Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

The expression “two steps forward, one step back,” isn’t just the realization that progress is being hindered — it also describes a situation the NBA could potentially be in. After ridding itself of degenerate former governors (owners) who did heinous acts during their tenures in Los Angeles (Donald Sterling) and…Read more...

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With the release of the NFL Players Association’s first-ever Club Report Cards, players have more power than ever before. Of course, not everything that came from these reports was shocking. No one’s jaw hit the floor when it was revealed that the Los Angeles Chargers’ medical staff was voted one of the worst in the…Read more...

It’s no secret that last season the Baltimore Ravens’ passing attack at times looked like a little brother wildly swinging at air while his older brother holds his forehead. There is plenty of blame to be passed around for the Ravens’ struggling passing offense. General Manager Eric DeCosta gave an answer about it…Read more...

Welcome to Deadspin’s The Sports Nihilist, where all is for naught and we are but accidental jolts of electrified meat stuck to the surface of a rock in an indifferent universe. Fuck you.Read more...

The NBA All-Hunk team was released Thursday, and I have to say, it was reassuring to discover that I have no idea what qualifies as attractive for men. It’s nothing against who’s hot or not. I’m just saying my needle isn’t moved one way or the other.Read more...

Just like your local jungle gym, the NFL Combine hasn’t been modernized in decades. They’re still using the same stale gym equipment and drills Al Bundy practiced with at Polk High School to measure the relative strength and athleticism of NFL prospects. It’s past due time for the NFL combine to undergo a renovation.…Read more...

One of the biggest mysteries from the 2022 NFL season was “What the hell happened to Russell Wilson?” This was a conundrum that not even the Scooby Doo gang could solve. Danger-Russ was supposed to help the Denver Broncos compete with the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers in the AFC West, but instead posted…Read more...

Quarterbacks are always under the biggest microscope in football, that’s a given. And there’s not a more unnecessary magnifying glass on signal callers than the NFL Combine. Going through all the scouting drills appears important for about five minutes. How many analysts quoted Tom Brady or Peyton Manning’s time in…Read more...

In this era of NFL parity, it’s rare to see the Super Bowl loser make it back the following year. Since 2000, it’s been rare to see Super Bowl losers make back-to-back appearances in the sport’s biggest game. Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman is tasked with putting his team in a position to get back…Read more...

One of the observations that persists among people who watch Ja Morant play is, “Oh my god, he’s going to break his hip if he keeps going to the rim like that.” It’s hard for normal people to understand how someone is not only that fast and explosive, but that coordinated. Morant attempts stuff not even NBA defenses…Read more...

Kevin Durant is a master of disguise who is already blending in seamlessly with the Phoenix Suns. Not many teams can do the DMX Challenge and present as many looks as the Suns can with their new wing roaming the floor. Most guys take a second to re-integrate into an offense or to heal from an MCL sprain or, y’know, a…Read more...

Less than a month after Brian Flores’ class-action lawsuit against the league and multiple teams for their alleged racist hiring practices wasn’t mentioned at NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s annual press conference at the Super Bowl — where he was pressed again about the lack of diversity in the NFL and NFL Media…Read more...

If Lavar Ball was to be believed, NBA fans should be nearing phase two of the Ball-aissance. Lonzo is in his sixth year, LaMelo is in his third, and LiAngelo, well, if things had panned out, he’d be somewhere in between. But LiAngelo currently has no entries on his Basketball Reference page, Lonzo is shut down for the…Read more...

The last year Gonzaga missed the NCAA Tournament was 1998, quite a run from a lowly West Coast Conference school in the oddly placed town of Spokane, Washington to a national powerhouse. The most unique team in college sports is a fixture of March Madness, becoming more closely associated with the blue bloods than the…Read more...

Being the go-to option sounds fun. It looks great. Michael Jordan making last-second shots; Patrick Mahomes spinning out of trouble and throwing a laser for a touchdown; Quinta Brunson delivering on another great episode of Abbott Elementary as the show’s creator and lead actor. Paul George has held that role in his…Read more...

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Former Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer sued Deadspin and former managing editor Chris Baud over three statements in this article from 2021, written about a temporary restraining order a woman sought after a sexual encounter with Bauer. According to the woman, the sex was initially consensual but turned into a violent…Read more...

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Every year around this time, football fans get bombarded with numbers, scores, and facts about a player’s athleticism based on their combine drills. “This guy ran a sub 4.6 40!” “Did you see so and so’s vertical?” “Joey Donuts over there has enormous hands!” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Too often these statistics are…Read more...

With NFL combine workouts slated to start tomorrow with D-linemen and linebackers taking the field, many of this upcoming draft’s top prospects had the opportunity to speak with the media about the opportunity and what they expected moving forward. It wasn’t just prospects though. Many general managers from around the…Read more...

This morning I was assigned to evaluate the Aaron Rodgers-Aubrey Marcus podcast about the quarterback, excuse me, person’s self-reflection after the darkness. Over what was a sprawling conversation that wasn’t as interesting as the two thought it was, I am now dumber for having listened to it. Oh, and by the way,…Read more...

What are the odds that the NCAA and the NBA’s scoring records would fall within a month? Nothing lasts forever, but the fact that it took a global pandemic and the NCAA granting athletes an extra year of eligibility for Detroit Mercy guard Antoine Davis to come within 26 points of eclipsing the NCAA’s all-time scoring…Read more...

Projected No. 1 overall NFL Draft selection Jalen Carter’s path to the league just got a lot bumpier.Read more...

In what universe did any NBA fan ever think they’d hear Dwight Howard’s name followed by the phrase, three-point sniper? I’m still in disbelief typing this, but it took Howard traveling to Taiwan and playing in the T1 League for this to happen. On Tuesday, Howard participated in the T1 League three-point contest and…Read more...

The Dan Snyder era has had a dumpster-grade stench from the beginning. But just when it seemed like he’d leave peacefully, his destructive personality kicked back in. Snyder is finally leaning towards selling the team on his own, but not without kicking and screaming.Read more...

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Welcome to Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE MONTH, our world-renowned celebration of stupidity in and around the world of collegiate and professional sports. Now with 50 percent more slideshow to placate the bosses! The Industrial Revolution was a mistake!Read more...

It’s official, the old heads of the NBA heads have welcomed LeBron James as one of their own. The Athletic recently polled 101 former NBA players, asking which current player is the best player in the Association. In a league that has an abundance of under-30-year-old talent that it is bursting out of the sides, the…Read more...

With the MLB season around the corner, most of the offseason moves we saw over the last few months seem like they happened eons ago. One of the most coveted young players in baseball, Bryan Reynolds, requesting a trade would’ve made waves in any other offseason, but even as rumors surrounding his future continue to…Read more...

NFL free agency is about two weeks away, and along with that comes the opportunity for potential trades across the league. Los Angeles Rams cornerback Jalen Ramsey is expected to be a name that could be moving to another team via the trade block. While every team would welcome a six-time Pro Bowl selection, three-time…Read more...

Last week, sports outlets spent an inordinate amount of words on the NBA All-Star Game’s poor ratings. The telecast came in with 4.39 million viewers, a sizable drop from 2022 when 6.28 million people tuned in. Well, LIV Golf’s TV debut on the CW drew 291,000 fans on Sunday, which was 5,000 better than they had…Read more...

Packers’ QB Aaron Rodgers has reportedly emerged from his darkness retreat, during which time he reflected on his life, his career, and the possibility of making a film about his darkness retreat. Rodgers said he would let the world know about his decision to play or retire in 2023 after emerging from the soft cocoon…Read more...

It’s unfair that Giannis Antetokounmpo is one of the best power forwards in NBA history and also genuinely likable and funny. We rarely get to see NBA players outside of arenas during the season, but the two-time MVP took the time to appear on The Daily Show on Monday night, with comedian Hasan Minhaj filling in as…Read more...

TNT analyst and Hall of Famer Charles Barkley appeared on First Take Tuesday morning and said something wild. Shocker. While some might take offense to what Sir Charles said, he did have a point. Barkley hasn’t been shy in sharing his thoughts on load management over the years. While on First Take with Stephen A.…Read more...

It’s combine week in the NFL, and to celebrate the league’s views of human flesh, it’s in the news for objectifying women — again. Per a report by the Wall Street Journal, the league and NFL Films allegedly had an archive of fan and cheerleader footage categorized like PornHub kinks — “cheerleaders buttocks,”…Read more...

If there is a general manager currently in Indianapolis in need of a quarterback and someone to share a shrimp cocktail with at St. Elmo’s, Derek Carr is your guy. There will be more than 300 NFL prospects in town for the NFL Scouting Combine, and also one free agent veteran quarterback roaming around downtown Indy.Read more...

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Everything just slowed down.

While the West Coast has been experiencing a cold front like never before, Klay Thompson has been as hot as fish grease the last two months. He began to heat up around the holidays and hasn’t slowed down despite all talk about him being “washed.” If this version of Thompson is washed, throw me in the spin cycle right…Read more...

The Elam Ending has become NBA corporate jargon to throw out there as a salve for everything. All-Star Game lost its appeal? Elam Ending fixes that. Low ratings? ELAM ENDING! Superstars sitting out games? E-LAM END-ING!!! The latest rumored implementation of “Playing to a number” comes as a fix for lengthy, not-at-all…Read more...

Joel Embiid has been one of the best basketball players on the planet for quite some time now. Recently, the LegionHoops account on Twitter, and other social media accounts, pulled a quote from Embiid’s 2018 entry from the Players’ Tribune about his journey, in which he told a hilarious story about how a teammate at…Read more...

March Madness is just around the corner. Conference tournaments will be underway and soon enough, we’ll be down from 350-plus teams contending for a championship to 68. The high-level conference teams that’ll compete for a title have been well-documented and we’ll no doubt see some of them make it deep into March.…Read more...

The “middle class” of the NBA is slowly eroding. Surprisingly, it’s not totally a bad thing. Almost every team has a talented young core with potential, raising parity within the NBA. Even the teams at the bottom of the standings have enough young players to have something to look forward to in two or three years when…Read more...

If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around, does it make a sound? What if it drops 71? That age-old question describes how empty Damian Lillard’s explosion of points felt — but not because of anything Lillard himself did wrong.Read more...

The NBA continues to follow down this path they’ve been on, where people think more scoring equals more interest in the product. On Friday night, the Kings and Clippers combined to score 351 points. LeBron James’ All-Star team scored 175 points the previous weekend, and the Kings and Clippers both matched that…Read more...

In the age of social media, we see people misbehaving and exhibiting an egregious lack of self-awareness every day. Alabama men’s basketball standout Brandon Miller is the latest athlete to show the world just how tone-deaf one person can be. During Saturday’s pregame introduction against Arkansas, Miller chose to go…Read more...

Joel Embiid is the Second Coming. That is, he’s perpetually in second place, whether it’s to Nikola Jokić in MVP battles, playoff battles, or on the All-NBA team. Count the Boston Celtics as another circumstance where Embiid finishes second. On Saturday night, Embiid continued his second-place tradition in a 107-110…Read more...

The NBA complaint department has been hard at work this season. If someone prompted ChatGPT to write a report for the 2022-23 product it would be titled “The National Load Management Association: How street clothes became more noticeable than basketball uniforms.” Throw in an All-Star Game with the intensity of a…Read more...

White Sox pitcher Joe Kelly’s book, “A Damn Near Perfect Game: Reclaiming America’s Pastime,” delves into many of the issues frustrating fans of major league baseball, and is on sale tomorrow wherever you get your books. Here’s an excerpt:Read more...