Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Championship NBA teams have always revolved around star players, but the glue guys/role players make it possible for franchises to become title contenders. There are stars all over the Association, but only those with the best supporting casts can make deep runs into the postseason year after year. Regarding role…Read more...

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In the 24 games since the Arizona Cardinals started 7-0 in 2021, the team is 8-16. They were embarrassed by the Rams in the playoffs, Deandre Hopkins had to sit out six games due to a positive PED test, Kyler Murray and Kliff Kingsbury either think their dysfunctional relationship is normal or are apathetic toward it,…Read more...

RICKY WILLIAMS was sitting on a couch in a smoke-filled room, blazing a joint to celebrate his cannabis lifestyle brand “Highsman” during one of the biggest sports weekends of the year.Read more...

A player signaling for medical help for an injured teammate is nothing new. Lawrence Taylor called for it after he saw what did to an opponent’s leg.Read more...

If part of the reason you watch sports is to see things that will live forever, then Tuesday was a day for you.

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Sometimes those who cover the game have to fistfuck a narrative into fitting. And then sometimes Lionel Messi does that.Read more...

I spend a lot of time on Baseball-Reference. Apart from it being my job to do research and correctly relay player statistics to you, the readers, I enjoy looking back at old names from the late-90s and 2000s to see if they were as good as I remember them in my head. Casey Blake? Better than I remember. Mark Teahen?…Read more...

This Golden State Warriors in San Francisco thing will never sit right with me.Read more...

They say millennials are obsessed with trophies, but our elders have been expanding the ones propping up that industry. Commissioner Adam Silver’s quest to revitalize the regular season’s infrastructure has been his pet project for almost his entire eight-year stint. One day after Kawhi Leonard expressed his apathy…Read more...

After so much turmoil to start the 2022 campaign, the Brooklyn Nets have finally begun to look like the contenders many expected. The Nets have had two different four-game win streaks since Nov. 27, winning eight of their last nine. Suddenly Brooklyn is five games over .500 (17-12) and in fourth place in the Eastern…Read more...

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Technology is terrifying. That’s why I still do all my research via newspaper and all my math by abacus. However, when I heard about an AI that could write professional-level essays and news articles with ease, my curiosity got the better of me. I’d been hearing about it everywhere. Some of my favorite YouTube…Read more...

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When trying to illustrate how much a team is struggling, one of sportswriters’ favorite go-to’s is, “If the season ended today…” As in, “If the season ended today, the Miami Heat would need to win two play-in games only to face the team that beat them in 2022 in the first round.”

The NHL season has been invigorated by some surprise teams and new blood announcing themselves as either contenders now or soon to be. The New Jersey Devils sit atop the Metropolitan by open lengths, redefining what the Devils mean as a whole with their obscene amounts of speed and skill. The Dallas Stars have the…Read more...

Editor’s note: This column has been updated to include a comment from Kim Mulkey.Read more...

College football’s most-beloved pirate, Mike Leach, died Monday night at age 61 following complications from a heart condition. Leach was a longtime high-level-conference head coach, starting with 10 seasons at Texas Tech, and eight at the helm of Washington State, before spending his last three at Mississippi State.…Read more...

It’s time to check in on the teams that can’t get out of their own way. We’re coming up on the home stretch of the 2022 NFL season, and much of it has been unpredictable, but there are always a few teams we expect to disappoint their fan base. Now let’s get into the Powerless Rankings for Week 14.

It’s easy to laugh when your team is up by two touchdowns. Jokes and giggles are plentiful when the Colt McCoy-led Arizona Cardinals — Kyler Murray left the game after suffering a non-contact injury — turn the ball over on consecutive possessions, the first of which was converted for a touchdown.Read more...

Late last week, former MLB reliever T.J. House came out in a heartwarming and beautiful Instagram post. Coinciding and inspired by the Respect For Marriage Act, House included pictures of him and his recent fiancé, while telling the story of his journey to arrive at the decision to come out.Read more...

As an analyst on TV, you need to be either entertaining, say something shocking, or have controversial opinions, but sometimes they can go a little far in attempting to make Twitter waves. Robert Griffin III is the latest, basically saying NFL teams don’t want the Detroit Lions in the playoffs.Read more...

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The MVP discussion has been whittled down to an A and B conversation between Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts. Joe Burrow is eavesdropping, but in the final quarter of the season, he is on the outside looking in. As things currently stand, Mahomes occupies the B slot in this race as Hurts is edging out the 2018 MVP in…Read more...

It was wholly unfair to the Seattle Kraken that they had to be the expansion team to follow the Vegas Golden Knights. The Knights warped everyone’s view of what an expansion team should be, reaching the Stanley Cup Final in their very first year. The Knights took advantage of a swath of moronic NHL GMs who didn’t…Read more...

The San Francisco 49ers have become the scariest team in the NFL over the last seven weeks of the season. On Sunday, the Niners continued to invoke their dominance over the NFC by shutting down and nearly shutting out Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 35-7. Besides having the best defense in the league, the…Read more...

The difference was clear last night. Of the two quarterbacks selected top-10 in the 2020 NFL Draft on the field on Sunday night, only one has a chance to become one of the best in the league.Read more...

Perhaps it’s a sign that the USMNT is moving into the big time that they hold their big controversies until after the tournament than before. We’ve been through Jürgen Klinsmann keeping Landon Donovan at home in 2014 simply to show everyone what a brain genius he was. Or John Harkes way back when. This time around,…Read more...

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The Dak Prescott discourse has become one of the most polarizing in the NFL. He’s not an MVP-caliber quarterback, but he’s been a steady hand for seven seasons. He has a higher career passer rating than Tony Romo and led explosive offenses, but Prescott’s leap to top-5 quarterback never came, and now, during the…Read more...

There were a handful of upsets in Week 14, but for the most part, chalk held up. The teams that were expected to win, and also contend in the playoffs, held serve during the final week of byes in the 2022 season.

Grit is all well and good, but it takes far more than turning a cliche sports’ term into an acronym on national television to get the most out of professional athletes.

It’s a visceral feeling. We all go through it. Team A fails to convert on third down, and yet the flag alert on the score bug pops up, and you get this sinking feeling (unless you’re a fan of Team A, that is. I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never seen Justin Fields get a roughing the passer call). The camera pans to the…Read more...

You have to hand it to Tom Brady, who is having the best sad season after having the most glittery career in league history. It was one thing when his divorce was playing out in front of all, as he grouped together scud after scud that landed five yards in front of his receiver.

The free agency of Odell Beckham Jr. began with the energy of a 10-figure lottery jackpot. Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer reported in early November that Beckham would soon be fully cleared to play, and also that he expected there to be a bidding war for his services.

While this World Cup has had its share of great stories, the overarching one that started well before the tournament was Lionel Messi. This is his tournament, whatever Argentina does. Either it’s the last great failure of him (it’s never by him when it comes to Argentina). It’s always that the rest of the team have…Read more...

Boston’s league-leading winning percentage meant nothing once Golden State decides to ascend to a higher plane of basketball nirvana. Golden State’s geezers might sprint out the gates as quickly as they did in year’s past, but when they need to hit the thrusters, they still have the energy to tap into a higher gear…Read more...

The Detroit Lions are currently 5-7 — two games away from a wild card spot. They have won four of their last five, and their lone loss was by only three points to the Buffalo Bills — a team many people consider Super Bowl favorites. With five games left on their schedule, only two are against teams with a winning…Read more...

To the surprise of very few college football fans, Caleb Williams lifted the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night. The USC quarterback finished with 4,075 yards, 47 total touchdowns, and just four interceptions, all while leading his team to within a win of the College Football Playoff. Of all the quarterbacks Lincoln…Read more...

Here are some of the best reactions and tweets to Harry Kane’s devastating penalty kick miss that leads to England’s dismissal from the World Cup.

First things first: As the sport of soccer mourns, take a moment to remember Grant Wahl, a journalist of the highest order.Read more...

It would be folly and insulting to not write something about Grant Wahl. With the story breaking, and all that surrounded it last night on social media, it was hard not to feel a terrible chill. Given how thorough and great of a journalist Mr. Wahl was, the fact that his last newsletter was about the callousness of…Read more...

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There’s no better feeling in the world than risking very little money and winning a boatload of cash. It’s why parlays have become so popular in the last few years. Why make $100 on a $100 bet, when you could make $10,000 just by picking six more games correctly, right?!

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There comes a point when public figures are no longer defensible. Donald Sterling and Robert Sarver were scumbags way before we had evidence that they were. So when the audio of Sterling leaked, or the Baxter Holmes piece hit the internet, there was zero reason to go to bat for them. Let the investigations play out,…Read more...