Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

On May 14, 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned the ban on sports betting, New Jersey legislators hurried to update the state’s 2014 sports betting law. Back in 2014, Jersey lawmakers had passed a law permitting sports betting at casinos and racetracks, but the law couldn’t go into effect until the Supreme Court…Read more...

Fuck!!!!!!!!!!!

Even though LeBron James and Steph Curry had already said that neither of their teams would visit the White House if they won the NBA Finals, today Donald Trump tried to pretend like he wouldn’t have invited them anyway. Surely the basketball players will regret the opportunity to watch a septuagenarian trot his…Read more...

Most friendships have a sort of intrinsic half-life. Each passing year tends to draw you further from the people you care about or at least reduce the number of people you stay in touch with, but this is usually a good thing. I’d say the best number of friends is somewhere around MySpace’s platonic ideal of a top…Read more...

No nation as small as Iceland (population: 337,479) has ever qualified for the World Cup before, but simply getting to Russia won’t be satisfying enough for this team. After a couple of miraculous wins in Euro 2016 that put Icelandic soccer on the map, this Scandinavian group will be forced to experience outsized…Read more...

Is this the stupidest thing we’ve ever put on the website? Uh, sound off in the comments I guess. I’m just really sorry about all this.Read more...

Somebody gave me a copy of Kitchen Confidential shortly after I graduated from college; I wish I remembered who. I mostly subsisted on Trader Joe’s frozen meals back then, and I’m almost certain I had never heard of Anthony Bourdain.

Last month Zak DeOssie thought his championship rings were purloined, but a police investigation concluded that the Giants long snapper had done what many people have with coffee mugs, briefcases, and other items they forget about while getting into their car.

In September 2015 an NYPD officer tackled and handcuffed James Blake outside a Manhattan hotel, mistaking the former American tennis player for a suspect in a credit card scam; a month later, an independent panel ruled that police used excessive force in the arrest. That panel, the Civilian Complaint Review Board,…Read more...

“This moment...” Alexander Ovechkin started, flanked at the podium by the Stanley Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy. He never once that I saw looked at the latter, but he kept glancing toward the big one, the one he had kissed and lofted and screamed into and shared with every single one of his teammates and coworkers.…Read more...

In the middle of the night on November 11, 2011, Jenn Shapland, a 24-year-old graduate student in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin, received an email from her professor.Read more...

Tomorrow is a bigass waste of time. I am a grown adult, which means that the majority of my decisions are based around tomorrow. I save money. I go to bed at a reasonable hour. I don’t do crack. Tomorrow dictates a great deal of my actions, which is a shame because today is RIGHT HERE to be celebrated and enjoyed and…Read more...

If you still haven’t picked up a PlayStation VR kit, I don’t think we’ve ever seen a better deal than this one. Just $250 gets you the headset, two Move controllers, the camera, and a copy of Skyrim. That’s $100 less than the usual price on this bundle. Just remember, the arrow in your knee isn’t real, you can still…Read more...

Four months ago, Eduardo “HookGangGod” Hook had never entered a tournament in person. He had been shooting up the leaderboards in Persona 4 Arena and Guilty Gear for years while preferring to risk frame delays and shaky network connections. But Dragon Ball FighterZ got the self-described “online monster” to see if…Read more...

Orioles first baseman Chris Davis is in real danger of having the worst season in the history of baseball. That’s not a joke or hyperbole. He’s playing unbelievably, historically bad baseball:

Start off your Friday with a dress shoe sale, PS4 E3 discounts, a whole bunch of Father’s Day gift, and more.Read more...

Muhammad Ali’s career in the ring came to a standstill in 1967 upon the late boxer’s conviction for avoiding the Vietnam Draft by declaring himself a conscientious objector. Four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that conviction by a unanimous vote; 47 years later, Donald Trump is suggesting he will pardon…Read more...

At the 2014 World Cup, Australia were one of those entertaining minnows who have no real shot at escaping the maws of the big fish hunting them down but still make the chase interesting. In a hellacious group along with Spain, the Netherlands, and Chile, Australia lost all three matches, as was expected. What’s lost…Read more...

Steamed Steam’s Irresponsible Hands-Off Policy Is Proof That Valve Still Hasn’t Learned Its Lesson | Gizmodo Least Transparent FCC Ever Goes Dark as Former IT Chief Walks Back DDoS Attack Claims | Jalopnik Does The Dealer Have To Honor The Price On A Car You Ordered? | Vitals What Knowing Your Astrological Sign Is…Read more...

If ever you need confirmation of the theory of general relativity, just watch your team in a Stanley Cup clincher. After Lars Eller scored the go-ahead (and soon to be Cup-winning) goal with 7:37 left, time started doing funny things, depending on who you were rooting for. While those final minutes and seconds ticked…Read more...

Last month, Michigan State settled with 332 victims of Larry Nassar’s sex abuse for half a billion dollars. While it’s still unclear how exactly MSU will pay out that substantial settlement, the prevailing wisdom is that some combination of insurance, public funds, loans, and university money will cover it. It was…Read more...

Baseball is Ye Olde American Pastime, old enough to have developed its own language and customs and conventions. For example, everyone who follows baseball knows that “7.1 innings” should be understood to mean “seven-and-a-third innings,” even though that’s not at all how decimals work. You could reject that shorthand…Read more...

I am always up for images of sports fans celebrating a championship—the euphoria is contagious, especially when it’s a fan base that hasn’t tasted the glory of a title in a good long while. For a nice appetizer, here’s the celebration on the ice:Read more...

You will get absolutely nowhere if you try to keep the emotion bottled up inside while watching Caps winger T.J. Oshie talk about winning the Stanley Cup with his father in attendance. Oshie’s father is battling Alzheimer’s disease, so big joyous events they can experience together take on added importance:Read more...

Hockey is over for the summer. That sucks! Perhaps, maybe, the only thing that can get us through those lean months will be the annual masterpiece that is the Hockey Night In Canada season-ending montage, set this year to Oasis (??). Here you are.Read more...

This year was different. The Washington Capitals are Stanley Cup champions.

In an absolute bullcrap turn of events, dear sweet masher Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was sent to the disabled list Thursday with an injured leg. Per the Toronto Sun:Read more...

It’s 2-1 Washington as I write this, but the goals are coming fast and furious so let’s not spend too much time on this before the score changes. (No shit, Vegas made it 2-2 before I finished writing that sentence.) But the Caps have been scoring some of the prettiest goals of the playoffs—especially their setups—and…Read more...

ESPN’s Field Yates and Adam Schefter reported Thursday afternoon that Julian Edelman is facing a four-game PED suspension from the NFL, pending an ongoing appeal. This is important news, for a number of reasons: New England’s receiving corps was thinned out during the offseason, making Edelman’s production as…Read more...

Alexander Ovechkin’s and Marc-Andre Fleury’s playoff familiarity goes all the way back to 2009. Fleury’s side has won every single one of their series (even if he happened to be on the bench for some of that). That could change tonight, obviously. Even before puck drop, they were sending each other messages.

The vast majority of teams that make it to the World Cup don’t have a quart of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream’s chance in Jason Whitlock’s freezer of winning the thing. The latter stages of this edition feel particularly preordained, like if one of Brazil or Germany or Spain don’t win the tournament then either the Russian…Read more...

It has been a long, long while since the last time D.C. had any reason to throw a public sports watch party. With the Caps on a run through the Stanley Cup playoffs, and the weather around town holding up beautifully, Caps watch parties, taking place inside and around the Caps’ Chinatown arena, have been growing…Read more...

Sue Woodman’s feature on how the AIDS crisis impacted women was published in the Jan/Feb, 1987 issue of New York Woman and appears here with the author’s permission.

Footage from a documentary on corruption in African soccer, shared exclusively with the BBC, shows World Cup assistant referee Adel Range Marwa accepting a $600 gift from an undercover journalist posing as a Ghanaian soccer official. Marwa, the only referee from Kenya set to participate in the World Cup, has resigned…Read more...

This is the first World Cup since 1982 for Peru, but that doesn’t mean they’re here just to play three games and go home. After weathering an absolutely cutthroat cycle of South American qualifying and earning a spot in a group from which they’re favored to place second and advance, Peru are poised to do some real…Read more...

Wisconsin-based bicycle giant Trek has settled a lawsuit today with the estate of Chris Farley, who sued the bike company last year over a line of performance fat bikes that shared a name with the iconic comedian. A fat bike is essentially a mountain bike with even bigger tires, which make it easy to get gnarly on any…Read more...

Kendrick Perkins, nominally on the Cavs roster, is just there to wear a suit and start shit. He’s a large, rude chaperone who escorts the team from Cleveland to the Bay and back, occasionally stepping up to yell at or near Drake or knock knees with Steph Curry. Last night he fully embraced his role during his old OKC…Read more...

Do the best you can with what you have—it’s an old idiom, and one that is particularly useful when it comes to explaining the above image. It is also useful to note the pathetic foot at lower left. Here is how it came to pass.Read more...

Wild shit happens in the steeplechase. Emma Coburn won last year’s world championship in part because one of the favorites ran around the first water jump instead of over it; a runner at the 2009 U.S. women’s championship broke her foot after one barrier was accidentally set at the men’s height; in a college race last…Read more...

If you can’t beat ‘em, blackball ‘em. That’s among the morals of the story of the dissolution of Baltimore’s prep football scene, which is now complete: St. Frances Academy, a historically non-athletic and financially strapped institution which is suddenly among the best football schools in the country and fiscally…Read more...

Terrell Owens will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this August. But he won’t be there to celebrate his enshrinement.Read more...

Temple has yet to start construction on a promised community jobs center, a project that was announced three years ago, but its plans for a controversial on-campus football stadium have only gained steam. This is thanks in part to some grade-A scuzzery courtesy of the Philadelphia Eagles.

In June 2002, facing numerous complaints about a tire that had been installed on thousands of motorhomes, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. put out a service bulletin one RV manufacturer to replace the tires for certain owners, free of charge. By then, Goodyear had received at least 20 injury and death claims over failures…Read more...

Darren Rovell, an AI who aims to drive Earth’s entire population insane through the banality of its observations, launched yet another attack on our psyches last night:

After last night, the Shanghai Dragons are 0-37 in the Overwatch League. That’s longer than any losing streak in the history of the big four North American pro sports—worse than the 1976-77 Bucs and Process Sixers losing 26 and 28 games over two seasons. Worse than the Louisville Colonels losing 26 straight in 1889.…Read more...

France are one of the four or so teams coming to Russia for whom anything less than a World Cup title will be a disappointment of sorts. I mean, look at their roster. It just oozes talent, with Champions League experience across the board and the depth necessary to fill in for anything from an unfortunate injury or,…Read more...

In that frame up above, the guy playing as the Seahawks in Madden 18 recovered the onside kick with a lead of six and five seconds left. He still absolutely blew it.Read more...

The odds boards are outdated, and they are state-of-the-art in Delaware.

The Philadelphia 76ers and collar-loving general manager Bryan Colangelo have “agreed to part ways” today, per ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. Last week, the Ringer dropped a bombshell report advancing the theory that Colangelo had been secretly operating five Twitter accounts to defend himself. They were close, and as …Read more...

Let me take you inside the game for a moment: we record the Deadcast a little while before you actually hear the Deadcast. It is not, despite the seamlessly integrated ads and effortlessly fluid riffage, a live show. When we recorded this one on Wednesday morning, the NBA Finals were not quite as extravagantly over as…Read more...