Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

For those of you who were still awake when the Los Angeles Lakers sandcastle of a 2021-22 season finally washed away, we had a good time didn’t we? The jokes have been piling up all season with this new roster that improved on none of their weaknesses from last season and also had none of their strengths. Their…Read more...

While TV talking heads and sports scribes fixated on Coach K and UNC, it took until the second half of the national title game for most fans to notice that Kansas was in the Final Four. College basketball’s 2022 National Champion hid under the radar all season. Not only because the Jayhawks are a vanilla, efficient…Read more...

You don’t need sportswriters to tell you that the Dodgers are going to be better than the Diamondbacks this year. You already know that. At the same time, it feels wrong to go into the baseball season without looking ahead at it, without trying to gaze into a crystal ball to make some kind of picks.

With three games remaining for Boston, Philly, and Milwaukee, and the three teams all squared up at 49-30 for the two through four seeds, The Race Not to Finish Fourth in the East has massive implications on who plays Phoenix in the Finals, who wins the MVP, and who likely faces Toronto in round one and Miami in round…Read more...

Over the weekend, the NFL’s third all-time leading rusher Frank Gore announced his retirement after 16 seasons. From just that sentence alone, you’d probably think Gore is a surefire Hall of Famer. It shouldn’t matter that Gore only averaged more than five yards per carry once in his career (2006). It shouldn’t matter…Read more...

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about his frustrations with the “white moderate” when he was sitting in that Birmingham jail, he was talking about Pete Carroll.

A season that started out with so much hope in Los Angeles came to an end Tuesday night against the Lakers’ I-10 rivals, the Phoenix Suns, 121-110. The Lakers have three remaining games on the schedule, but the 11-point loss to the Suns eliminated LA from play-in contention. So, the Lakers have absolutely nothing left…Read more...

What an interesting offseason, huh?

The NFL has been trying to expand its appeal overseas for decades. They’ve had several games hosted in London. They’re set to have a game in Germany next season. A few years ago, they even partnered with Pro Football Focus, a football data analytics company that was founded in the UK. Still, they have not had the…Read more...

As another baseball season is about to descend upon us, there’s a scourge you must be aware of that is partially responsible for the state of MLB today. While the CBA was a small step toward progress, we still are dealing with far too many teams diving for the bottom without worrying about the water pressure, and even …Read more...

It’s been 25 years since Tiger Woods walked onto Augusta National and shocked the world with a record-breaking Masters win at the age of 21. It’s been three years since he won his comeback Masters, and just over one year since he was in a car accident that nearly killed him. The ability to walk again wasn’t assured…Read more...

It’s been a turbulent time in Dallas since their season ended at the hands of long-time rival San Francisco 49ers in January’s wildcard round debacle. Since then, the Cowboys have traded Amari Cooper, had Randy Gregory stolen right from under them, cut La’el Collins, and let wide receiver Cedrick Wilson walk away in…Read more...

A ghost was spotted at the Los Angeles Clippers’ practice yesterday afternoon.Read more...

At least for one night, I didn’t manage to motherfuck something. The Toronto Maple Leafs and Florida Panthers put on a hockey game dressed as Calvinball last night, with the Cats getting a 7-6 win in OT. It wasn’t even that simple, if a 7-6 game can ever be simple.

Congratulations to the Kansas University Jayhawks, the 2022 NCAA Men’s Basketball Champions! In a tournament defined by chaos, you kept a steady hand, being the only 1-seed to make it past the Sweet 16. You had the largest comeback in the history of the championship game, winning after being down by 16 points. Well…Read more...

In a sport where some stadiums still adjust the scoreboards by hand, it’s not surprising it took a massive sign-stealing scandal for the MLB to try technology. The league announced it will allow teams to use PitchCom this season, a device worn by catchers, pitchers, and a player or three that lets them signal pitches…Read more...

Find the nicest pocket square possible and stretch your pinky out for this year’s Masters Champions Dinner. Well, only if you own a green jacket. The ultra-exclusive meal with a menu chosen by the most recent green jacket winner, Hideki Matsuyama, features one of the most expensive proteins in the world. The…Read more...

I’m already on the record as pro Nikola Jokić for NBA MVP, so don’t take this article as me piling on Joel Embiid — I know, says the person who is expressing more negative thoughts about him. With the regular season in its final week, the Philadelphia 76ers struggled with three consecutive losses, two of them to…Read more...

It’s time to face the music. Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert are a more discordant duo than Salt Lake City and jazz. Always have been and always will be. Their partnership has been filled with more personal drama than team success. The oversized egos don’t match the playoff wins. Great partnerships require synergy…Read more...

Brett Favre has never satisfactorily answered why he took a million bucks of state money, intended for needy kids, to do a radio PSA. He just kind of said that he did it, and promised to pay the money back, and then tried not to do so.

Quarterback is the most important position in football because a quarterback has the ball in their hands for nearly half of the game. They control the game’s pace of play, the efficiency of the passing attack, and although it’s not done nearly as much nowadays, they can even call their team’s plays.

I’m not here to defend LeBron James. As recently as two weeks ago, I gave him shit for chasing the scoring title because it’s the only thing he can win this year. James also has enough obsessed, annoying fans willing to defend him by any memes possible, and this pitiful Lakers team was a failure of his own creation.

Look at the people getting this one right. For all the moronic governors, members of Congress, and former presidents that who been elected but have nothing better to do than make their constituents’ lives worse — but still win by tapping into those tried-and-true methods of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and…Read more...

This year’s NBA Most Valuable Player award race is coming down to the regular season’s final days. We’re almost a week into April with a handful of games remaining, and the pack leader seems to change by the day. There is no clear-cut leader, but one thing we do know is the winner is almost assured to be a player of…Read more...

College basketball is full of rituals, and one of them is that the day after the season ends a host of publications will release their “way-too-early” preseason rankings, as more attention will be focused on mock drafts and the upcoming NBA Draft.

For the first time since the February 2021 car wreck that threatened his ability to walk again, Tiger Woods confirmed Tuesday he intends to play in the Masters. Woods’ desire to compete comes after a 9-hole practice round on Monday with a huge audience.

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Rarely does it make sense to link the NBA and the NHL, other than they tend to play in the same buildings at the same time of year. You wouldn’t really call them roommates, because when one is home the other never is. Though that probably makes them perfect roommates, come to think of it. Still, on occasion you’ll…Read more...

2022 really hasn’t been Mark Emmert’s year.Read more...

It wasn’t the all-out classic that Monday in Bridgeport was, but UConn took down another No. 1 seed on Friday night, dethroning defending national champion Stanford, 63-58.

April 1, 10:09 a.m. Pacific Time: LeBron James sends a tweet saying, “I’m out for the season officially. See y’all in the fall.Read more...

The Los Angeles Dodgers don’t know when enough is enough, huh? No matter how much fire power they have, they can always have more. Earlier today, the Boys in Blue traded for Chicago White Sox All-Star reliever Craig Kimbrel, giving up outfielder A.J. Pollock in the process.Read more...

As the United States men’s national team backed into the FIFA World Cup on Wednesday night, Friday’s draw couldn’t have realistically worked out any better for them.Read more...

As the women’s Final Four kicks off tonight, the cloud looming over the NCAA only grows. Having gotten away with treating their female athletes like second-class citizens for decades, the crackdown is truly beginning, as the organization gets piled on from all sides with growing expectations to create NIL regulations,…Read more...

The sports world wasted no time getting to pranking on this first day of April. From the moment many Americans woke up they were bombarded with tweet after tweet from well-respected sports pages claiming that their team had traded for/away a great player.

It only took 15 games of watching James Harden for Doc Rivers to get annoyed. After a loss against the Detroit Pistons last night — the team’s third straight — where the 76ers got all of eight points from the bench, the coach didn’t put the lack of production on them.

On Tuesday the Los Angeles Dodgers re-signed Andrew Toles so that he can have access to mental health care and therapy as he battles schizophrenia. Toles played in just 96 major league games for the Dodgers and hasn’t played since 2018.Read more...

Shad Khan, the lone majority owner of color in the NFL, became the majority shareholder of the startup “Black News Channel” in 2019 when he invested $50 million. Last week, he let the network die.

The Los Angeles Rams are doing their best to be the 2000s New York Yankees. While the NFL is a hard-salary capped sport, they are doing their all to keep as much big-named talent on the roster as possible. They were not able to re-sign midseason acquisition Von Miller, so they instead added a big name to the next…Read more...

We got an all-blueblood Final Four. I know we enjoyed Saint Peter’s, but as happy as I am for Shaheen Holloway’s new contract — of course this is yet another example of a college coach capitalizing off of his hard-playing talent for a much better job, but the Peacocks pull their home bleachers out of a wall — Saturday…Read more...

One question for Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. Where were you when Colin Kaepernick was in trouble with the NFL and needed a brother to help out?

Welcome to Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE MONTH, where we laugh at people and organizations around the sports world because otherwise we would cry. An honorable mention for March goes out to none other than You, the reader! That’s right — You, most dearest sports media consumer, honestly believed your March Madness bracket…Read more...

Baseball season is right around the corner, and as is the norm, it’s panic time in Queens.Read more...

It’s a strange phenomenon, not exclusive to basketball, where somehow the defending champs get lost. Perhaps most people just conclude that the fatigue from a playoff run the previous season is just a bit too much to overcome. It’s doubly so for the Milwaukee Bucks, as their Finals run didn’t end until the middle of…Read more...

Jim Harbaugh has named former 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick as honorary captain of Michigan’s spring game this upcoming weekend, making waves across the national CFB fandom by taking what appears to be a pretty solid pro-Kap stance in a decidedly anti-Kap sport.

The in-stadium experience is what makes going to sporting events fun. The energy that radiates from other fans of your favorite team, the mascot’s antics, and fan interaction through graphics on the jumbotron and the in-stadium camera crew make attending a live sporting event an unforgettable experience. The music…Read more...

The best way to keep a job you’re in jeopardy of losing is to insist that the failures aren’t your fault. Occasionally, it’s true. You could’ve been in the World Series had the Houston Astros not sounded the alarm for fastballs in the ALCS. That’s misleading because there’s a decades worth of slacking off to account…Read more...

ESPN’s is set to test a new idea on ESPN 2 with an NBA “retro-cast” that will roll out on April 6 during the New York Knicks vs. Brooklyn Nets game at Madison Square Garden.

ESPN needs to have a Greg Gumbel day on First Take, because it appears that this man has been simmering with hot takes for years. He recently appeared on Sports Illustrated’s Jimmy Traina’s SI Media Podcast and let it fly about how he feels about the recent contracts that NFL broadcasters have received.

If Duke, UNC, Kansas or Villanova are going to win another national title, we have to celebrate something besides another blueblood champion. Watching another blueblood Final Four is nauseating and almost seems antithetical to the glorified ideal of March Madness.