Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

The thing about baseball is that sometimes you think a team will be good, but they’re not. Other times, you think a team will be bad, but they’re really good! O fortuna!Read more...

It’s about the quarter mark of the MLB season, with most teams surpassing 40 games played. There’s still a looooooong way to go this season and the trade deadline is still two months away so a lot can change, but now seems like an apt time to compare teams’ records to their preseason expectations.

While Memorial Day may be a uniquely American holiday, its sentiments — honoring those who have given their lives for their country in the line of duty — are global. America is no longer at war, having pulled out of Afghanistan, and if there was any positive to take away from that conflict that raged on for decades,…Read more...

It may be rare these days, but there was a time when some of the best athletes in America went off to fight in wars. Some did so willingly, others were drafted.

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We’ll likely never see a UEFA Champions League run like the one Real Madrid just completed. If only quality of play decided Los Blancos’ quarterfinal and semifinal two legged-ties, as well as Saturday’s one-game final against Liverpool, they would’ve lost each one. Real Madrid trailed late in each second leg against…Read more...

NBA Top Shot, a collection of NBA NFTs featuring highlights, GIFs, and other classic NBA moments, recently surpassed $1 billion in sales. There have been ups and downs during the company’s lifespan, and it surely hasn’t reached the same heights it teased in early 2021, but Top Shot has remained a viable enterprise…Read more...

If the recent sale of Chelsea FC taught us anything, it’s that sports franchises are as valuable as ever. The English Premier League club sold for $5 billion, and there was no shortage of suitors. That should make Portland Trail Blazers’ fans sleep better in the coming months as a sale of the team is inevitable.

Yes, I understand that Ryan Tannehill clarified his comments on Malik Willis just a few days ago, but his excuse for how those words got twisted just doesn’t make any sense.

It’s now a Memorial Day weekend tradition, as AEW has its other tentpole PPV (and they still call them “PPVs”) from Las Vegas. If you’re a weirdo like me, it’s no longer the holiday that kicks off summer but this event. It’ll actually be the start of a pretty frenzied summer of activity, given that “New York” will…Read more...

The NHL’s most prestigious individual award was first handed out in 1924. Calvin Coolidge just became President of the United States. It took until Barack Obama’s final year in The White House for someone born and raised in America to win the Hart Memorial Trophy, the league’s most valuable player award.

Athletes: they’re just like us! They play fantasy football, they get pissed over fantasy football, they physically assault each other over fantasy football — you know, just guys being dudes!

Every revolution begins with a single act of defiance - Mahatma Gandhi

Thirty years after the Dream Team introduced the NBA to the world at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, the league has transformed into something that the late David Stern would be proud of. Basketball has truly become an international game.

Deciding to be neutral and only point fingers after Tuesday’s senseless mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, which left 19 kids and 21 total dead, is a beyond puzzling stance for Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank to project.

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As we sit in states of grief, hopelessness, and disbelief after yet another preventable massacre of children in Uvalde, Texas, the New York Yankees shocked the nation by forgoing their usual Twitter programming during their game against the Tampa Bay Rays last night.

Sure he had to hear his eulogy while he was still living after Andrew Wiggins read him his last rites in Game 3, but Luka Dončić has nothing to be ashamed of. The Dallas Mavericks star led the NBA postseason in scoring, but his singular output was futile against a Golden State Warriors team that plays both sides of…Read more...

The Washington Commanders are a crumbling empire. The once thriving franchise has been reduced to something worse than a laughingstock over the last two decades. The Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars and New York Giants are a joke. Dan Snyder’s dysfunctional Washington Commanders are a waking nightmare. For someone…Read more...

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OK, obviously not. But maybe?

2021 saw the end of one of the most famous Finals streaks of all-time. Thirty-seven consecutive NBA Finals between 1984 and 2020 saw at least one teammate of Shaquille O’Neal’s on one of the competing rosters. No one on last year’s Suns or Bucks rosters had ever played with O’Neal during his career. “All streaks come…Read more...

It can’t be easy to be Shaquille O’Neal. I remember meeting him many years ago, and thinking, “that’s the biggest human being to ever live.” Factually, of course that’s not correct, but for those who have a friend who is 6-foot-5, and your life does not intersect with professional basketball often, think about how…Read more...

Three teams have been pillars of culture in the modern NBA: The San Antonio Spurs, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the Miami Heat. No matter the players, these three franchises have established systems where players come in to fill a role, commit to the vision, and buy in completely. Of the trio, only the Heat are…Read more...

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Against all odds, disgraced former Raiders coach Jon Gruden has garnered some support from the public — grudging and conditional though it may be — in his fight against Roger Goodell and the NFL. You wouldn’t think he could come back from the racist, sexist, homophobic, slur-filled emails that got leaked last year —…Read more...

Josh Donaldson had all week to come up with something better than this. Whether he couldn’t or wouldn’t, he didn’t, and just like his racist comment to Tim Anderson on Saturday, it’s Donaldson’s lousy actions that mean more than his lousy words.

Far be it for me to blast any blogger for blasting a player. The amount of incendiary shit I’ve written this month alone would probably provoke a confrontation — or 60 — from a sports figure if I was physically present at a practice facility during the work week.

Last week, Nick Saban said that NIL is how former assistant and current Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher “bought every player on their team.” This week, Saban got an ESPN 300 quarterback recruit to commit to Alabama after he was originally supposed to play for Fisher in College Station.Read more...

If there was ever a reason to finally do away with the positional rankings for All-NBA teams, it’s Joel Embiid’s flagrant omission from First-Team All-NBA honors. The powers that be thought it appropriate to put the direct runner-up to MVP on the Second Team to adhere to a positional preference more than half of NBA…Read more...

Lift up the annual refrain: “This is going to be our year! No, we know we said that last year after Sark got hired and then promptly went 5-7, and the year that Tom Herman got hired and we went 7-6, and just about every year for the last decade with nothing much to show for it, but 2022? Yeah, it’s the year of the…Read more...

Lane Kiffin isn’t the hero college football wanted, and certainly not the one we thought we’d get, but he may just be the hero college football needs. The 47-year-old Ole Miss coach has watched the SEC drama of the past week play out in a sort of shocked delight (a man of the people), and in an interview published by …Read more...

While the NBA’s Conference finals are making surface-level headlines, tectonic plates are shifting underneath the NBA’s crust. On Tuesday, the NBA’s scuttlebutt radar detected signals that could alter the composition of the league. If a report from Portland 750 AM host and Oregonian sports columnist John Canzano are…Read more...

Tennessee Titans quarterback Ryan Tannehill didn’t realize the firestorm he sparked when he claimed it isn’t his job to mentor rookie third-round QB pick Malik Willis. His comments quickly went viral and, according to Tannehill, got spun and twisted a bit.Read more...

Remember when everyone clutched their pearls after Ricky Williams mimed smoking a joint on the sidelines of a Miami Dolphins game? It aged about as well as the “a college scholarship is more than enough compensation for student athletes” argument. Not only would America be richer had it taken Errick Miron’s…Read more...

This could finally be it. The NHL is starving for its next superstar. Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby’s first-round exits with Washington and Pittsburgh left a void for a television-ratings hockey juggernaut.

A lot of sports fandom and analysis is about feel vs. facts, which can go pretty haywire at times. It definitely “feels” like these NBA playoffs have been uniquely blowout-heavy, but it kind of turns out they haven’t been. There just hasn’t been any game-turning shots in the last minute or buzzer-beaters that we…Read more...

The hype train for the 2022 NFL season hasn’t just left the station, it leapt off the tracks, burst into the stratosphere, and started singing a collection of Tupac’s greatest hits.Read more...

Logically, it makes zero sense to give Kyrie Irving a long-term contract.

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I’m exhausted trying to think of ways to drive home the severity of the allegations against Deshaun Watson. The depth of his indiscretions and sheer volume of his accusers is hard to put into words. It’s one of those things that you need to see visually to contextualize just how many massage therapists (22 in total)…Read more...

Well, if what you wanted from lawmakers in response to a senseless and sickening mass murder was a string of literal nonsense words, then you’ll be thrilled to hear that former Georgia running back Herschel Walker won his state’s Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat yesterday and then responded to the Uvalde…Read more...

While four years is a long time in soccer, and teams can greatly transform a couple times in that timespan, Real Madrid and Liverpool look a lot like they did four years ago. Liverpool are still anchored by Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, and Andrew Robertson in defense and Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah in…Read more...

Deebo Samuel might have 19 problemz, but his contract is the biggest one. In pursuit of a big-money extension or trade, Samuel is taking the troll route. Deebo was in Dallas for Game 3 of the NBA Western Conference finals, surely showing support for the Golden State Warriors, and was seen shaking hands with Cowboys QB…Read more...

Thoughts and prayers are the worst things you can offer during times like this. The Bible says that faith without works is dead, which means that all those prayers are useless without legislation. And those thoughts? Well, just because people hope — or think — we can get back to the world we lived in before Columbine…Read more...

For those who were sick of the Golden State Warriors and LeBron James winning all the time, you finally have what you wanted in the NBA: parity. Going into the playoffs there were at least six teams who had a legitimate shot at winning the championship. But one question: has it been fun?

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The going story out there has been that the NBA Playoffs have been kinda trash. It’s easy to see why people think that, because there’s been a ton of blowouts, and neither of the conference finals has produced a close game in eight tries. What we want out of the playoffs are moments and performances we can recall from…Read more...

Yesterday we finally got news that the NFL is considering eliminating the Pro Bowl!

The Los Angeles Lakers are currently searching for a new head coach. Once they settle on a candidate, this will be the Lakers’ sixth full-time head coach since 2012. That’s shocking for a franchise that has won as much as the Lakers have in their history. But this coaching search feels destined for failure.Read more...