NBA 101

Micah Parsons asks for Cowboys trade, but Dallas has ‘no intention’ of moving him, per report

Read Micah Parsons’ full trade request.

What has seemingly become the biggest story of the NFL offseason just reached a new breaking point, as Dallas Cowboys’ all-world EDGE Micah Parsons officially announces he requested a trade.

This situation has finally hit a boiling point, after The Athletic’s Dianna Russini posted Friday that Parsons was ready to take “drastic measures” in his ongoing battle with Stephen and Jerry Jones over a new deal. Well, the drastic measure has been taken, with Parsons finally requesting a trade.

Of note in his message he posted, Parsons explicitly talked about the relationship (or lack thereof) between the Joneses and Parsons’ agent, David Mulugheta. Notably, earlier this offseason, Jerry Jones said this about Mulugheta:

It’s always great when you stick your foot in your mouth and then wonder why your breath smells like feet. Masterful gambit, Mr. Jones, they never saw that one coming!

The Athletic’s Dianna Russini is reporting that the Cowboys (naturally) don’t want to trade Parsons.

If they do end up acquiescing to his request, the compensation would be similar to when the Bears acquired EDGE Khalil Mack. In that trade, the Bears gave up two first round picks, a third-round pick and a sixth round pick for Mack, a second-rounder and a conditional fifth. Mack and Parsons are around the same age when he was traded as well, so the framework could be similar.

However, this could end up playing out how all Cowboys trade requests do. The Cowboys look stupid, Jerry Jones hates looking stupid, so they pay Parsons at a monster clip which he deserves and everyone goes home. But at this point, has the bridge been burned? Has there been too much damage done?

NBA’s 3 most overrated and underrated teams, starring Celtics, Spurs, Nuggets, and more

Here are the most overrated and underrated NBA teams entering the new season.

The dog days of the NBA offseason have set in. Just about the only thing hanging over the league right now is the frozen restricted free agent market keeping four young players from agreeing to new deals. It’s brought the rest of the NBA’s summer activity to a halt with it. There’s still plenty of time left for a big trade or two before training camps open league-wide on Oct. 1, but for now it feels like we have a pretty good handle on the hierarchy of the league heading into next season.

ESPN dropped a way-too-early power rankings for the 2025-26 season this week. A nine-person panel of writers came up with consensus rankings entering the season, and it does a great job outlining what the championship race, tank race, and middle-class of the league all look like. Of course, reasonable minds can disagree over the exact placement of these teams.

We’ll have our own rankings closer to the start of the new season. For now, here are the teams we think are overrated and underrated heading into the season, based on ESPN’s rankings.

Underrated: No. 3 Denver Nuggets

The Nuggets check in behind the Thunder and Rockets in these rankings. OKC deserves to be the favorite entering the season, but to me the Nuggets are their biggest competition. Denver nailed the offseason by adding Cam Johnson, Bruce Brown, Tim Hardaway Jr., and Jonas Valanciunas. A team that was so reliant on under-developed young players finally has the veteran depth it always needed. The upgrade from Michael Porter Jr. to Johnson is also a substantial one: if Johnson was one of the league’s most efficient scorers with Cam Thomas passing him the ball in Brooklyn, just imagine how he’ll be playing off Nikola Jokic’s gravity. Of course, this all comes back to Jokic, who has been the best player in the league for five years running and is showing no signs of slowing down. The Nuggets have a real chance to win the championship with a better supporting cast around their mega-star, and to me it makes them the league’s second-most-likely champion entering the season.

Overrated: No. 13 Dallas Mavericks

Kyrie Irving is very likely out of the year as he rehabs a torn ACL. In his absence, Dallas has a notable lack of ball handling, with free agent addition D’Angelo Russell and holdover Dante Exum being the only things resembling a point guard on this roster. ESPN has the Mavericks as the 8th best team in the West, ahead of the Grizzlies, Spurs, and Trail Blazers. My guess is two of those three teams finish with a better record than Dallas, and the Mavs will be back in the lottery this season. Cooper Flagg is going to be awesome as a rookie, but it’s important to remember he’ll be the youngest player in the NBA this season. The Anthony Davis-Dereck Lively II front line is super intriguing, but I’m a bit worried about the spacing, as well as AD’s consistently inconsistent availability. This is likely going to be among the worst three-point shooting teams in the league, and I’m not confident that the defense can make up for it. I laid out my preferred road map for the Mavs after they won the lottery for Flagg, and I still believe Dallas should take more of a long-term view of their build around their new star.

Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images

Overrated: No. 14 Milwaukee Bucks

The Bucks’ attempt to keep Giannis Antetokounmpo happy this summer was equal parts desperate and creative. Waiving Damian Lillard (and stretching his cap hit over five years) to sign Myles Turner was a move no one saw coming. Turner is a natural replacement for Brook Lopez (now a Clipper) as a stretch-five next to Giannis, and at age-29, he should have plenty of good years left. I’m just not sure if it’s really moving the needle enough to make the Bucks the No. 6 team in the East, as ESPN predicts. Milwaukee has nothing resembling a starting point guard on this roster: Cole Anthony, Ryan Rollins, and Kevin Porter Jr. each provide a different skill set, but it’s not making up the loss of a healthy Lillard. The wing room here is pretty terrible too barring a major bounce-back season from Kyle Kuzma, who was awful last year. Depth is more important than ever in the NBA these days, and unless Giannis gives the Bucks 82 games of super-human play, I don’t see how this team gets a protected playoff seed in the East.

Underrated: No. 16 San Antonio Spurs

The Spurs are ready to make a push up the Western Conference standings. Victor Wembanyama is reportedly ready to go after a blood clot in his shoulder ended his season early last year, and he’s poised to certify himself as a top-10 player in the world in Year 3. Wemby only played five games with De’Aaron Fox before the injury last year, and a full season of Fox should be highly beneficial for San Antonio. Stephon Castle should be better in Year 2 — can he improve as a shooter even a little bit? — and Dylan Harper is an instant impact rookie in my eyes. Luke Kornet and Kelly Olynyk give San Antonio more front court depth and lineup flexibility than they’ve ever had in the Wemby era, and for once it feels like this team can hang tough when its 7’5 French superhuman goes to the bench. This ranking has the Spurs at No. 10 in the West, and I think they will easily be better than that.

Photo by Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images

Overrated: No. 17 Boston Celtics

The Celtics won’t just be missing Jayson Tatum as he recovers from a torn Achilles this season, they will be missing Kristaps Porzingis, Jrue Holiday, Al Horford, and Kornet, too. This has to be the worst front court in the league with Neemias Queta and Sam Hauser slated to start, and Luka Garza probably playing big minutes as a backup center. The Celtics are already lying the groundwork for a stealth tank that can get them a premium draft pick while Tatum recovers. Don’t be surprised when Jaylen Brown and/or Derrick White get shutdown early, Boston bombs the second half, and crosses its fingers for some good luck on lottery night. I do not think the Celtics are making the playoffs.

Underrated: No. 27 Charlotte Hornets

Oh no, I’m talking myself into the Hornets again. I was high on the Hornets last season, and that totally blew up in my face. For Charlotte to take a leap up the standings this year, LaMelo Ball has to stay available and play a little less selfishly, Brandon Miller needs to take a leap, and Kon Knueppel needs to be an instant impact rookie. I can see all of those things happening, and in a down year for the East, I think the Hornets can win more games than it feels like entering the year. Adding Collin Sexton for nothing for a nice move for the bench, and last year’s top-10 pick Tidjane Salaun can’t be any worse than he was as a rookie. The big rotation scares me, but I could see Charlotte being a little more competitive than this with a solid young head coach in Charles Lee, and enough shot-creation and shooting to build a decent offense.

The latest ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater’ game features more awesome women than ever before

Gone are the days where Elissa Steamer was the only playable woman in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video games. The latest is full of badass women.

Elissa Steamer can remember what skateboarding videogames were like before 1999.

She didn’t play a ton of them, and as a kid she was more likely to fire up Mike Tyson’s Punch Out or The Legend of Zelda when she was skipping school. But there was 720, released in arcades and on the original Nintendo. Similarly, there was Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage, another NES game that combined surfing and skating. Skate or Die! was another with 8-bit graphics.

But as Steamer recalls, “none of them really felt like skateboarding… It was very 1980s.”

Sometime in the late 1990s, Steamer heard that some company was making a video game that Tony Hawk was attached to. At the time, Steamer was then a budding professional skateboarder who had deals with companies like Toy Machine and Baker, and had featured in some of the straight-to-VHS skating tapes that were popular around that time — most notably 1996’s Welcome to Hell where folks can see a then-21-year-old Steamer grinding on benches and pulling off kickflips while sporting baggy pants and some crisp white Adidas kicks as a track from The Sundays plays over the grainy footage.

One day, she found herself hanging out in the garage of fellow pro skater Jamie Thomas who had a sample copy of 1999’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Steamer fooled around with the game a bit on Thomas’ PlayStation, and she was blown away by its look and feel. Thomas then told her, “I think they’re going to reach out to you too.”

A few days later, Steamer was on the phone with the game’s makers, Activision and Neversoft, who pitched her on the idea of being in the game. Having already played a version of it, Steamer didn’t hesitate to sign up. And that’s how she became the first woman to be featured in a Tony Hawk video game.

Now, 26 years later, the impact of that first game is still being felt. Countless people from in and outside of skating have credited it with pushing the sport into the consciousness of pop culture and making it more accessible to a wider audience. Books have been written about it, documentaries have been produced, and thoughtful essays about its resonance were penned at places like the New York Times and NPR. Game Informer named it one of the 100 Greatest Video Games of All-Time. As kids and adults alike played Graffiti, H.O.R.S.E. and Trick Attack, they were exposed to a gnarly soundtrack and the culture around skateboarding. Many of them fell in love with it.

“I mean, at that time, skateboarding was pretty low key, and I think that just kind of boosted skateboarding into the mainstream,” Steamer recently told SB Nation. “You didn’t have to be able to ride a skateboard to see skateboarding. You could sort of participate in a game that portrayed skateboarding in such a great way. It got eyes on skateboarding and our names and who we were.

“I think a lot of the early 2000s skateboarding boom was kind of due to this video game.”

Since the success of the original THPS in 1999, the game has produced 20 additional variations and sequels. And Steamer has appeared in quite a lot of them, with the latest being no exception.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 — the fully remade from the ground up versions of sequels originally released in 2001 and 2002 — dropped on July 11. The remake blends what fans loved about those classics with modern upgrades, new tricks, additions to the soundtrack, unique parks and online play.

And there’s more skaters too. Long gone are the days where Steamer was the only playable woman in the game. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 features eight women skaters and also Leo Baker, who identifies as transgender and uses they/them pronouns.

Steamer, who recently celebrated her 50th birthday, feels like the game’s growing inclusion of women, minorities and LGBTQ+ folks has played a large role in exposing skateboarding to more people.

“We’ve learned that if you see somebody like you doing something you want to do, then you know you can do it,” Steamer says. “So, yeah, it’s totally been helpful to women, transgender, queer people. The game’s really inclusive, as the world is becoming and should be. The best thing about skateboarding is that there’s no rules. Just anarchy.”

Nora Vasconcellos was 7-years-old when the first THPS hit the shelves of video game stores. She grew up in New England in what she calls “Cranberry bog land” where there were a lot of barns but not many paved driveways. Simply put, she wasn’t surrounded by skate culture. Still, Vasconcellos couldn’t shake her interest in skating and consumed it through books and magazines she would get at the library.

Then THPS arrived and she soon found herself playing as often as she could at her cousin’s house or on the small TV in her brother’s room.

“I just feel like everything from the music to literally learning who Elissa Steamer was, that was through a video game,” Vasconcellos, now 33, told SB Nation. “It was one of the avenues that I got to explore skating.”

One of the levels in THPS 3 is called “Skater’s Island.” It’s in the latest re-release too and is based on a real skatepark in Rhode Island that was destroyed in 2004. Vasconcellos never got to skate there despite living relatively close, but got to experience it through the game.

“It’s pretty funny, what gets ingrained in your mind,” Vasconcellos says. “I just remember people telling me how sick it was, and then I get to like, kind of relive it, through the video game.”

After playing as Steamer in some of the old video games, Vasconcellos blossomed into a professional skater. She won a gold medal at the 2017 Vans Park Series World Championships and signed with Adidas. One of her skateboards is in the Smithsonian, but being in a Tony Hawk video game seems to come with more social currency than that or other milestones she’s hit in her career.

“There’s a lot of people from all corners of my life who can’t maybe understand what it means to get a Thrasher cover, or can’t maybe understand getting a pro shoe… But they do understand, like, ‘You’re a playable character on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,’ because that’s a lot of people’s only interaction with skateboarding. So, it’s very cool.”

Vasconcellos and Steamer are two of the eight badass women featured in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4. The others are Lizzie Armanto, Letícia Bufoni, Chloe Covell, Margielyn Didal, Rayssa Leal and Aori Nishimura.

For Vasconcellos, she seems to believe that if it weren’t for Steamer in 1999, she might not be making her THPS debut in 2025.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of women who were making careers out of skateboarding. I think seeing how that’s blown up… If you’re a woman, you weren’t getting the bigger deals, you were kind of getting scraps. So, it’s kind of cool to see that full circle aspect of it now,” Vasconcellos says. “Granted, we’re not all buying houses off the Tony Hawk game anymore, but back in the day, they did, and that was an avenue for these skaters to create wealth and be themselves. For a girl like me at the time to play and envision myself in that space, it’s pretty cool.”

Skateboarding is arguably as mainstream as it has ever been and the Tony Hawk video games are a big reason why. In 2028 in Los Angeles, skateboarding will appear in the Olympics for the third time.

Back when she was piling up gold medals at the X-Games in the mid-2000s, Steamer — the first woman to go pro in skateboarding and the first woman ever inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame — thought there was a chance the sport might reach the Summer Games someday. Now that they have, she gets to sit back, watch and check out all the awesome young skaters come through on a path that she helped pave.

“I think the future of skating is in good hands,” Steamer says. “I’m just stoked that the game is back and I’m happy to be involved. It’s really great for skateboarding, and I think Tony Hawk is incredible.”

Nicklaus-Jacklin Award returns for 2025 ahead of Ryder Cup at Bethpage

The Nicklaus-Jacklin Award has returned ahead of the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black.

There is no sporting event, no event in general, in the world like the Ryder Cup. It stands alone.

Part of the lore behind the Ryder Cup is the intensity of it all. The United States squares off against Europe in a battle that is bigger than any individual and that transcends golf in a lot of ways. Major Championships are all incredible, but like most things in golf they are individual accomplishments. The Ryder Cup is played for and ultimately won in the name of something bigger than any single person. It is about who you are and who you belong to.

The Ryder Cup carries a high level of intensity obviously, but it also carries a high level of prestige and honor. Many have come through and won it and done so with extreme dignity and grace. That is golf in its purest sense.

The Nicklaus-Jacklin Award presented by Aon is and was designed to honor these overall qualities. Ultimately it honors the player who best represents the spirit of the Ryder Cup and it is officially back for 2025 and for all of the glory that we will see at Bethpage Black.

Justin Rose received the award following the 2023 Ryder Cup where he and his fellow Europeans emerged victorious in Rome. His overall story was told in a documentary that can be seen below.

Obviously the 2025 winner of the Nicklaus-Jacklin Award will be chosen at the culmination of the Ryder Cup. It stands to reason that Justin Rose is rooting for another European to win it, but if Captain Keegan Bradley has anything to say about it then an American will take it home.

This year’s Ryder Cup has had a build up like no other and is surely going to deliver well over our expectations. It goes without saying that the Nicklaus-Jacklin Award will as well.