Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

It is with great sadness and more than a little frustration at having stayed up to watch the stupid thing that I must report that the NBA dunk contest, which looked for a few years there like it might be good again, is, in fact, bad again.Read more...

For a period of decades, USA Swimming fostered a “culture of sexual abuse” and ignored or covered up hundreds of cases of underage swimmers being sexually abused, according to a report by the Orange County Register. From the report:Read more...

Auburn sophomore forward Anfernee McLemore suffered a grotesque injury late in the first half of the Tigers’ SEC matchup at South Carolina just days after putting up one of the best performances of his career. Warning: the video is graphic.Read more...

When Ester Ledecká crossed the finish line of this morning’s run of the women’s Super-G a hundredth of a second ahead of reigning gold medalist Anna Veith, the Czech couldn’t believe she’d beaten the Austrian champ. Ledecká, after all, is best known for her achievements in a completely different event: snowboarding,…Read more...

The NBA announced Saturday the finalists for the 2018 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame class, and it’s a pretty sweet group: the 13 finalists include Steve Nash, Jason Kidd, Grant Hill, Ray Allen, and Chris Webber, among others:Read more...

Last night’s NBA Rising Stars Challenge was a laugher, and not even just for the usual reasons (no defense, sloppy passing, reckless shooting, general exhibition behavior): This time, the World team just kinda flattened the U.S. team, from start to finish, so that what is always a talent show masquerading as a contest…Read more...

Part of the discussion around the NBA’s new All Star format, where the teams are selected via a draft by the top two players in fan voting, is whether the draft should be televised, or otherwise broadcast, or in any way made public. You see, that was not done this time around, and so fans (and players) have mostly had…Read more...

Chris Mazdzer’s silver-medal performance was the signature achievement for USA Luge in Pyeongchang, but no event better exemplified the American effort in this strangest and fastest of sports than the team relay. The Americans have enviable depth in the men’s, women’s and doubles disciplines, with a team-wide balance…Read more...

The U.S. Men’s Olympic hockey team, haver of plenty of NHL-caliber talent, was shredded by the awesome Russian team, 4-0, in a preliminary round Group B match today.Read more...

GANGNEUNG, South Korea—Recent Grand Prix champion and Olympic favorite Nathan Chen shocked the skating world earlier this week with a pair of disappointing short programs. A wipeout in his Olympic debut during the team event brought the U.S. down to bronze and a disastrous first half of the men’s individual…Read more...

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea—Without any NHL players participating in the Olympics this year for the first time since 1994, the level of play in Pyeongchang is simply not what it’s been at previous Winter Games. Obviously, no team is as handicapped by this decision as the U.S. The roster that includes just four college…Read more...

The Switch Pro controller isn’t just one of the best ways to control your Nintendo Switch, it might be one of the best gamepads ever made, period. If you have a Switch and still haven’t picked one up, $50 is by far the best deal we’ve ever seen on it, and we don’t expect it to last long.

For the first time since Dick Button in 1952, the reigning Olympic gold medalist in men’s figure skating has defended his title as Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu scored a combined 317.85 to obliterate the competition.Read more...

Weather postponements led American ski star Mikaela Shiffrin to skip today’s Super-G competition, leaving the event reigning champion Anna Veith’s to win. And Veith had an easy lead after Lindsey Vonn, among others, faltered. Then arrived Czech Ester Ledecka, a world champion snowboarder who borrowed Shiffrin’s skis…Read more...

Nathan Chen entered tonight’s free skate in 17th place thanks to a disastrous short program, but showed up with a massive 215.08 thanks to cleanly delivering six quad jumps in the performance:Read more...

Laura Ingraham says basketballers should stick to their sport and keep their opinions to themselves. Here, then, are some examples of her employer believing otherwise:

“Did we lose him?”Read more...

Skating on ice dates all the way back to 3,000 BC. Or, anyway, the oldest pair of skates date back that far. The blades on these early skates are made of animal bones with holes bored through them; leather straps attached the skate to the foot.

Bronx-born fencer Daryl Homer won silver in the individual saber at the 2016 Olympics, but he’s watching the Pyeongchang games from home, just like you. So, as you’ll see in the video above, we had him play a little game.

“I really like to fuck,” said Team Wings’s Julianne Escobedo Shepherd.Read more...

Michigan State trustee and defense attorney Dan Kelly, the man who apologized to victims of Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse for only viewing the case through a legal lens, once used victim blaming and another time used victim shaming when defending Michigan public school systems in child sexual abuse cases. The tactics…Read more...

The Carolina Panthers have reinstated interim GM Marty Hurney after the NFL found no evidence of a violation of the league’s personal conduct policy, according to the team.Read more...

Tom Scocca is leaving us, after a combined six and a half years at Deadspin, Gawker, and the Special Projects Desk. Here’s how we’ll remember him.Read more...

Sage Northcutt—an action figure brought to life—fights this weekend against some French guy who’s 1-3 in the UFC. Here’s how the Northcutt weight cut’s going.

25 years ago this week, the top story in pro wrestling was, in many ways, also the biggest pro wrestling story in the history of the business’s insider press.

The details on Jimmy Garoppolo’s new contract with the 49ers are available for scrutiny, and it’s hard not to notice how beneficial the terms turned out to be for both the player and the team.Read more...

Robin Haase started strong but appeared to vomit into a garbage can during a changeover in the final set of today’s 4-6, 6-1, 6-1 loss to Roger Federer. With the third-round victory at Rotterdam, 36-year-old Roger Federer will become the oldest No. 1. in the history of the ATP, reclaiming the top rank 14 years and 17…Read more...

After constant overhauls with the rules in recent years, NASCAR isn’t the same NASCAR as it was a few seasons ago. If you want to tune into the Daytona 500 on Sunday and start following the rest of the 2018 season, you may need a refresher course first. Welcome to class.Read more...

Yankees minor leaguer Thairo Estrada was shot in his right hip last week in Venezuela during what he says was a botched robbery at a restaurant. Manager Aaron Boone said he was recovering quickly, and should be available for the “bulk of the season.”Read more...

Two American tennis players with a history of conflict had a lengthy argument during their New York Open match on Friday, which they followed with another exchange of words during the post-match handshake. That much we know for sure. Everything that came after has been disputed by both parties.Read more...

You probably already got your Bean boots from last year and are ready for whatever 2018 throws at you (weather-wise, at least). But if you need to replace a few things, or you need a new pair, L.L.Bean is giving you 25% off any order of with the code GET25. Stave off what’s left of the winter weather in the best way…Read more...

West Brom players Gareth Barry, Jonny Evans, Jake Livermore, and Boaz Myhill were detained by local police in Barcelona yesterday after allegedly commandeering a taxi that had taken them from their hotel to a nearby McDonald’s drive-thru, driving the cab back to their hotel, and ditching the vehicle outside before…Read more...

No one but the 100 or so unemployed baseball players invited to attend was admitted to the shadow spring training that the MLB Players Association opened at Bradenton, Fla.’s IMG Academy on Wednesday. The press was banned from the facility, and reporters who tried to get in were turned away; at least one team sent…Read more...

Curlers are supposed to be good sports. As Matt Sussman wrote last year, the “first page of the official rulebook discusses The Spirit of Curling for a reason.” Curlers call their own fouls, even in the Olympics.Read more...

Lindsey Vonn is the most decorated female skier in history, and the most decorated skier, man or woman, in U.S. history. She’s also the athlete whose motto is “If you fall, pick yourself back up.” And with good reason. It isn’t just that she’s fallen, a lot. It’s that each time she picks herself back up, she doesn’t…Read more...

ESPN.com altered the published headline of one story and deleted Twitter and Facebook posts about it, and halted the promotion of another story, all under pressure from advertising partners, according to an ESPN source and internal emails viewed by Deadspin.Read more...

Phantom Thread was a sensuous, satisfying movie, and critics agreed that this was mostly because mushrooms finally got their due in popular culture. If you spent the last two decades milling around, stumbling over tree roots, wondering when fungus would appear as a key plot point in a Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle, you…Read more...

American figure skater Nathan Chen came into Pyeongchang with the promise of a possible coronation. He’ll leave, instead, with a whole lot of work left to do. The 18-year-old winner of back-to-back U.S. national titles, who was many people’s pick to win gold at the men’s individual competition in his first Olympics,…Read more...

Lower in this blog post is a really heinous photo of Tigers pitcher Travis Wood’s finger. It’s bad! I’m warning you here. I’ll even type some more words to force it further down the page so you don’t see it unless you’re trying to.

Amphibians, as every little kid knows, are born in water, as larvae, breathing water through gills. Later they undergo metamorphosis, and emerge from the water with (in most cases) air-breathing respiratory systems. Even after they’ve taken to land, though, they retain highly permeable skin that can act as a secondary…Read more...

The Swedish men’s hockey team just barely squeaked by Germany this morning, riding an early goal from Victor Stahlberg to win 1-0 despite getting outshot 28-26. Two games into the Olympics, that win plus a 4-0 defeat of Norway in their opening game suggest that things are going smoothly. They aren’t.Read more...

Dale Hansen is a WFAA sportscaster whose “Extra Point” segments sometimes go viral; we’ve featured his work here multiple times. Yesterday, he turned his attention to the school shooting in Florida, one of eight already this year. An excerpt:Read more...

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea—One hundred and nineteen skiers took off at 30-second intervals in the 15km cross-country ski race at the 2018 Olympics today. Three didn’t finish or were disqualified. Of the 116 athletes who successfully skied the course, 115 of them were faster than German Madrazo, the 43-year-old lone…Read more...

Skeleton exists because someone decided luge wasn’t terrifying enough. What if luge, but head-first? Accordingly, skeleton sliders tend to personalize their helmets like hockey goalies, having them painted in artistic, patriotic, or intimidating ways.Read more...

Laura Ingraham is a Fox News personality whose job is to say nice things about Donald Trump and generally seem kind of impatient, a job that she carries off while exuding all the charisma and personal warmth of a clenched butt cheek. Last night, during her show Laura Ingraham Would Like To Speak To A Manager, she took…Read more...

Jalopnik Someone Left This 720-Mile C6 Corvette Z06 In A Storage Unit And Now It’s On eBay | Kotaku The Donkey Kong Timeline Is Truly Disturbing | io9 Titans Has Cast a Vital Member of the Doom Patrol | Lifehacker You Could Win a Bitcoin By Beating This New Video Game |Read more...

Pita Taufatofua joined the longer-than-you-might-think list of athletes to compete at the Winter and Summer Olympic Games when he raced in the 15 kilometer freestyle today. Taufatofua, of course, is best known as the “Shirtless Tongan.”Read more...

The Norovirus outbreak at the 2018 Olympics has mostly been confined to staff and security personnel, but today it was confirmed that the bug has finally reached the athletes.

ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported tonight that a member of the Michigan State basketball team, Brock Washington, is under investigation for possible criminal sexual conduct. Campus police took a report back in August from a woman who said Washington “forcibly groped her without her permission,” Paula Lavigne reported.…Read more...

Yuzuru Hanyu, the defending world and Olympic champion, took the ice first tonight in the final flight of the men’s short program to great anticipation. Hanyu, who is considered to be one of the greatest male skaters of all-time, hadn’t competed since injuring his ankle in November; though considered one of the…Read more...