Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Osprey makes some of the most popular camping gear around, and nearly 200 of its products are on sale on Amazon for up to 25% off. These x% off sales on Amazon aren’t always actually good deals, but I spot checked a bunch of the gear in this sale, and every product I looked at was significantly cheaper than usual.

On Tuesday, just after Mariners second baseman Robinson Cano was suspended 80 games for failing a drug test, Pirates outfielder Gregory Polanco started to receive concerned texts from his friends and family in the Dominican Republic. A fake ESPN tweet began to circulate online, suggesting that Polanco would also be…Read more...

A doubles tennis match in Rome today was interrupted by a feline interloper. While Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo played against Juan Sebastian Cabal and Robert Farah at the Foro Italico, a cute little cat ran across the court. Cat on the clay!Read more...

White tennis players from Telfair County High School in Georgia have been punished for posing for a photo in which they wore white bags over their heads with the eyes cut out. The photo, which was taken on Snapchat and then distributed on Facebook in the days after the tennis tournament, was taken after the Telfair…Read more...

Partly it’s superstition, and partly it’s because, as they say, he likes what he likes, Alex Ovechkin eats the exact same thing a few hours before every Capitals home game, and he’s been eating it since his rookie year. Athletes really are different from the rest of us.Read more...

Celebrate the fact it’s Friday with a giant REI sale, a couple discounted weighted blankets, a Brother all-in-one laser printer, and more.

This week, USA Gymnastics is holding its training camp for the women’s national team at Flip Fest Camp in Tennessee. (Since ceasing to host camps at the Karolyi Ranch back in January, the camps have been held in different places.) And at this month’s camp, a bomb was dropped on national team members and their coaches:…Read more...

The numbers are intimidating. The Tampa Bay Lightning had the league’s third best power play during the regular season, at 23.9 percent. They have the best power play of any team left alive, at 30.8 percent. They are 6-of-14 on the power play against the Capitals. They have scored a power-play goal in nine straight…Read more...

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Mookie Betts, the best non–Mike Trout player in baseball who makes everything look impossibly easy, has a history of showing as little mercy as possible to the division rival Baltimore Orioles. He continued that trend during last night’s 6-2 victory over the O’s in Boston.

Reuben Foster’s ex-girlfriend said last month that she had lied when she told police that the San Francisco 49ers linebacker hit her, threw a dog across the room, and broke both her cell phones. On Thursday, 28-year-old Elissa Ennis said that again—this time under oath in a San Francisco courthouse at a preliminary…Read more...

If you have trouble unwinding and turning off your brain at the end of the day, you’re gonna want to check out a weighted blanket. We’ve seen a lot of deals on 15 pound blankets lately, but today, ANJEE has not just a 15lb blanket, but a 20 pounder on sale as well. The 15lb is $110, but you can upgrade to five more…Read more...

It might seem a bit tedious to go through all the goals in the Lightning’s 4-2 Game 4 win over the Capitals on Thursday night, which evened the Eastern Conference Finals at two games apiece. But bear with me—in the tensest game of the series so far, every scoring play (minus the empty netter with two seconds to go)…Read more...

Rhodes College beat Franklin College 4-2 on the opening day of D-III regionals today, but it wasn’t without a ninth inning pitching performance that gave new meaning to the phrase “gutting it out.”Read more...

A three-run dinger from Xander Bogaerts gave his Red Sox a 6-0 lead and chased Orioles pitcher Kevin Gausman in the fifth inning of tonight’s game. While Gausman himself couldn’t have been thrilled with his mistake, O’s manager Buck Showalter appeared even more disgusted, as he couldn’t even restrain himself until…Read more...

A recent first-round NHL draft pick might be spoiling his career prospects because of a video game addiction, according to some gossip passed along by hockey analyst Jeff Marek on the Sportsnet podcast 31 Thoughts. Marek, who declined to name the player, cited a conversation with his junior general manager, who said…Read more...

New Red Sox signing J.D. Martinez had a very, very good first month in a Boston uniform—an April OPS of .994 is nothing to sneeze at—but Just Dingers has truly been living up to his nickname since May began. And in his first at-bat tonight against the Orioles, J.D.’s fifth-gear hot streak got even more impressive.Read more...

Aaron Schlossberg, the New York City lawyer who was caught on video dressing down restaurant employees for speaking Spanish and threatening to call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on them because he believed they were undocumented, is having a rough time since activist Shaun King released the clip Wednesday.…Read more...

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Depending on where you’re eating and who you’re eating it with, the rules around food can be stunningly complex. The core concept, however, is that food is inserted into the mouth, and once it’s there, if you find it impossible to masticate with human teeth or discover the object to be a source of pain/bleeding, an…Read more...

Nobody can be blamed for not paying too much attention to swimming in a when the Olympics aren’t going on, but whenever Katie Ledecky gets in the pool, I’ll make an exception.

Ronda Rousey wrestled her second-ever professional match, and it wasn’t even on television.Read more...

Naturally, Alex Honnold is in Yosemite right now. This should not surprise you, because if non-climbers know anything about Honnold, it’s that he climbed El Capitan without a rope a year ago, becoming the first person to free solo the legendary big wall. When I spoke to him yesterday, Honnold was enjoying a rest day,…Read more...

What Casper did for mattresses, Burrow has done for couches. The online sofa store lets you pick your your couch’s size, its fabric, its leg color, and even the height of its arms, add a chaise sectional or ottoman if you want, and get it shipped to your front door for free. If you don’t like it, you even get 30 days…Read more...

The worst trend in modern moviegoing is not the proliferation or quality of superhero movies—there is just the right amount of those, and most of them are very good—but what happens to a theater when Stan Lee makes his way onscreen during one of these movies. I’d say around 2008, when the first Iron Man was released…Read more...

The eighth day he was out on the ice, Scott Gilmour’s eyes started to feel like jelly. They wobbled around in his sockets, and when he looked out, the world seemed like it was smeared with goo. Gilmour and his two companions had been facing headwinds for hours, walking on ice as hard as steel. They needed to find a…Read more...

The NBA Playoffs should be at something like their apex right now, and in the least entertaining possible sense they may well be. There are four notionally entertaining teams left, and they have combined through four games for maybe three entertaining quarters. The league’s biggest and most brilliant stars are still…Read more...

DeMarcus Cousins is in tricky, unpredictable territory now after tearing his Achilles tendon just as the Pelicans were easing into a groove. Without him, they sped up and swept the Blazers. This summer Boogie hits unrestricted free agency while recovering from an injury has sapped many previous stars of their juice.…Read more...

Sports gambling is going to be a disaster for some. The widespread legalization of sports gambling in the United States, for which the Supreme Court paved the way with a ruling earlier this week, will lead to some people gambling all their money away. It will not lead to a renaissance in Atlantic City or anywhere…Read more...

If the 2016 survey of 6,000 sports fans that found no active baseball players cracked the top 50 most popular athletes, the persuasive handwringing over Mike Trout’s likability, and the fact that we just considered this question last week to no definitive answer weren’t convincing, here’s more evidence for the…Read more...

It took Justin Verlander just 2 hours and 36 minutes to dispatch the Angels on Wednesday night, striking out seven in a five-hit shutout. We’ve come to expect this sort of thing since Verlander was traded to Houston last August, but it was especially impressive given the team that was on the receiving end of this…Read more...

Justin Wong is a legendary fighting game player, and he’s nearly unbeatable when given the chance to use an ultra-defensive character or system mechanic. This part of Wong’s skillset was on full display last weekend during the Canada Cup Master Series tournament in Calgary, where he won the stacked event using Falke,…Read more...

There is a cricket ball bouncing down the streets of Bangalore right now after legendary batsman AB de Villiers cranked an enormous dong entirely out of M. Chinnaswamy Stadium.Read more...

This event, which appears to ask its participants to stand in a small ring and wait for a charging bull to visit its fury upon them, is hard to understand. Why would any human being volunteer for this?

Last night, the Houston Rockets blew past the Golden State Warriors in Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals by getting a little more lively on offense and moving the ball. That is cool and good for them, but let’s be honest: the best thing about the game was Chris Paul’s dribbling.

In the middle of his seven-plus scoreless innings in the Texas Rangers’ 5-1 win Wednesday, pitcher Bartolo Colon had to deal with a comebacker from Mariners shortstop Jean Segura. While Colon wasn’t quick enough with his glove, his tummy more or less did the job, and he got the out in time. You can’t teach density.Read more...

A derecho of red shirts swept through Raleigh, N.C. on Wednesday as thousands of teachers and their allies flooded the capitol, in defiance of the pouring rain, to demand better conditions in their state’s public schools.

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It’s been over two weeks since Steph Curry returned from his knee injury to make the Warriors fully operational for the latter stages of the playoffs, and his results have been mixed. He made the Warriors look invincible once again in his first game back against the Pelicans, but he’s been up and down in the five…Read more...

We’ve featured several Mynt massaging products here over the past year, and now, they’re running an Amazon Gold Box deal for the first time ever.

According to the numbers, home ice in the NHL isn’t that big a deal, and I’m never been one to argue with hard data. However, playing in the desert does seem to mean something to the Vegas Golden Knights, who beat the Jets 4-2 Wednesday night to take a 2-1 lead in the Western Conference Finals. The Knights, who were …Read more...

The Rockets can pass! That’s the most stunning takeaway from their 127-105 win against the Warriors tonight, which evened the Western Conference Finals at one game apiece and introduced a prettier, more kinetic version of the Rockets than the team that won 65 games in the regular season. Game 2 saw Houston move away…Read more...

Winnipeg strongman Dustin Byfuglien won’t stop asserting his dominance against lesser men, as the Vegas Golden Knights learned once more in Game 3 of their series tonight. In a big testy scrap near the end of the second period, Byfuglien grabbed hold of both Tomas Nosek and Colin Miller—who are listed at 210 and 196…Read more...

The Vegas Golden Knights have made a habit out of spectacularly over-the-top performances to kick off playoff games, and their home opener in the Western Conference Finals might have been their best yet. The Game 3 pregame party had everything: a drumline, an archer, a swordfight, a flying dude with a Winnipeg flag,…Read more...

If baseball players didn’t wear cleats, Tyler Flowers would have earned himself a dinger in his first at-bat tonight. But because outfielders have those spikes on their feet, the Braves catcher’s long fly ball to center field was hauled in by the Cubs’ Albert Almora Jr., who dug his cleats into the wall to gain some…Read more...

Mike Budenholzer, the head coach who parted ways with the Atlanta Hawks last month after a 24-58 season, has agreed to become the new coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, according to Woj. What a lucky bastard.Read more...

The Luke Heimlich redemption tour carried on this week, cresting with the full Sports Illustrated feature treatment. There are thousands of words, a serious-faced cover photo, an alliterative headline, randomly capitalized words (“the era of Too Much Information” comes up twice), and all the fancy online bells and…Read more...

One year ago today, a random Twitter user tweeted at Wrestling Observer Newsletter editor Dave Meltzer to ask if he thought that Ring of Honor, the number two pro wrestling promotion in the United States, could sell out a 10,000 seat arena. Meltzer didn’t think so, but Cody Rhodes, a regular in the promotion, called…Read more...

The Knicks did not luck out, which is basically an evergreen sentence. Their lottery pick did not leap into the top three, which had only a six percent chance of occurring last night. It instead landed at nine, as expected. I feel a little good about this.Read more...

Luka Dončić is not only a presumptive top-two pick in June’s NBA Draft, he’s also the proud owner of a Gamer’s Heart. According to a profile written last month by ESPN’s Mina Kimes, Dončić is a fan of the Call Of Duty series. He also “spends two to three hours a day playing video games like FIFA and Overwatch,”…Read more...