An Apology From Our Editors: Coach Budenholzer Was Not ‘Fired Into The Sun’

This past Monday, we at Sports Riot incorrectly reported that Phoenix had fired their head coach, Mike Budenholzer, “straight into the sun.” This reporting was made surrounding a tight deadline and published without proper corroboration, especially since we thought we saw a smoking, black speck with five championship rings on it sailing in front of the sun at around 3:46pm Central Time, confirming our suspicions. Sports Riot regrets the error.

In defense of our editorial staff, they have correctly predicted several past coach sun-firings. These include last year’s catastrophic firing of Phoenix’s previous coach, Frank Vogel, and the Connecticut Sun’s attempted firing of their own coach, Stephanie White, whose launch was aborted due to the New England region’s five consecutive weeks of cloud cover. This is not even to mention Sports Riot’s proudest scoop back in 2011, where we were the first to report that Los Angeles had fired longtime veteran coach Phil Jackson directly into the bottom of Lake Superior.

We at Sports Riot naturally make it our duty to vet all sources of information, but we assumed we were clear to report the Budenholzer sun-firing due to Arizona being a place with excellent launchpad conditions, as well as a place from which many people would wish to escape by any means necessary. We may have also incorrectly skimmed the ESPN article covering Budenholzer, as we were busy researching the teams that were actually good enough to make it into at least the play-in.

Update: sources are now confirming that what we actually saw in the distance was former Houston coach Stephen Silas, whose unconscious, nearly winless body had been strapped to some sort of elaborate rocket by angry fans back in 2023.