Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Whenever a team does poorly, many fans of said team will point to luck as a contributing factor.

The NHL playoffs have been robust, entertaining, competitive, hard-hitting, and full of intrigue. Last night, however, was none of those things. The defending Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning absolutely waxed the New York Islanders 8-0. Although former General Manager Steve Yzerman has returned to his Detroit…Read more...

Yesterday, the Team USA women’s basketball squad announced its full 12 for next month’s Olympic Games in Tokyo, and the men’s roster, while yet to be finalized, is taking shape.

The NBA is thinking about expanding. The likely destinations? Seattle and Las Vegas. Both make sense for a myriad of reasons. Seattle, once home to the SuperSonics, has been without an NBA franchise since 2008, and just got its first NHL team, the Kraken. Vegas, meanwhile, is a growing haven for pro sports. The Vegas…Read more...

Money management is a thing that we all deal with. But when it comes to athletes, the stakes are even higher as their salaries are just as accessible as their stats. And with Lamar Jackson closing in on a contract extension that will pay him hundreds of millions of dollars, many are curious how this is going to work…Read more...

You have to hand it to Tottenham. While they certainly haven’t come anywhere close to curing their basketcase ways, they’ve at least learned to shroud it in bigger happenings in the soccer world to avoid attention. When they fired Jose Mourinho, essentially admitting to and correcting a gargantuan mistake all at once,…Read more...

I’m glad NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is trying to say the right thing, but I don’t buy it. Not for a second, and I’ll gladly tell you why. Here was the statement from Goodell yesterday in response to Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib coming out as gay:Read more...

Don’t get it twisted — these Los Angeles Clippers could do it again, but would you really want to doubt them this time?

The Kansas City Chiefs offense is filled to the brim with elite weapons. Well, last night we learned that their defense has some weapons of their own, just not the kind any football team wants to have.

Major League Baseball’s crackdown on sticky stuff began on Monday, and the program already is a sweeping success.

Isaiah Jewett is tired.

I haven’t bothered to look, because no one needs to, but I know there’s already the cliche and tired backlash to Carl Nassib’s coming out as gay while an active NFL player (or as ESPN put it, “actively gay”). Sure, there’s just the hateful, bigoted insults openly hurled. And then there’s the “why is this even a…Read more...

Carl Nassib, defensive end for the Las Vegas Raiders, has come out as gay. He is the first openly gay player on an active roster of an NFL team in league history. Nassib did so in a video on his Instagram.Read more...

For years, the NCAA has seemed legally untouchable. It is a corporate structure complete with lavishly compensated executives, but was able to avoid paying its labor class by invoking a long-ago tradition derived from British private schools, where wealthy competitors were able to exclude the unwealthy by refusing…Read more...

Ben Zobrist claimed that his wife, Julianna, had an affair with their former pastor. That’s according to a copy of a May lawsuit filed on behalf of the former MLB player. The court document also accuses the minister, who also worked at Ben’s non-profit, of defrauding the foundation.

Denmark’s last group game in Copenhagen was always going to be an emotional wringer. After all, they’ve been through, and all the fans have witnessed, with their advancement hopes riding on not just their result but the one from the Belgium-Finland game, it set up to be a night full of torture, glory, euphoria,…Read more...

Eli Manning is coming back to the Giants.Read more...

For all intents and purposes, WWE exited its “Thunderdome Era” last night. The “Hell In A Cell” pay-per-view was the last one that will take place in the company’s outsized and glorified TV studio, as next month’s “Money In The Bank” will take place in Fort Worth before a live crowd. There are still a few more Raws…Read more...

There was a point during the final round of the U.S. Open yesterday when Bryson DeChambeau had a one-stroke lead with only 9 holes to play. He, umm… did not finish with a victory. In fact, he didn’t finish in the top five, or the top 10. Or anywhere close to that. DeChambeau finished in a tie for 26th.

I’m not sure if the Atlanta Hawks won the series or if the Philadelphia 76ers lost it, but either way, the Hawks and Trae Young have surprisingly made it into the Eastern Conference finals. On the other side of the bracket, the Phoenix Suns and Devin Booker are surging. Dreams are forming in my head of a Young vs.…Read more...

While watching the U.S. Open, you may have noticed a ball stuck in a tree, or Byson DeChambau’s near ace on No. 8 or, if you’re like me, you wondered what the view was like from paragliders overlooking Torrey Pines.Read more...

It used to be that I thought NHL refs, of the four major sports at least, did the best job. Which wasn’t an accolade so much as just not crashing the car in quite such a fireball. Baseball umps make up their own strike zone while daring anyone to argue with them about it. It used to be that NBA refs were all too happy…Read more...

When Keyzer Soze infamously said, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist,” at the end of The Usual Suspects, he wasn’t just talking about the con he’d just gotten away with. He was also foreshadowing what Sam Hinkie would do to Sixers fans.

There’s something special about seeing other people’s dreams come true.Read more...

The NBA is finally back in the Black. In coaching, that is.

I admit that I fell into the trap of using every NBA playoff game as a referendum on the legacy of every NBA star. Things are never that simple, and winning a championship is hard. Especially in the NBA, where it’s an actual referendum on how your team is built. It’s not hockey where the bounces just go your way for a…Read more...

You know the old saying: “That’s why they play the games.”

If the whole Super League debacle put people in the very awkward and uncomfortable position of having to side with UEFA, they can feel assured that UEFA was always going to do everything it could to squander that capital. It didn’t take them long.

Sang Ho Baek, a college pitcher at George Mason University, died after complications due to ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, otherwise known as Tommy John surgery. That’s according to a GoFundMe page created for Baek by one of his teammates.

Giannis Antetokounmpo is becoming another NBA enigma.

Recently, the discussion in basketball has been Defensive Players Of The Year and just how exactly certain players ended up with that award. As we watched Rudy Gobert stare blankly from the lane at the Clippers as they constantly kicked the ball out to whomever he was supposed to be guarding outside the three-point…Read more...

Happy Fathers Day, dads! Aren’t you glad this isn’t you?

After weeks of talk on Twitter, years of speculation, and hundreds of YouTube videos calling out pitchers for cheating, MLB has finally caught up with the times.

This season’s been historically injury-plagued, and it might only get worse as the NBA returns to normal this fall.

Baseball-Reference is the gold standard for record keeping in a game whose numbers are its lifeblood. The site that Sean Forman built has supplanted decades of encyclopedias, carving out a niche on the Internet as the most authoritative source for statistics to connect baseball’s past to its present. Any bar bet can…Read more...

There is no growth without pain.

Admit it. You woke up not knowing that NBA teams not currently playing could make trades during the playoffs. Don’t feel bad — a lot of people learned that today, in a startling way.Read more...

2022 will be Barry Bonds’ and Roger Clemens’ final years on the Hall of Fame ballot. The two baseball superstars of the ‘90s and ‘00s have garnered more and more votes each of their last eight years on the ballot — increasing their percentages from about 35 percent each in 2014 to approximately 61.5 percent each in…Read more...

Who wants to stage a fight at an NBA game next season? Any takers? I’ll let someone throw a few haymakers my way if it means I get tickets to a playoff game. I’ll take a signed Jayson Tatum or Mike Conley jersey. It can’t be that hard to fake a fight, right? The WWE scripts their fights all the time. So, come on!…Read more...

There’s nothing on Earth that gets stolen from more than Black culture. From our bodies being taken from Africa to every part of our identities being appropriated and fawned over, as infuriating as it may be, it makes sense that America would want to steal our joy, too. It’s why a white-ass team in a white-ass sport…Read more...

Former long-time Utah Jazz point guard and Hall of Famer John Stockton has appeared in an anti-vaccine documentary, saying things that you normally would say in an anti-vaccine documentary.Read more...

The New York Times just took a deep dive into Megan Rapinoe’s turn as a brand ambassador for Victoria’s Secret, which has been about as good for women’s empowerment as second-hand smoke.

The concept of sports gambling has gotten skewed in the past year. Now that it’s becoming legal in more and more places, you see Allen Iverson or Paige Spiranac in a dress that very well might cause her to cough up her soul (now word on how AI would fit into it) telling you about all the things you can bet on at a…Read more...

Brooks Koepka is really good at golf, and he’s really good at golf on the biggest stages. Since the 2017 Masters, he has played in 14 major championships. In those 14 appearances, he has won four, finished second twice, and placed in the top-10 in three more. Half of his 14 Majors appearances have been a top-10 finish…Read more...

The Donnie Nelson-Rick Carlisle era in Dallas is over... and it’s shaping up to be a real ugly divorce.Read more...

Less than a week ago, the second round of the NBA playoffs seemed like it was on its way to wrapping up quickly, with the 76ers and Nets looking far superior to the Hawks and Bucks, the Suns on the verge of sweeping the Nuggets, and the Clippers down 2-0 to the Jazz with no answers for Utah’s ability to go on runs.

The best you can describe Belgium’s situation as against Denmark was “awkward.” While a good portion of the Belgian squad is personally involved with Christian Eriksen,Thursday’s game was about Danish unity and recovery. This was clearly a catharsis for fans and players in red alike, a group that went through…Read more...

It’s only been two years, and Zion Williamson isn’t extension eligible until next summer, but we’re already looking ahead to one of the most important seasons in the history of Louisiana basketball.

Christian Eriksen will receive an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), a heart starter device, days after his suffering cardiac arrest in a soccer game. The Danish player collapsed during the team’s opening match against Finland last Saturday in the Euro 2020 tournament.