The Weekly Haul #10
The Williams' are back at Wimbledon, Jaÿ Z is out there doing this thing, the NBA is bad basketball, the case for watching the World Cup on Telemundo, and Fox & Roku are teaming up.
What we carried this week
Welcome back. This week handed us a tennis comeback, an NBA hangover, and a World Cup we’re watching in a language we don’t speak. Jaÿ-Z is back on his nonsense (the good kind), and Fox quietly bought the front door to your living room. The group chat was busy.
If there’s a common thread, it’s this:
A lot of what we love is being optimized within an inch of its life. Yet the unoptimized versions keep winning anyway.
The NBA analytics-ed the fun out gameplay for a whole season. Fox turned a soccer broadcast into a podcast with a live game playing behind it. Meanwhile a 44-year-old is out there playing for the love of it, and a Spanish-language feed we barely understand is the most fun on TV.
Let’s get into it.
1. Wimbledon, brought to you by Venus and Serena Williams
The Williams sisters are back at Wimbledon. Serena and Venus pulled a wild card into the women’s doubles, reuniting on the same grass where they won their first doubles title together. For a lot of people that’s the whole story: two of the most important athletes of the last century are back where it started.
Serena’s also playing singles. And at 44, on a wild card, she opens against 20-year-old Australian Maya Joint on Tuesday. It’s her first Grand Slam singles match since the 2022 US Open. Wimbledon is the third stop of the comeback (after Queen’s and Berlin, where she went 1-1).
Serena doesn’t mince words and she told us what she’s thinking, “I don’t have anything to prove, I don’t have anything to lose.” She’s said the comeback is mostly about her kids getting to watch her play. A seven-time Wimbledon champ walking out with nothing to prove is its own kind of story.
And buckle up - we’re going to have a lot to say about this.
2. The NBA season in review
My enjoyment of this NBA season ranks last in my memory. 1 Star; would not recommend. It dragged on and on. The pace of play was weird and now every team seems to run the same game plan; drive for a layup, if it isn’t there, pass it out to shoot the three. It feels like watching practice.
The Finals were something different. There was energy, a rapid pace, people playing legitimate defense, and history made in more ways than one. BUT - I agree with Charles Barkley when he said it was really bad basketball. Even though the energy was up and players were giving it their all, it was still sloppy as hell.
And maybe that’s whole point? Maybe we should promoting bad basketball? It may have been sloppy, but it was fun.
Basketball is a fascinating game that has changed wildly over it’s lifetime, and that’s one of the most wonderful things about it. You wouldn’t recognize the original sport if you saw it today (there was no dribbling; a player caught the ball and stopped dead in their tracks).
What if the stat-bros and money-ball managers took a year off from tying to optimize shot patterns and the ROI of their rookie class (which I say as I push my black acetate glassed back up my nose). Just let em play.
I realized why I enjoyed the Unrivaled 1on1 Tournament so much this year (which just so happen to be the same weekend as the most boring NBA All Star weekend I’ve ever lived through). The 1on1 tournament was us getting to watch the highest level athletes do their thing. There comes a time in most things (business, sports, and just living life), when it becomes clear you’re overthinking. That’s how this year’s NBA felt; over-thought, under-played, and I for one am hoping for more “bad basketball” next year.
3. Why We Watch on Telemundo
I do not speak fluent Spanish (or broken Spanish for that matter). That doesn’t mean I’m not watching the World Cup on Telemundo. I’ve been doing so ever since I was in college, which we’ll just politely say was before 2010. Their commentary, the speed, the tenor, the excitement... it bridges all language barriers.
I feel like I’m yelling at children to get off my lawn when I say, the art of sports commentating is slowly dying. What happened to crisp and clean play-by-play and a color-guy who’s there to the pepper in facts, stats, jokes, and the occasional weather report?
We tuned to Fox for a hot second to see if we were missing something good. We joined the broadcast to 15 seconds of dead silence; just crowd noise. When they started talking, it was about one of the player’s wives. Watching live sports feels more like watching a video podcast about each team where the B-Roll just so happens to be a live game.
Play-by-play commentary delivers the pace of play to the viewer. It’s a way to channel the excitement in the stadium into your living room. Which is why I’m watching every World Cup game on Telemundo. Fox feels like a polite conversation in the sitting room at my grandmother’s house. Telemundo feels like sitting at midfield with my friends.
4. What is Jay Z up to
Jaÿ Z performed his first solo headline set in more than 7 years when he closed night of of the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia. He opened by dragging Drake, Nicki Minaj, and Ye and his set was styled around the 30th anniversary of ‘Reasonable Doubt.’ He added back the umlaut earlier this year. And, his sit down chat style documentary with Rick Rubin is coming to HBO Max this month.
I’m mainly full of questions at this point, and we’ll be watching closely as this unfolds.
Did Jaÿ Z see rap coming around from trap, country-rap, and pop-music trends and he saw an opening that was carved out by Kendrick Lamar?
Why is “2026 all offense?” Maybe it’s because the coast seems clear. Cancel culture has been quieted by this current administration and maybe he (like many others) is coming out to start cashing back in?
Am I writing this all without Steph proof reading it first and praying I don’t see my phone light up with call seconds after I publish this?
One hot take is that come later this year we’re going to hear the next headliner for the Super Bowl, and it’s going to be Jay Z -- hand picked by himself.
5. Fox Bought Roku
Fox is buying Roku for about $22 billion, which makes the combined company the third-largest player in US TV by share of viewing. Stack that on Tubi and the Roku Channel and the immediate read is simple: Fox is going nowhere for a long time. They are disciplined with cash, and diversified on purpose. On the surface, a slam dunk.
This deal is a bit different than others we’ve seen recently. Hardware is involved. This isn’t just the addition of new streaming channels to an existing service like WBD adding HGTV and the Magnolia network to HBO Max. Roku isn’t a channel, it’s the front door to your TV. Hell, it IS your TV. It’s the thing you see before you open Netflix. Fox now owns the door.
Roku is set to keep running as a standalone platform and founder Anthony Wood is taking a Fox board seat. Here’s the sharp question: do they turn the platform itself into a Fox News and Fox Nation destination, editorializing the hallway everyone walks through to get anywhere else? The deal isn’t expected to close until 2027, so we’ll be watching the door for a while.
We’re still standing
So here’s where we land. The week kept making the same point in different outfits. The people running the show keep reaching for more control (more analytics, more polish, more of the pipe), and the audience keeps voting for the version that lets it rip. Serena isn’t optimizing anything. Telemundo isn’t either. That’s a big part of why we’re watching.
What we’re keeping an eye on: Serena and Joint on Tuesday, the World Cup grinding toward the knockouts, Jaÿ-Z’s Rick Rubin doc landing on HBO Max this month, and a slow-motion Fox-Roku deal that won’t close until 2027. The door’s worth watching. We’ll be here when it opens.
Watch Wimbledon (ESPN is the US home, runs through July 12)
Watch the World Cup on Telemundo (official Spanish-language coverage, all 104 matches, streams on Peacock)
JAŸ-Z In 8 (the Rick Rubin docuseries, teaser’s out, premieres this fall on HBO Max)
Fox–Roku, straight from the source (the official announcement, good for the “front door to your TV” point)