Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

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.

Formula 1 is coming to Las Vegas, and “the fastest growing sport in America” is so popular I want to avoid it entirely. There’s nothing wrong with car racing — I played a couple of the Gran Turismo games, and they were fun — I’m just not going to add it to the never-ending list of sports I follow.

First things first, I know LeBron James fans are going to think I’m only saying this because LeBron currently leads the scoring race, but that’s just not the case. I don’t hate LeBron. He’s the GOAT in my eyes. He’s still one of the best players in the league, and what he’s been able to do at 37 is nothing short of…Read more...

Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo can join some elite company, should he take home his third NBA MVP award at the end of the regular season. If he can edge out Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokić, we can finally lay the best player in the world debate to rest. We can’t continue to deny Antetokounmpo his bouquet…Read more...

The USMNT punched their ticket with a true let’s-not-fuck-this-up-royally performance in Costa Rica. So now the attention turns to who are the 23 souls that Gregg Berhalter will be putting on the plane for the tournament. Our intrepid soccer goofuses Sam Fels and Eric Blum have some ideas.Read more...

The Buccaneers announced yesterday that Bruce Arians, their head coach for the past three years, would be moving into an executive role in Tampa Bay’s front office, effective immediately. He’ll be replaced as HC by the Bucs’ current defensive coordinator Todd Bowles, who has been with the organization since 2019,…Read more...

The NBA Rookie of the Year vote has gotten even more complicated. Yesterday, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that Evan Mobley sprained his left ankle and is out for the next three games. This comes at an especially difficult time for the Cleveland Cavaliers, who have lost four of their last five games and have not…Read more...

Sorry to all the Eric Church fans out there, but I’ve just got to respect the man’s commitment to the game. The country singer canceled a sold-out concert in San Antonio this Saturday so that he could watch North Carolina face Duke in a Final Four game that, if all goes well, is sure to go down in history as a March…Read more...

Earlier this week, TMZ posted a story with video footage from FOX 8 in Cleveland that featured excerpts from two of Deshaun Watson’s depositions in multiple civil lawsuits filed against him for sexual assault and inappropriate conduct by more than 20 women No matter how you feel about the Browns’ new quarterback, this…Read more...

As mentioned previously this week, the USMNT fan’s natural inclination these days is to turn cold and scornful. It’s understandable, as we all spent so much time watching a team and program that was an utter mess and just twirling around before falling like a child you made do the spin-around-the-bat thing. It becomes…Read more...

The NBA postseason is nearly upon us, and each year you can pick out a few players that have something to prove. Giannis Antetokounmpo did it last season (no matter how many breaks they got along the way), leading Milwaukee to the title, and LeBron James the year before when he led the Lakers to their first…Read more...

This year’s NBA MVP Award has several contenders: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Ja Morant, Devin Booker, Luka Dončić, etc. However, most fans and analysts would agree that the award is really a two-horse race between Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid and the reigning MVP, Denver’s Nikola Jokić. It’s been that way for a few months…Read more...

However you feel about that era of Los Angeles Lakers and San Antonio Spurs, the world is a better place because Robert Horry played for them in the 2000s. His performance in Game 5 of the 2005 NBA Finals against the Detroit Pistons gave us something to remember from that dry white toast of a seven-game series, and…Read more...

On the list of things in England that I love, add jailing a racist internet troll for abusing Marcus Rashford next to the Great British Bakeoff, an accent that makes everything sound classy, using holiday as a verb, and Tom Holland. News that Justin Lee Price, 19, of Worcester, will be spending the next six weeks…Read more...

Major League Baseball is great. As long as no one is complaining about the unwritten rules and Nick Castellanos isn’t at the plate, the game is laid back and fun. I doubt I could enjoy it any more than I already do.Read more...

Joel Embiid learned a valuable lesson in Tuesday night’s loss to the Milwaukee Bucks in the waning seconds. When you come at the king, you best not miss. Or at least go up for game-tying shots more aggressively when the king of weakside blocks is prowling.

Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay is still feeling the aftershock of the Carson Wentz experiment, weeks after trading the former No. 2 overall pick to Washington. Irsay just can’t seem to get past his mistake of trading for Wentz last offseason and how the team fell apart, led by the QB at the end of last season.

Marsha Blackburn and Cory Booker — now there’s two names you don’t expect to see co-authoring a Senate bill. But I guess if there’s one thing that can bridge the ever-widening political chasm in the United States, it’s the universal experience of being fed up with the NCAA.

The Clippers appear to be operating like a team that’s extremely aware of its mortality. Paul George returned from injury Tuesday to help lead LA to a comeback win over the Utah Jazz, scoring 34 points in 31 minutes. If his right elbow — which could’ve been repaired via surgery but he opted to play through it — was…Read more...

The term “White Sox” in baseball basically means anger. Or at least a heavy pinch of it to go with however else it might be defined. There is always an undercurrent of seething with the White Sox and their fans. It’s part of their identity. The White Sox are a symbol of their part of Chicago, the Southside, which…Read more...

Sometimes, even the NBA’s all-time leading scorer misses an easy one.

Records are made to be broken, specifically any LPs that were pressed of the 2010 Scott Stapp (yes, the Creed guy) song “Marlins Will Soar,” the baseball team song to end all baseball team songs.

In the NBA, teams with stars and veteran leadership usually make waves in the postseason and win championships. It’s rare to see a team of young inexperienced players going deep in the postseason, no matter how talented they are. Of course, there are outliers to everything.Read more...

Last night, there was one of those rare regular-season NBA games that rise to the level of must-see. The Sixers and Bucks met in Philadelphia, and with the top four seeds in the Eastern Conference still in flux, and could very well finish in any order, it had some real meaning. And it was a classic, as much as any…Read more...

Championship windows are an interesting concept, in theory. However, they assume too much. One one hand, it’s impossible to project how rosters will look from year-to-year. Half the league’s championship prospects are a one-window apartment facing an alley. Teams like the Chiefs, Packers, and Bills have a porch…Read more...

The private flight tracking, the Medalist rumors, the never-ending hope — this morning, the last year of Tiger Woods news came to a head when he touched down at Augusta National, home of the Masters, for a practice round that almost no one saw coming. Just over a year after a car accident that nearly cost the 15-time…Read more...

If no good deed goes unpunished, what happens when you perform a good deed from a place of self-interest? Soon-to-be-former owner of Chelsea FC Roman Abramovich found out after he tried to “help” the peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

For all the energy devoted to the Lia Thomas story, you’d think there was an army of transitioning athletes looking to snatch Division I titles from the women who rightfully won them. Laws have been written, passed, vetoed and passed again to prevent people assigned one sex at birth from competing with people who…Read more...

It’s already an instant classic and the ball won’t be tipped for four more days. The greatest rivalry in college basketball, one of the fiercest in all of sports, heads to the Final Four. Duke squaring off with North Carolina is a momentous, must-watch occasion when it takes place under routine circumstances during…Read more...

The annual NFL owners’ meetings always bring a flurry of storylines, rumors, and occasionally rule changes. This year’s meetings brought some pretty significant changes. Per a release from the NFL, the free kick formation rules that were tested in 2021 will be made permanent starting this year. That’s whatever. It…Read more...

Precedent, precedent, precedent. There may be countless takeaways from the Cleveland Browns’ newest QB hire, but the salary contingencies they’ve set up for Deshaun Watson are sure to set a league-wide standard that will have a significant impact on future quarterback contracts.

It’s been a whirlwind offseason for the Seattle Seahawks and their fanbase, with the potential to get even worse. The team started down the path of rebuilding by trading away Russell Wilson earlier this month. Soon after, rumors began circulating around 24-year-old wide receiver DK Metcalf potentially becoming the…Read more...

Opponents of the St. Louis Cardinals better get their rocking chairs and kitsch retirement gifts ready because another act had been added to the team’s retirement tour. Former lead singer/first baseman and current designated hitter Albert Pujols is rejoining the Red Birds for what he says is his “last run.”Read more...

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BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — There was no good answer for the NCAA when it came to seeding Connecticut for March Madness.