At Defector, in our staff Slack, we have a slogan: Root For Your Guys (RFYG). It's an ethic, and also very often an exhortation. As an upstanding sports fan, your only true calling is to root for those guys down there, wearing your team's colors. However much grumping you might do at the water cooler—about the stupid idiot coach and his refusal to trust the rookie, or about the big brick-handed lummox mucking up the offensive spacing, or about the sleazy executive with his hands on the purse strings—when it comes to games and scores and outcomes, you have to root for your guys. That's your end of the deal. Also, significantly, how dare you share in the good feelings of a victory if you spent the contest sour and toxic, wishing ill on your very own players.
More than once I have been scolded by my coworkers for this type of miserablism—RFYG, man!—although in my defense in at least one of these instances my team was employing, and deploying, and depending upon, Russell Westbrook. The NBA season is four days old, and already one Defector staffer has been RFYG'd in Slack for being doomerish about their home team.
But rooting for your guys is more complicated than it might seem. Take, for instance, the case of the Dallas Mavericks. In many ways, the Mavericks should be easy to root for. They have good players, some of those good players are also cool players, and they are well-coached. They've been one of the sharper operations of the 21st century, posting 19 playoff appearances over the last 25 seasons, with three Finals trips and a championship in there. Cooper Flagg is good, cool, and exciting, and is going to be all of those things for a long time. Sure, it's nauseating that three of their top five or six players played college ball at Duke, but neither Flagg nor Dereck Lively II played under Mike Krzyzewski. Anthony Davis is blandly inoffensive; Max Christie seems well-meaning and harmless enough; Klay Thompson gives off the vibes of a good dude. As a collection of players, certainly you could do a lot worse. You could, for instance, be a fan of the Washington Wizards.
The Wizards beat the Mavericks Friday night, in Dallas. The Wizards are a disgraceful, shockingly terrible basketball operation. They are generally expected to be the NBA's worst team this season, for what certainly feels like the 1,000th year in a row; ESPN stat nerd Kevin Pelton recently predicted that the 2025–26 Wizards will be one of the worst teams in history. Down the stretch of Friday's frustrating loss, Mavericks fans vented their disappointment. Specifically, they fired up their favorite chant from the second half of last season, calling for the firing of head personnel honcho Nico Harrison. If Harrison hoped that his team's cosmically unfair good luck in the 2025 draft lottery would ease the anger of Mavericks fans over the trading away of star Luka Doncic, that has not so far turned out to be the case. The Mavericks were flattened by the San Antonio Spurs in their season-opener, and then lost to the Wizards. The season has barely begun and the Dallas crowd is already calling for Harrison's head.
It's hard to escape the feeling that many Mavericks fans have been eager for an opportunity to resume this cause, lest Harrison think for one moment that the Doncic trade is now water under the bridge. I would like to offer this as a carve-out in the otherwise sturdy RFYG ethical framework. Mavericks fans broadly want their team to do well and to win basketball games. On the other hand, I'm sure many of them want more than anything else hoops-related to see Harrison shoved out onto the street with all of his office crap jammed into a cardboard crate.
The Mavericks open this season with six straight at home, in what will be the longest home-stand of their campaign. A loss to the Wizards is a hellish way to spend a Friday night, but what if it brings the team that much closer to firing Harrison? And what if, by turning up with a blackened heart and ready to further spoil a ruined night with chants and taunts, a fan can advance that cause? What if a terrible winless home-stand makes Harrison's position untenable? Is Nico Harrison even one of your guys? Or is he, in fact, a curse upon your guys?
Normally, a bad and embarrassing run of losses would land first on the shoulders of a head coach, but the Mavericks just signed Jason Kidd to a multiyear extension. Kidd is a good coach. For that matter, disgusting though it may be to admit it, Harrison has put together a solid NBA roster. Creepy managing owner Patrick Dumont probably should not fire either of these men, based solely on the merits: After all, Dumont signed off on the Doncic trade, and participated in the weird and tacky post-trade trashing of Doncic's work ethic. But Dumont is for sure never going to fire himself.
If it's unpleasant bordering on impossible for Mavericks fans to stomach sharing a rooting interest with this oaf, it can only be that much harder to associate in this way with his appointed executioner. Maybe it would take something extraordinary for Dumont to fire Harrison! Certainly a record of 0-82 in the 2025–26 regular season would be extraordinary. You see the dilemma!
To me, it is fine and acceptable to root against your guys (RAYG) in a few circumstances. If your team has already started to tank down the stretch of a lost season, naturally it is fine to root for the other guys (RFTOG). If there is some sort of playoff seeding matter that can be turned to your team's advantage by an end-of-season loss, you almost have a moral duty to RAYG. Relatedly, if your team's season is effectively over but by beating your team another team can leapfrog your team's bitterest rival in the standings, to me it is fine to RFTOG. Perhaps the Harrison case is somewhat more complicated, but I think bloodthirsty Mavericks fans can be exonerated: If your team's general manager traded away and then trashed a beloved superstar, and only painful and sustained failure will force that backstabbing scoundrel out of the picture, and you have these six games to really twist the knife, to me it is fine to engage in a little RAYGing. It's a long season. Sometimes, your guys can wait.
