with them now for the tournament

This is probably a long shot, but if anybody happens to be in DC this weekend and plans on visiting Arlington, I would love to see a fresh photo of my husband’s grave in Section 60. SSG Alan W. Shaw Section 60, Grave 8451 B Co 1/12 Cav, 1st Cavalry Division November 10, 1975 - February 9, 2007 There’s just something about knowing people still stop by, still say his name, still remember. 🇺🇸⭐🇺🇸

the best 3 minutes of video I've watched this year

Sometimes this world wears you out and leaves you cynical … and then you see a moment like this and realize there will always be more good than bad.

When everyone says you can’t murder or play cornhole without arms and legs

Peter Dinklage welcoming Kyler Murray to the Vikings #skol

Unpopular Opinion: We aren't building the future 10x faster with AI. We are just generating legacy code 10x faster. Everyone is currently bragging about developer velocity. "I built this entire backend in a weekend!" "AI wrote 80% of my codebase!" But here is the reality check we are ignoring: Code is a liability, not an asset. If an AI tool spits out 1,000 lines of functional boilerplate in five seconds, that is still 1,000 lines that a human being has to read, review, secure, and maintain when the dependencies inevitably break next year. We are treating code generation like a pure productivity win, but we are optimizing for the wrong metric. The bottleneck in software engineering was never how fast we could type. The bottleneck has always been comprehension, architecture, and maintenance. If we don't shift our focus from "generation speed" to "architectural sanity," the tech debt of the next five years is going to be an absolute, unmaintainable nightmare.

Catherine O’Hara and Fred Willard singing “Midnight at the Oasis” in the audition scene from Waiting for Guffman is one of the purest little joys you will find today. teapawt.net/TheMonologist/status/1…