Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

As expected and possibly intended, Lonzo Ball, stateside, is having to answer for his dad’s commentary on the fit of Luke Walton as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. Here we have the young man trying to navigate his way through this trial with as many clichés and platitudes as possible:Read more...

Draymond Green picked up his 11th technical foul of the season during Saturday’s win over the Los Angeles Clippers, bringing him within five techs of an automatic one-game suspension. Afterward, he told Anthony Slater of The Athletic that the current state of NBA officiating is “ruining the game”:Read more...

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Less than twelve hours after the men’s competition at the 2018 U.S. Figure Skating Championships was over, the president of U.S. Figure Skating, Sam Auxier announced the three members of the 2018 Olympic team at a press conference at the SAP Center. The three man team is Nathan Chen, Adam Rippon, and…Read more...

Giannis Antetokounmpo put up another absurd Greek Freak line Saturday night in a Bucks road victory over the Wizards: 34 points on 17 shots, 12 rebounds, 7 assists, a couple steals, and a block. That’s the third time this season he’s put up at least 34 points on better than 70 percent shooting, and his physical…Read more...

Nottingham Forest’s Eric Lichaj has spent the vast majority of his career in the second tier of English soccer and the fringes of the USMNT. But in the first half of his team’s FA Cup match against Arsenal, Lichaj looked like a savior. The 29-year-old American defender scored both of his team’s goals to put Forest out…Read more...

Blake Martinez of the Green Bay Packers not only tied for leading the NFL in tackles this season, but also finds some time to play Dota 2 on the side. Though he currently plays under “Packernation50,” Martinez told the story of his induction to the cult of Dota at yesterday’s Captains Draft 4.0 tournament—including…Read more...

NFL referee Jeff Triplette, famous for blinding Orlando Brown and bungling a 2013 replay review badly enough to trigger changes to the NFL’s replay system, was part of the officiating crew for Saturday’s AFC Wild Card game, a sloppily officiated game that drew harsh criticism from former officiating head Mike Pereira.…Read more...

In a metaphorical sense, Barcelona are almost always playing above their competition. But today against Levante, Lionel Messi and Jordi Alba combined for some play that was literally untouchable. Their give-and-go was almost as suited to volleyball as it was to a soccer pitch, and it was good for Messi’s 365th La Liga…Read more...

LaVar Ball, right now, is probably most associated with overheated popup retail openings and the bizarre basketball odyssey of his two younger sons. He’s a reality TV star and a famous Famous Person, and part of his job as a person who is famous for being famous is to say outlandish things in order to draw attention,…Read more...

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Ross Miner had the crowd at the SAP Center on their feet at the end of his long program at the 2018 National Figure Skating Championships. The 26-year-old Boston native had performed to a medley of Queen songs and landed a clean quadruple salchow jump (and several other jumps, too).

Tonight’s Bucks-Wizards game is a tight one, but Milwaukee is finishing it out without guard Matthew Dellavedova after the Australian earned a flagrant 2 ejection for demolishing Bradley Beal. He is fortunate the official punishment is all that he suffered.

It’s our favorite genre of local news screwups!Read more...

May we all be this excited someday:Read more...

By now, Steph Curry highlights are sort of redundant. His very way of playing is a highlight reel: he uses darting dribble moves to create space to launch bombs from insane distances; he plays high-stakes, gambling defense; nearly every pass he throws is a slick no-look job. That’s how you turn a relatively…Read more...

The Tennessee Titans are somehow still in this wild card game against the Chiefs thanks to Marcus Mariota throwing a touchdown pass to himself, entirely legally. PLAYOFFS, BABY. We believe this is only the second time this has ever happened in NFL history; here’s the first, in 1997:Read more...

SAN JOSE, Calif.—After the Grand Prix Final last month in Nagoya, Japan, figure skater Adam Rippon, the 2016 U.S. men’s national champion, got on Twitter and defended the authenticity of his butt, as one does.

A helmet-to-helmet hit left Travis Kelce dazed and knocked the All-Pro tight end out of the Chiefs’ wild-card blowout against the Tennessee Titans.Read more...

Blake Griffin, recently back in the Clippers lineup after recovering from a knee injury suffered back in November, took a scary JaVale McGee elbow to the head in today’s tilt against the Warriors and crashed to the court with what looked very much like a brain injury:Read more...

Yesterday, Erin Jackson, 25, became the first black woman to make an Olympic team for long-track speedskating. She qualified in third place with a time of 39.04 in the 500 meter event at the U.S. Speedskating Trials in Milwaukee, Wisc.Read more...

While the biggest events host the latest games, it’s always nice to revisit classics. In Japan, love for Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike never waned, thanks to a vibrant arcade scene. This weekend’s Cooperation Cup highlights the best of the best, in a game almost 20 years old.Read more...

The once-dead Coutinho-to-Barcelona transfer, a hot rumor of the post-Neywatch soccer landscape, is now, suddenly, a done deal: today Barcelona and Liverpool reportedly agreed to a £142 million transfer fee that will send the midfielder to Catalonia. Per ESPN:Read more...

Chris Chiozza, no stranger to the dramatic, gave his Florida Gators an important SEC win over Missouri when he stole the ball with four seconds left and the game tied at 75 and made a game-winning layup that silenced the Tigers faithful.Read more...

Browns fans, perhaps more adept at wringing enjoyment out of crushing hopelessness than any fanbase on our planet, threw a delightful parade through Cleveland to celebrate the team’s historic winless season. God bless these poor sons of bitches:Read more...

New year, messy new you.Read more...

The middle part of the Eastern Conference is a muddy mess, right now. Whether there are any actual Good teams below the Cavs in the standings is an open question. Maybe the Wizards are turning it on? Maybe the Sixers will rise? Certainly early optimism about a deep field of bonafide playoff teams is looking sillier,…Read more...

The start of the 2018 League of Legends Championship Series is just two weeks away, and the ink on team rosters is starting to dry. As the best talent in North America falls into place, one name keeps coming up among the jobless: Marcin “Selfie” Wolski.Read more...

Let us check in on the jet-setting Ball brothers, whose detour into the murky waters of international professional basketball is totally about professional development and preparing for the NBA and is not at all about sacrificing a couple of promising careers at the altar of personal brand management. How is all that…Read more...

The United States Figure Skating Association announced Saturday morning its nominations for the 2018 U.S. Olympic figure skating team, and, unlike with its selections in 2014, stuck with the top three overall finishers from the just-completed U.S. Figure Skating National Championships:Read more...

SAN JOSE, Calif.—When Ashley Wagner walked into the mixed zone after the women’s competition at the U.S. Figure Skating National Championships, practically the first words out of her mouth were, “I’m furious.”

Canada claimed the world junior hockey championship tonight with a 3-1 win over Sweden, and a distraught Swedish captain Lias Andersson wanted nothing to do with his silver medal—first attempting to not even have it placed around his neck, before immediately chucking it over the glass where a happy Buffalonian (we’re…Read more...

Who’s ready for the debuts of LaMelo and LiAngelo Ball??? Hopefully not fans of the Baltic League, because Vytautas Prienai announced today that they’d be pulling out of the Baltic Sea region’s second-most prestigious tournament to play in something called the Big Baller Brand Challenge Games, which is a real thing…Read more...

One of the main characters in Seth Wickersham’s must-read ESPN story on infighting between the most powerful people in the Patriots organization is not technically a part of that organization at all. This is Alex Guerrero, Tom Brady’s personal quack doctor and someone who has amassed a great deal of power thanks to…Read more...

You don’t need any insight into the inner workings of the Miami Marlins to understand why the franchise is currently in the midst of stripping itself of every decent player making even a modest salary. The team was just purchased by a bunch of people who couldn’t really afford it, and now they need to cut down on…Read more...

Sean McVay is rightfully getting a great deal of credit for transforming the Los Angeles Rams from perennial throw-rugs into the champions of the NFC West. As the Rams prepare to host to the Atlanta Falcons on Saturday night—the prodigal franchise’s first home playoff game in L.A. proper in 39 years—here’s a question…Read more...

We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites to kick off your weekend.

Deion Sanders serves as one of the coaches at an annual high school football All-America game, though it seems that not all of his players were pleased with the (mostly ceremonial) job he did. Dual-threat quarterback Emory Jones, ranked as the fourth-best player in Georgia by ESPN, tossed just three passes last night,…Read more...

When ESPN made Rush Limbaugh a part of their Sunday NFL Countdown flagship back in 2003, the country was a different place. Everything that is currently bad and dumb about these United States was already very much in evidence, if maybe not quite in its current state of roaring psychedelic metastasis, but it felt as if…Read more...

This past summer was a great one for aficionados of melodramatic transfer window soap operas. The most passion-inflamed and drama-filled ones were the two Barcelona-based series, NeyWatch and One Life to Liverpool. NeyWatch, you probably remember, starred the impossibly hunky Neymar and detailed the dissolution of…Read more...

The Witcher 3’s Geralt of Rivia spends most of his time fighting. But for all the mountaintop battles and magic powers, the best fights in the game are the ones where he gets into a ring and uses his fists.

Brooks was a “forgettable brand on the brink of a second bankruptcy,” so CEO Jim Weber decided to focus on the basics. According to a new Bloomberg Businessweek story, Weber “scrapped almost the entire product line—no more cleats or tennis or basketball shoes, no $30 cross-trainers sold at Walmart—and refocused the…Read more...

ESPN might not be the first stop for sports highlights, but it’s apparently the place to poach vintage coaching talent. Multiple outlets have reported that Monday Night Football analyst Jon Gruden is set to finally make his rumored move to become the next head coach of the Raiders. Contract details are starting to…Read more...

Welcome to Meat Sack, a guide to sports-related body horror. Today’s column is about skin-colonizing bacteria.Read more...

The upcoming Galaxy Battles Dota 2 tournament will no longer be a major because local regulators in the Philippines are requiring drug testing for the players.

Just before Christmas, former UFC bantamweight champion Cody Garbrandt relayed the wonderful story of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s visit to Team Alpha Male’s Sacramento HQ for a bit of training. After sweating on everyone and weirding the team out with some strange stretches, the action star got in the training ring with…Read more...

The Latin language is one of the Roman Empire’s lasting legacies. We hear it around us every day in the form of direct Latin loan-words into English, like “abdomen” or “exterior.” Every time you say something is “necessary” or you need to make a “revision” to a document, you’re using a loan-word from French, which…Read more...

Kayla “Mew2Queen” Mackay was one of five players who won a fan vote to play Super Smash Bros. Melee in Genesis 5, a major tournament in Oakland, and the first to receive full funding. For Mackay, who plays as Marth, it should have been a huge moment. But in response to her nomination, Melee players immediately raised…Read more...

Anker’s SoundBuds Slims were the single most popular product among our readers in 2017, and the red and blue-corded models are down to $19 on Amazon right now, down from their usual ~$26.

The hot Patriots gossip is here and everyone loves it, because there is something undeniably hilarious about the best quarterback in NFL history teaming up with the real-life Dr. Nick and sabotaging the future of his own franchise. What’s also hilarious: this joint statement from Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and Robert…Read more...

Minnesota center Reggie Lynch was officially suspended from participating in any university-related events until Aug. 1, 2020 after an investigation by the school’s Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action office found he was “responsible” for an April 28, 2016 “sexual misconduct incident,” according to the St. Paul Pioneer…Read more...

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord, and it looks like Jimmy Garoppolo in a 49ers uniform. For the first time since Jim Harbaugh was canned at the end of the 2014 season, the 49ers have been fun, and interesting, and there has been a glimmer of hope, led by the concerningly attractive man who…Read more...