Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Would you hug Roger Goodell? Is this a face that demands embrace? Probably not, assuming you’re not his spouse, or child, or one of the 32 men whose lifelong dreams of earning millions as a professional football player came true upon hearing the NFL commissioner read your name last night.

The Giants liked Daniel Jones. Obviously, because otherwise they wouldn’t have drafted him at No. 6, ahead of Josh Allen or Ed Oliver or Dwayne Haskins. But: they really liked him.

The Kansas City Chiefs announced last night that star wide receiver Tyreek Hill would be suspended indefinitely from all team activities. The team made their announcement shortly after Kansas City CBS affiliate KCTV5 released an audio recording of Hill being confronted by his fiancée Crystal Espinal about the…Read more...

CM Punk has been back in the news—or, anyway, back on wrestling websites— this past week for two separate and very different reasons. One of those is fueling giddy speculation about a potential comeback. The other is a bit more complicated.

An REI sale, Anker USB-C cables, Timbuk2 bags, and a Philips wake-up light lead off Friday’s best deals.Read more...

Goaltender Jordan Binnington is getting the overwhelming share of attention during this dominant run the Blues have enjoyed since putting him in net halfway through the season, and it’s not hard to see why. The team sucked before he showed up, and now they’re in the second round of the playoffs with a 1-0 series lead…Read more...

Basketball fans of a certain age will remember a time not so long ago when the San Antonio Spurs were just as reviled for their steady greatness as they were respected for it. Around that time, the league kept producing pretty new things that seemed custom-built to capture the hearts and minds of the next generation…Read more...

In the event that you’re offered the job of running the Los Angeles Lakers, you would do well to consider the pros and cons. The salary is almost certainly better than what you currently earn—as you are reading this website, I am assuming that “you” are an attorney of some kind—and you get to live in Los Angeles,…Read more...

The most irritating man in hockey had returned for the second round of the playoffs after lying relatively dormant in the first, as Bruins forward Brad Marchand is back to inventing petty tricks to get in his opponents’ heads.Read more...

The Azerbaijan Grand Prix at Baku has been proving itself to be one of Formula One’s most exciting races of the year—mostly just because the tight street circuit makes for a hell of a lot of shenanigans. And those shenanigans have already started kicking off in the form of a killer manhole determined to gobble up race…Read more...

For the first time in forever (and a few years after it should have happened), the New York Giants have a quarterback of the future. Duke’s Daniel Jones is the anointed successor to Eli Manning, the shiny new model to replace the beaten-up old jalopy who’s running on rims. Orderly succession is the goal of every NFL…Read more...

When Freddie Freeman saw his third-inning liner to right-center squirt away from the glove of Reds outfielder Yasiel Puig and toward the warning track Thursday night, he made the perfectly sensible decision to chug his way to second base. That’s a sound, heady base-running decision, which is why it seems almost…Read more...

The Washington football team selected Ohio State quarterback, and Maryland native, Dwayne Haskins with the 15th overall pick in the NFL draft. Haskins fell to Dan Snyder’s vanity project through a combination of other teams focusing on positional needs, or going with strange draft strategies.

When the Oakland Raiders selected Clemson’s Clelin Ferrell with the fourth pick in the NFL Draft, the response from fans was mixed to say the least. Some were frustrated, like the man at the top of this post, while others were just flat out confused, like the fan in this clip that stopped to look around before…Read more...

Retired NBA star turned esports entrepreneur Rick Fox is preparing to cut ties with Echo Fox, the competitive gaming organization he helped found, after another shareholder allegedly used racial slurs during an email exchange, according to a report by Richard Lewis for Dexerto.Read more...

Back in October, Texas Tech’s then-head coach Kliff Kingsbury had high praise for the Oklahoma quarterback his team was about to face, Kyler Murray. He told reporters that if he could, he’d take Murray with the first pick of the draft. The Cardinals appeared to take that comment into serious consideration on Thursday…Read more...

The Rockets find themselves in the advantageous position of having closed out their first-round series days ahead of whoever they’ll eventually meet in the second round, giving them a head-start on preparations for the series to come. It would be reasonable, under the circumstances, to tilt the balance of that prep…Read more...

Kansas City CBS affiliate KCTV5 released audio of a conversation between Chiefs receiver Tyreek Hill and his fiancée, Crystal Espinal, on Thursday. The conversation features Espinal confronting Hill about the details of what happened that led to their son getting a broken arm, Espinal bringing up previous times where…Read more...

Bucks-Celtics was one of the best and most hotly contested series in last year’s NBA playoffs, and Bucks-Celtics II (The Kyriedux?) promises to be, if nothing else, an opportunity for Super Giannis to triumphantly hurl the team that eliminated him last season into a dumpster. Which is what makes today’s news extremely…Read more...

The Warriors are going to have to play at least a sixth game against the Clippers, possibly because it’s hard for a team to maintain such a level of absolute dominance for this long without occasionally falling into complacency, but anyway, here’s a clip that is most likely nothing but could, given this team’s…Read more...

Joe Biden’s campaign announcement video—he’s running for president, of course—begins with Charlottesville, Va. It’s a choice, and the construct it reflects is an interesting one. It says a lot.

The San Jose Sharks are in the second round of the playoffs, and it’s mostly because of a third-period Cody Eakin major penalty. In the Golden Knights–Sharks Game 7 on Tuesday, Eakin crossed-checked Sharks forward Joe Pavelski on a face-off with Vegas leading 3-0 and 10 minutes remaining. Pavelski hit his head on the…Read more...

Two of the best distance runners of all time are engaged in a very public feud, which started when British four-time gold medalist Mo Farah says he had a bunch of his stuff stolen while staying in Ethiopian running great Haile Gebrselassie’s hotel.Read more...

When Drew Magary asks if you’re excited about something, the initial impulse is generally to say yes. The man is large and eager and highly excitable, and when he is excited the instinct is to be excited, too. You would no more tell him that you are not excited than you would say “ugh, relax” to a big grinning…Read more...

The bizarre high school basketball career of Jimmy Sorunke, who went from an overhyped freshman to an ignored senior in just one year, appears to now be over.

Russell Westbrook is headed for a summer of reckoning. Three straight triple-double seasons have been followed by three straight first-round playoff exits. This latest 4-1 defeat by the Blazers did not show many signs of progress, and, thanks to Damian Lillard, even cast his weaknesses in starker relief. Westbrook’s…Read more...

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Email Drew here. Buy his book here.

The fundamental idea undergirding the pervading ideology of Premier League exceptionalism is that the English league is uniquely competitive. All the manifestations of this exceptionalism—from the holding of the Premier League title above all other domestic league trophies and nearly on par with the European Cup, to…Read more...

It’s not too difficult to figure out what’s plaguing the Golden State Warriors as their first-round series against the Los Angeles Clippers drags on to surprising lengths. According to Klay Thompson, the champs were already looking forward to the Rockets, assuming a tidy Game 5 win. According to Kevin Durant, they…Read more...

Chicago White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson is having a very good April, give or take a gratuitous insult to his buttocks. He’s hitting .383, which is second in the AL, and has stolen nine bases, whichleads the league. He has popped four home runs, too, which is the issue, here. After one of those homers, a two-run blast…Read more...

Mike Trout went 0-for-3 in Wednesday’s game against the Yankees, but he still drew a walk, which meant that in all 22 of the Angels’ games he’s played in this season, the outfielder has gotten on base. While it’s still worth gawking at his .510 OBP, feel free to also gawk at how he made this center-field catch look…Read more...

In the autumn of 2012, I began working at a pricey midtown Manhattan steakhouse. At one of my first tables sat Geno Auriemma, the women’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut. Eleven years earlier, I had embedded with him and his players for six months for a book I’d write. I’d held a notepad countless…Read more...

Kotaku Days Gone: The Kotaku Review | Gizmodo If You Care About Privacy, Throw Your Amazon Alexa Devices Into the Sea | Jalopnik Tesla Posts $700 Million First-Quarter Loss as CEO Elon Musk Says It Will Offer Insurance | Vitals Don’t Trust the Calorie Count on the Elliptical Machine | The Takeout Presenting the…Read more...

Raise your hand if you expected this series to be over by now. Sure, the Clippers are fun and feisty and Lou Williams is a delight forever, but their opponent is Golden State, destroyers of world and shuckers of corn. And yet, whether out of boredom or exhaustion or just annoyance, the Warriors haven’t quite looked…Read more...

A Cole Haan sale, Ninja Foodi, KitchenAid kettle, and a Little Giant Ladder lead off Thursday’s best deals.Read more...

The Carolina Hurricanes pulled off the last in a string of crazy first-round playoff series upsets on Wednesday night, disrespecting the far more experienced Capitals by wearing them down over two overtimes for a 4-3 win. It was going to be extremely tough for the ’Canes and the Caps to match the hijinks of the…Read more...

The video, like so many videos ostensibly talking about how to save the world, begins with two white men in crisp white shirts and ties. One of the men is a reporter, the other is then-vice president Joe Biden. They sit facing each other on an Amtrak train, outlines of Anywhere, America, zipping past in the window.Read more...

The Braves became the target of many people’s ire earlier this month when they signed Ozzie Albies to a seven-year, $35 million contract extension that will, if Albies turns into the kind of player he looks destined to become, go down as one of the most appallingly team-friendly contracts in baseball history. Plenty…Read more...

All your brackets are dead. Every prediction model is forfeit. Does the regular season have any meaning whatsoever? (Does life?) Does chance play too great a role in this slippery sport? Does the best team ever win the Stanley Cup?

The Ninja Foodi, designed in part by friend of the site Justin Warner, wants to be the One True Buzzy Kitchen Appliance. It’s a big, hulking thing, but it can do just about everything, as our researcher Corey Foster wrote in an (upcoming) Inventory post:

When the Warriors dropped Game 2 of their first-round playoff series against the Los Angeles Clippers, it seemed like it might’ve been because they were overconfident, lackadaisical, and maybe even a little tuned-out. This would seem to have been confirmed by their subsequent 27-point demolition of the Clippers in Los…Read more...

Brawny Phillies slugger Rhys Hoskins smashed a moonshot homer to left in the top of the ninth inning of Philadelphia’s 6–0 win over the Mets Tuesday night. The dinger came at the expense of Mets reliever Jacob Rhame, who then had to endure Hoskins taking a looooooong time to round the bases:Read more...

The Carolina Hurricanes refused to play their part in their opening-round series against the defending champion Washington Capitals. Arriving in the playoffs for the first time since 2009, the Hurricanes were not the inexperienced youngsters who got taught a lesson about the difficulties of the postseason by the…Read more...

The Utah Jazz needed a few games to get there, but they finally worked their way into fighting range of the Houston Rockets over the course of their first-round playoff series. The hilarious strategy of defending James Harden’s butt started to yield dividends, and a Rockets offense that scored 122 and 118 points in…Read more...

Huzzah, baseball friends! Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who has been the best and most exciting and most popular player in the Toronto Blue Jays organization for more than a year, is now finally good enough to join the Toronto Blue Jays:Read more...

There can’t be many experiences in sports more bewildering and humiliating than the yips, and any player going through something yip-like deserves sympathy, if not pity. In the case of Nationals reliever Trevor Rosenthal, it especially sucks to think that his current season-long inability to throw strikes is a…Read more...

We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.Read more...

At a press conference today in Kansas, Johnson County DA Stephen Howe told reporters that his office would not file any criminal charges against Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Tyreek Hill or his fiancée, Crystal Espinal. According to KCTV5, Hill had been implicated in two police reports filed in March by Espinal,…Read more...

Portland Trail Blazers center Jusuf Nurkic suffered a horror injury less than a month ago, and even though he remains pretty immobile with a super busted leg, he still showed up to support his teammates Tuesday night. Nurkic wasn’t part of the dogpile after Damian Lillard’s heroic game-winner, but he still celebrated…Read more...

In a bind? Jump start your own car and bypass the whole “wait for the pity of strangers” thing with these discounted iClever jump starters. The neat thing about both these models are that they can charge your devices through USB, too.Read more...