Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Well, here are several layers of shit to sift through: the Maryland Stadium Authority has increased security around the Ray Lewis statue outside the Ravens’ arena, after fans filed a petition requesting it be removed because Lewis knelt during the national anthem on Sunday. Even though Lewis has repeatedly and publiclyRead more...

Chargers superfan Dan Jauregui—better known as Boltman, the persona he’s adopted at games for decades—is, uh, extremely frustrated after briefly being told that he would be ejected if he did not remove his mask during his first game at the recently relocated team’s new home stadium in Los Angeles on Sunday.Read more...

“The process never ends,” said 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo during media day on Monday, and while those words sounded perhaps a bit conservative at the time, now that we’ve gotten a glimpse at his team in practice, Colangelo could be right.Read more...

Damn J.D. Martinez’s right foot. If the then-Tigers outfielder hadn’t sprained it back in Spring Training earlier this year, keeping him off the diamond until mid-May, who knows what kind of season he would have had. Watching Martinez smash the ball silly in Arizona—and seeing his home run total swell to something…Read more...

The fallout from the FBI’s NCAA sting has claimed another job: that of Alabama director of basketball operations Kobie Baker, who came to the school from a position with the NCAA as its assistant director of enforcement for basketball development. Yep.Read more...

Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. Keep up.Read more...

Ervin Maccarty suffered through a rather unique shark attack earlier this month—one in which the shark just would not let the hell go of him. With the small nurse shark attached to his stomach, he climbed back on his boat off the coast of Florida, where his friends tried to help him. Some choice quotes from video of…Read more...

Zach Lowe had Kevin Arnovitz on his podcast Tuesday to discuss the five most puzzling teams in the NBA, one of which was the Charlotte Hornets. The Eastern Conference is a lukewarm soup of bad teams, mediocre teams, and the Cavs and Celtics, which means the Hornets could plausibly finish fourth or 10th in the…Read more...

The Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins decided to visit Donald Trump at the White House, in a statement that was released soon after the President uninvited the never-really-invited Golden State Warriors. Former NHL player Georges Laraque, who played for roughly two years in Pittsburgh over a 12-season career,…Read more...

Michy Batshuayi has never been Chelsea’s best striker in his year-plus of service for the Blues, but he’s been there when they’ve truly needed a goal, and he was able to cement an eternal place in club history when he scored the goal that won the Premier League last year.Read more...

Steph Curry didn’t mince words when asked about the cover of this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated, on which was photoshopped front-and-center and arm-in-arm with Roger Goodell and LeBron James under the (bullshit) guise of “unity.”Read more...

PSG beat Bayern Munich by a score of 3-0 in the Champions League today. Edinson Cavani scored his team’s second goal after being set up nicely by Kylian Mbappé. Here is video of that goal, which you should watch for the goal’s coolness and for Cavani’s demonstrated happiness after he scores, but you should not make…Read more...

The worst-case scenario for the Laver Cup—a first attempt to construct an all-star game for men’s tennis, pitting the best players from Europe against the best players from everywhere else—was that it’d end up an elaborate, expensive excuse to smush nemeses Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal onto the same team for the…Read more...

When I set out for the Meadowlands on Sunday morning with Anders Kapur, I hoped to find tailgating Jets fans who were in a good mood. This might sound like an impossible mission—are Jets fans even capable of experiencing joy?—but my interactions with Jets fans through the years have taught me that their fatalism is…Read more...

Impassioned speeches, elaborate handshakes, and weird meals are all played out. The new hot thing in pregame rituals is taking a firm grasp of your buddy’s hand, looking deep into his eyes, and shouting in Spanish the names of as many animals as you can think of. Allow Kyle Seager and Carlos Ruiz to demonstrate:

Despite being this year’s installment of what the Steam store description calls “the highest rated annual sports title,” NBA 2K18 has a “Mostly Negative” rating with over 3,000 reviews and counting. I investigated. The psychedelic spectacle it unfurled unto me shocked me to the core of my guts. I’m speechless.Read more...

Only hours after Rick Pitino was effectively fired, basketball recruits are beginning to flee Louisville, and why wouldn’t they? Pitino is finished, and that will likely be just the start the Cardinals’ struggles. Nobody really knows what the full scope of consequences of the FBI’s sting on recruiting fraud will be,…Read more...

“The schools are, in a way, the victims.”

It’s always fascinating to find out what famous athletes eat, to marvel at the absurd amount of calories Michael Phelps consumes or make fun of Tom Brady’s bland vegan kibble. Kohei Uchimura, the greatest male gymnast of all-time, might have the weirdest athlete diet yet.Read more...

The only way Claudiu Bumba, winger for Romania’s Concordia Chianjna, was going to overcome the terrible angle and distance from which he decided to pop a shot in today’s match against Dinamo București was if he put a truly insane amount of curl on the ball to get it to fly into the far corner. Which is exactly what he…Read more...

NBA teams have taken their requisite pictures which can be disseminated in promotional materials you’ll probably throw away almost immediately, but it’s unfair to condemn the practice of making enormous people pose in dumb ways with balls, since the result is so wonderfully goofy. Here are, for one reason or another,…Read more...

A week after President Trump galvanized the entire NFL against him following remarks about how owners should fire any “son of a bitch” who protested the national anthem and somehow made commissioner Roger Goodell—Roger fucking Goodell—into the good guy, he’s returned to that well, because his strength is rambling…Read more...

Three years after the original model launched to little fanfare, the new Amazon Echo is here. Complete with improved speaker quality, a refreshed design, and the ability to customize it with different face plates, it’s available now for $99, or $80 less than the previous model.

The fallout from the this week’s FBI crackdown on shady college basketball recruiting tactics is only just beginning. Several college coaches, basketball-adjacent businessmen, and Adidas employees were charged with fraud and bribery on Monday, and the hammer has yet to truly drop on many of the programs implicated in…Read more...

The Packers and Bears resume the oldest rivalry in professional football tomorrow night, with the Bears visiting Lambeau Field for the teams’ 195th meeting. (The series, amazingly, is currently tied 94-94-6.) One man who will be in attendance for the game is Russell Beckman.Read more...

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that DirecTV was giving some customers a refund on their NFL Sunday Ticket packages if they said they were canceling due to players’ national anthem protests. DirecTV has yet to confirm the updated policy—we have reached out for comment—but a customer service agent made it…Read more...

Boston University’s CTE Center released a study yesterday detailing research on a protein found in spinal fluid that, they say, “may be a novel target for future CTE biomarker studies” that could eventually be part of a panel of tests to identify chronic traumatic encephalopathy—the pathology at the center of…Read more...

If you’ve purchased LED light bulbs in the past few years, they’ve almost certainly been 60W equivalents. But if you miss the days when we all choked the planet to death by burning blindingly bright 100W bulbs, you’re in luck. You can get eight 100W equivalent LED bulbs from Amazon today for just $30, an all-time low,…Read more...

Louisville fired Rick Pitino Wednesday, according to ESPN, shortly after letting go athletic director Tom Jurich, who reportedly refused to fire Pitino himself. The axing follows yet another scandal for the Cardinals head coach, this one involving payments made to a recruit by Adidas officials in exchange for his…Read more...

Carmelo Anthony will be Oklahoma City’s starting power forward, according to coach Billy Donovan and Melo himself. This gives the Thunder a very cool and good starting five with tons of switching fluidity on defense; much more importantly: LOL.Read more...

Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.Read more...

Former NFL player and noted nonsense-talker Ray Lewis, who has previously been critical of Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality, linked arms with several Ravens players and went down to two knees before Sunday’s game in London. The act seemed like a strange…Read more...

With a 6-1 win over the Rays, the Yankees clinched home-field advantage for the wild card game, likely against the Twins. But the most drama came in the eighth, when a fan sitting behind home plate was ejected from the stadium for trying to tip pitches with Gary Sanchez at bat.

Gizmodo A Freakishly Large New Species of Rat Has Been Discovered in the Solomon Islands | Jalopnik Here’s Why Puerto Rico Was Denied The Same Shipping Waiver Texas And Florida Got For Hurricane Relief | Kotaku Osaka Court’s Ruling Helps Destroy Tattoos In Japan | Lifehacker How to Shut Down a Condescending Coworker…Read more...

Trenton Central High School’s freshman football team had a game on Sept. 14, and fans arriving for the game apparently had the opportunity to purchase “Trenton football” t-shirts.

Maybe admitting to this makes me a bad sports-knower, but until starting this post I had forgotten every single member of the Vegas Golden Knights not named Marc-Andre Fleury. (I do remember that they’re going to be downright awful in their inaugural season, which is fine, that’s what expansion teams are supposed to…Read more...

Anker has long been our readers’ go-to manufacturer for inexpensive mobile phone accessories, but now they’re stretching their tentacles into higher-end markets, and you can save $150 on one of their most ambitious products to date, today only.

Behold, another move to co-opt a crude outline of Colin Kaepernick’s protest, divorce it of any meaning or purpose, and cash it in for a branding opportunity. The Green Bay Packers released a statement tonight asking their fans to link arms in a display of unity during the national anthem before Thursday night’s game.Read more...

The Minnesota Lynx staved off a second-half comeback by the Los Angeles Sparks in tonight’s Game 2 of the WNBA Finals—with the Sparks squandering two key opportunities in a wild and messy final minute before losing, 70-68, to even the series at one game apiece.Read more...

During my nightly viewing of Fox News, a familiar nasally, barely comprehensible voice called out from the abyss, mumbling, I have opinions about black people protesting!Read more...

Carlos Carvalhal, the manager of underachieving English second-tier club Sheffield Wednesday, faced some tough questions from the media following a 4-2 defeat to crosstown rivals Sheffield United. Rather than answer simply with words, a testy Carvalhal pulled out a 20-pound note and gave reporters a visual…Read more...

Sharks winger Joel Ward said that he may kneel in protest during the national anthem in a San Jose Mercury News interview focusing on his experience as one of hockey’s relatively few black players.Read more...

Miami Dolphins wide receiver Jarvis Landry will not face charges stemming from an August investigation into alleged domestic battery, per the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, which announced it would be looking into possible battery charges against Landry early last month. The investigation stemmed from an…Read more...

The hits arrived swiftly, recklessly, striking brains and causing damage. Not tackles on this Sunday’s NFL fields. Not this time. These were journalists contorting Aaron Hernandez’s diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy into arguments as twisted as the man himself.

Fresh off his buyout from Chicago, Dwyane Wade is headed to Cleveland, signing a one-year, $2.3 million deal with the Cavs, according to The Vertical’s Shams Charania.Read more...

Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. The baby picked tonight’s selection.Read more...

If you heard Gerald McCoy’s call to come to the Buccaneers’ headquarters and talk your shit to his face yesterday, I have bad news for you: The Bucs won’t let you, because answering McCoy’s call to come “hold court” with him does not (for some reason) constitute “official business.”

Nearly a week after Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are facing a massive humanitarian crisis and the nation of Dominica has been reduced to a “giant debris field.”

I’ve never lost a team. I don’t and can’t really understand what Raiders fans are going through with the planned departure of the team from Oakland; that’s what I came here to figure out.Read more...

Jake Elliott’s big kick not only won the game for the Eagles Sunday. It might’ve won Elliott a big payday.Read more...