Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

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...

Since suckers are born every minute, it means that the world is full of them. And for the past few years, Jake Paul — and his brother Logan — have been scamming “sports” fans like tourists who keep trying their luck at three-card monte. But, eventually, every fraud gets exposed. Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a…Read more...

The Carson Wentz experiment in the nation’s capital went even worse than expected. The Commanders 2022 Week 1 starter isn’t even on the team’s roster six months later, as he was released by Washington on Monday. The move leaves likely 2023 starter Sam Howell and soon-to-be-free-agent Taylor Heinicke as the only…Read more...

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Dallas Mavericks head coach Jason Kidd called his team out following Sunday’s loss to the Los Angeles Lakers. The Mavs held a 27-point lead in this game which the Lakers chipped away at and came back in the second half to win by three, 111-108. During the postgame presser, Kidd fired shots at his team and all but…Read more...

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Last week, we saw the NCAA hand out its first ever NIL ruling — the result of an infraction between twins on the University of Miami’s women’s basketball team — Haley and Hanna Cavinder — super-rich donor Canes donor John Ruiz.

It appears that Daniel Snyder’s disdain for Jeff Bezos will prevent the billionaire Amazon founder from buying the Washington Commanders. Bezos was allegedly prevented from joining a private auction for the NFL franchise by Snyder due to a long-standing grudge. (Bezos and Snyder did not return calls from the New York…Read more...

The new rules set for the upcoming MLB season are sure to change baseball forever, and the most impactful change will undoubtedly be the introduction of the pitch clock. Twenty seconds maximum between each pitch. Games are flying by, and with pace-of-play being an enormous talking point surrounding Major League…Read more...

Derek Carr may not be a superstar, but several quarterback-needy teams are interested in his services.Read more...

The New York Yankees head into 2023 as favorites to win the AL East and the second-biggest favorites to win the World Series. Yes, expectations are high for this team, but that’s nothing new. When a brand as iconic as the Yankees fails to meet its lofty season goals, fans get mad. Despite consistently being an…Read more...

March 7 marks the beginning of the World Baseball Classic as the best players from around the world compete in what is essentially baseball’s Olympics. Yes, baseball was an Olympic event in 2020, but let’s be real, that was a bigger joke than anything Marvel has put in its movie scripts recently. The WBC is where it’s…Read more...

The introduction of the pitch clock to Major League Baseball is a long overdue change necessary to entice younger viewers. We already know it won’t have a major impact, if any, on offensive output, but it will make games faster-paced and easier to watch. Or at least, that’s what we hoped it would do.Read more...

Super Bowl LVII was a thriller involving all the drama and storylines we’ve come to love about the NFL. We saw multiple big plays, quarterback heroics, and even got a controversial penalty that some feel should’ve been overlooked, even though it was clearly a penalty. Something else occurred in the weeks leading up to…Read more...

The Los Angeles Lakers are entering a critical time in their schedule after the All-Star break. With just 23 games remaining in the regular season, the Lakers are five games under .500 (27-32) and have a seven-game stretch where they’ll play all Western Conference foes, starting with the Golden State Warriors,…Read more...

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Answering the question as to why former Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy must have that title and not be a current head coach has been the story of in the NFL since Rihanna blessed us with her presence at Super Bowl LVII and Patrick Mahomes won his second championship — with Bieniemy as the…Read more...

It seems like with every mock draft, pundits’ opinions of certain prospects change. For practically the entirety of the 2022 NFL and college football seasons, the consensus top-three quarterbacks in the 2023 class were Alabama’s Bryce Young, Kentucky’s Will Levis, and Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud. Florida’s Anthony…Read more...

Yesterday, Netflix announced a brand new docuseries, “Quarterback,” set to air later this year surrounding the experiences of three NFL quarterbacks — Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota — during the 2022 NFL season. According to the announcement, these three men were all mic’d up for every game of the…Read more...

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With the news that Aaron Rodgers has emerged from his darkness retreat and will soon regale the people with the tablets he has produced, and certainly not the tablets or whatever else he definitely did not take while locked away by himself in obsidian, it got us to thinking who else could use some time in a prison…Read more...

The easiest way to protect yourself from outside criticism is to critique others. Negativity begets negativity, and I don’t even know where this is going because I’m here to tell you about insufferable fan bases.

In a time in which more people are realizing the importance of self-care and self-worth, one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL is in a situation with his employer that highlights the struggle that oftentimes comes with achieving self-sufficiency. The Baltimore Ravens don’t want to pay Lamar Jackson — the second…Read more...

The idea of arbitration for determining a baseball player’s salary has never sat right with anyone, other than maybe the front offices that get to save a few hundred grand here and there. There was a time when a few scribes would keep a scoreboard, and some still do. But the concept of two sides trying to come to an…Read more...

Before I get started, I want to make something clear. Trey Lance’s injury history is something that cannot be understated. He needs to stay healthy, and if he can’t, he shouldn’t be considered a franchise-caliber quarterback. This isn’t about his history of serious ouchies and boo-boos sidelining him for practically…Read more...

I never thought I’d say, “You know what, maybe J.J. Redick doesn’t suck,” but he’s surprisingly insightful in his post-playing career gig at ESPN. The former Blue Devil understands how the current iteration of the game is played as well as any analyst for the network and takes a refreshing approach to comparing eras…Read more...

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Remember Charlie Sheen’s “Winning” phase when he went on The Dan Patrick Show mid-bender and rambled incoherently? After that, there was a span of a week or two where we didn’t know if it was schtick or an addict relapsing in the most public way. Once it was clear that Sheen was really struggling, the jokes weren’t as…Read more...

Alabama hoops star Brandon Miller hit the game-winning shot against South Carolina in Columbia last night, amidst chants of “Lock him up! Lock him up!” raining down from the rafters. The chant referred to Miller’s presence when 23-year-old Jamea Jonae Harris was allegedly shot and killed by a longtime friend of former…Read more...

There was a time during the midst of 2020 in which Adam Silver and the NBA owned the world. The combination of an amazing All-Star Game in Chicago with a new dramatic ending, the sad and tragic death of Kobe Bryant, and the league’s decision to shut things down — becoming the first warning that this COVID-19 was super…Read more...

There’s no high school basketball LeaguePass — yet. Aside from the Bronny James hypebeast machine, the top prospects in the upcoming draft are previewed to the general public through the diligent scouting done by professional analysts or scouts who scour camps, national showcases, and high school gymnasiums for the…Read more...

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It is certainly a wonderful place to be, and a comment on what the USWNT has built over generations, that they can win three straight games over three decent-to-good teams in the SheBelieves Cup, conceding only one goal, and the overriding emotion is still more apprehensive than swagger. That is the downside when the…Read more...

March 2022: The Los Angeles Rams were less than a month removed from their Super Bowl parade and NFL free agency was just underway. Fans were a naive group prior to that 2022 offseason, having no idea about the storm of game-changing moves that lay immediately in front of us. Before Russell Wilson to the Broncos,…Read more...

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Bob Sturm of The Athletic explains in a recent piece that scouts are whispering that Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott is done — without actually saying it. “He has very little left in his legs, and the word is out.” So, in other words, scouts are noticing what most of the football world has known for at…Read more...

Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss both spoke at Seton Hall University last week. The discussion kept coming back to money — from the one dollar that started the WTA Tour back in 1970, to the $50 million to buy a National Women’s Soccer League team, to the ratings for live women’s sports that keep going up.

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Once the Phoenix Suns pulled off the blockbuster trade of the year for Kevin Durant, many pundits began to pencil them in as the Western Conference representative in the NBA Finals. Looking at their core of Devin Booker, Chris Paul, DeAndre Ayton, plus Durant, it’s easy to see why they’d be catapulted back up the…Read more...

For as much worship as billionaires seem to get around here, and the runway they receive to shape our society to benefit them more and more, they are a cranky bunch. There’s always more money to be made, money they’ll never know what to do with, there’s always someone else to fuck over, and as it seems there’s always…Read more...