Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Russell Westbrook didn’t hesitate to kick dirt on Frank Vogel after the latter was fired as Lakers coach.

Alec Bohm is not the first to get fed up with Philadelphia fans. He’s probably not even the first to do so by the fourth game of any baseball season. The point of Philadelphia sports, and maybe the whole city in general, is to be ornery. That’s certainly its charm, if you find it has one, as it’s just about the only…Read more...

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It’s play-in tournament time, and now that we know all the participants, let’s look at Day One, which will be the seven vs. eight seed in each conference. We have intriguing matchups here and two teams that weren’t expected to be dealing with the play-in when the season started back in October.Read more...

The 2022 NBA playoffs is an annual garden of forking paths. Teams don’t know who to expect awaiting them in the next round or when their season will end. One injury can swing momentum in the other direction. What we do know is that there are particular matchups that are more palatable than others. Certain matchups are…Read more...

We didn’t really get as big of a window to laugh at Barcelona as we thought or hoped. Proving the life lesson that you need to celebrate anything worth celebrating at that time and that place or you’ll miss the opportunity. Barça is roaring in La Liga right now, all the way up to second after winning seven in a row…Read more...

Once the NCAA Basketball Tournaments come around, the rest of the NBA season can feel like a slog. If you were already upset about players missing games, the volume gets ratcheted up on that, and at that point it’s fairly clear which teams are the best in the league. It’s also hard to muster excitement for a March NBA…Read more...

The NBA season has finally ended, and now it’s time to hand out some hardware. But this isn’t your usual NBA award. We’re handing out the MUP for the Most Unreliable Player of the Year. The criteria’s open to anything from being unavailable due to frequent injury, dealing with bouts of narcissism, to players that…Read more...

You get what you pay for. And the “worldwide leader in sports” just spent close to $100 million on two men that took Ricky Bobby’s father’s words a little too seriously.Read more...

If you’re a veteran of getting various out-of-town sports packages (Monday morning is a bit early for the jokes that would normally go here) you’ve probably been annoyed by what goes on during commercial breaks. DirecTV would just show you your market’s commercials, but if you go through the streaming package for MLB…Read more...

The most exciting three days of the NFL offseason are quickly approaching, with the NFL draft less than three weeks away. We’ve made it through the combine, player pro days, and individual workouts. During all the excitement, though, one part of the process can leave potential draftees scratching their heads: The…Read more...

Tiger Woods, 18th hole, The Masters. It didn’t matter that he was 13-over par and his chances at winning had long expired. It didn’t matter that Tiger wasn’t expected to win. It was spectacular that just over one year after an automobile accident mangled his right leg, he was playing in The Masters, at Augusta…Read more...

The NBA ended its worst season in recent memory on Sunday. Yes, it was really that bad.

My interest in golf has pretty much traced Tiger Woods’ presence. I know I’m not alone, based on golf’s struggles in recent years. I got into it when he burst onto the scene. I played regularly when he was dominating the PGA Tour, and then my interest waned when he stopped winning majors or being around at all. I…Read more...

We’re going to be hearing from Blue Jays fans all season, and it’ll be kicked into overdrive here in the next month after the Leafs barf all over themselves in the first round again. All of that energy will definitely be channeled into the Rogers Centre immediately. You won’t be able to duck it.Read more...

The only result between Manchester City and Liverpool this morning that would have made it a “title decider” (which is how it was built by every outlet broadcasting it) was a City win. A four-point gap at this point in the season, requiring City to fuck up two games in the run-in while Liverpool to run the table, was…Read more...

A sweep of the Detroit Tigers would have been the ideal way for the Chicago White Sox to begin the 2022 season, but sometimes the ball bounces off the wall, just over the right fielders’ glove for a game-winning hit. Hey, it’s a 162-game season, there’s going to be some head scratchers.

Joel Embiid capped off his chase for the scoring crown on Saturday night by summoning a brilliant 41-point, 20-rebound outing in the Philadelphia 76ers’ 133-120 win over the Indiana Pacers. A dazzling 40/20 game was the perfect way to secure the best individual accomplishment of his career.Read more...

When Kyrie Irving rolled his ankle last year in the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Milwaukee Bucks, it seemed like a common unintentional injury we often see on the NBA hardwood. Devin Williams, a trainer who works with Irving and other players, says it may not have been what we initially thought. Well, at…Read more...

Because the NBA regular season doesn’t really matter — seriously, the barometer of advancing to the postseason this year was, “are you better than the clock-struck-midnight on Julius Randle version of the Knicks or the bunch of corpses that LeBron James couldn’t animate to 35 wins in Los Angeles?” — the end of it kind…Read more...

Gil Brandt didn’t wake up knowing he was going to insult a dead man within hours of Dwayne Haskins’ death because he probably found out about the horrific accident that took the life of a young man on Twitter like the rest of us. Instead of trying to find something respectful or worthwhile to say about a player whose…Read more...

Fists flew on pit row during NASCAR’s Xfinity Series race at Martinsville. Rivals Sam Mayer and Ty Gibbs, the grandson of Super Bowl winning coach and NASCAR team owner Joe Gibbs, were the combatants in the altercation after Friday night’s race.

In the scene at the climax of Layer Cake, an English gangster flick Daniel Craig made two years before becoming James Bond, the antagonist goes on this tangent about taking shit, and how eventually, if you climb high enough, you forget what shit even looks like.

With Tiger Woods falling out of contention and Sunday at Augusta turning into a sleepy 3-year-old crashing off of sugar, wake yourself up by flipping on probably the biggest game of the English Premier League season. Man City sits atop the table but only barely. Liverpool, still chasing a potential quad, are only one…Read more...

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s XFL revival, scheduled to begin in 2023 after the former wrestler bought the league from a bankrupt Vince McMahon for $15 million following an inaugural season cut short by COVID, introduced a new visual brand identity earlier this week.Read more...

I forgot Joe Exotic existed. The Tiger King was the king of Netflix for a few months in 2020, and his fame vanished almost immediately afterward. Even Tiger King Season 2 wasn’t enough to bring Joseph “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage back into the forefront of American pop culture. Now, the man is imprisoned, sentenced to…Read more...

Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Dwayne Haskins died Saturday morning in South Florida after being hit by a car, weeks shy of turning 25. The former Ohio State star was drafted No. 15 overall by the Washington Commanders in the 2019 NFL Draft before his current role in Pittsburgh.Read more...

Major League Baseball made this exclusive deal with Apple for Friday night games, and Mets-Nationals was the very first one, Max Scherzer’s debut for New York (which the Mets won 7-3), against his old team, featuring JUAN SOTO, whom the broadcast gushed over as constantly as he gushed over Apple – because the…Read more...

Brian Kelly is on a mission to make himself Public Enemy Number One in South Bend, Indiana, for reasons unknown. His daughter will be graduating from Notre Dame next month, and at this point, if I were Kelly, I wouldn’t be too keen about showing my face on campus.Read more...

After an offseason filled with turmoil and uncertainty, Major League Baseball kicked off the 2022 season yesterday...with two postponements, one of them Red Sox at Yankees. Yeah, that wasn’t a great way to kick things off. Pushing back the start of your marquee series is never a good thing,especially for a sport…Read more...

I debated between a Lethal Weapon 2 “Diplomatic immunity” joke and a “Maybe we should stop bringing the kids around grandpa” barb to start this story about Gary Player wearing a Saudi Golf League logo during the ceremonial opening tee shots at the Masters and then his telling a reporter that Phil Mickelson is “being…Read more...

The avalanche started with the fifth pick in the 2021 NFL Draft. The Cincinnati Bengals selected Ja’Marr Chase from LSU, reuniting Chase with national-championship teammate and Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Joe Burrow, Cincy’s selection with the No. 1 overall pick in 2020. Those were far from the only reasons the…Read more...

Brian Flores was never the only one. Now, it’s undeniable.

Led by Trae Young, the Atlanta Hawks began this season with more buzz than the city’s best lemon pepper wings. They were a quality young League Pass team who’d matured into an Eastern Conference heavyweight overnight. The 2021 postseason served as the setting for Young’s glow-up from empty calorie stat-sheet stuffer…Read more...

Everyone’s favorite time of the year is finally here. We’re just days away from the NBA’s Play-in Tournament as eight teams battle for the right to get their spines pulled from them in the first round. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of the Play-in when it was first introduced. I thought it watered down the…Read more...

One of the headlines coming out of the NBA yesterday was Adam Silver’s lament that the league’s star players don’t actually dress for enough games during the regular season. This has been a grievance lodged by the media and fans for a while now, ever since the term “load management” entered the lexicon. At least…Read more...

It’s becoming routine at this point. A player is up for extension. Their team refuses to give them said extension. The player publicly airs their frustration over social media. Fans of said team go crazy and start spouting out wild theories and accusations. The two parties come to an agreement and then everybody…Read more...

MJ, please don’t do this.

An amendment to Brian Flores’ racial discrimination lawsuit against the NFL was filed in the Southern District of New York Thursday, adding longtime NFL defensive coordinator Ray Horton and former Cardinals head coach Steve Wilks to the complaint.Read more...

And it all comes together. The biggest stories of the 2022 NFL offseason have converged into one massive, film-script-worthy storyline today as PFT’s Mike Florio reported that the Tom Brady-Dolphins rumors floating around were not, in fact, fake — but his retirement was.

Rules are meant to be broken. That’s the saying, isn’t it? Where there’s a boundary, it must be tested in order to push the limits of the sport you’re playing. That was hockey innovator Roger Neilson’s ideology when he was a professional coach. From 1977 to 2002, Neilson was a menace to NHL officials everywhere. He…Read more...

The Buffalo Bills were 13 seconds away from advancing to consecutive AFC championship games for the first time in 30 years. Then the Bills fell apart on defense, squandering the lead and eventually losing in overtime, 42-36, to the Kansas City Chiefs

Pacific time zone hockey tends to get ignored in the same fashion as west coast baseball. It’s hard to win an MVP or another award when your games are on at 9 and 10pm, as you’re cutting into hockey writers’ drinking time. You have to put on a world-class and ear-shattering whining campaign to get someone to notice.…Read more...

Perhaps the ink isn’t dry, but it sure feels like current Ajax manager Erik Ten Hag is going to be leaving for Old Trafford after this season. Which is funny as all the reports of his hiring started spilling out just hours after SI made it pretty clear that the Man United board wasn’t exactly blown away by his…Read more...

Sometimes, olive branches can be extended from unlikely sources.Read more...

The hard-cap struggles of the NFL. How to improve, but yet stay financially flexible. It’s a dance every team does every offseason, but it’s especially important for those with generational quarterbacks. Sure the Los Angeles Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals in the Super Bowl, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who…Read more...

I spend a lot of time here pointing out everything that’s wrong with baseball. Maybe even most of my time. And for good reason. Baseball is broken, and the latest CBA doesn’t do nearly enough to address the problems. And those who are in a position to do anything about it aren’t interested in doing so, because it…Read more...

When Billy Hoyle told Sidney Deane he’s hustled players a helluva lot better than him, I was skeptical. How many times can you show up to a pickup game and aww shucks your way into a wad of cash? Well after six rounds and thousands of votes, it seems the scheme is still humming along.

As of this past Saturday, we have officially entered the Jon Scheyer era in Duke basketball. A first-time head coach, hand-picked by Mike Krzyzewski as his successor, Scheyer has been rising the ranks as an assistant coach with the Blue Devils since 2013.