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Kevin Durant’s month-long absence from the Golden State Warriors while he tries to recover from a calf injury has thrown the NBA Finals totally out of whack. Now, with the Warriors down 3-1 to the Raptors and facing a potential dynasty-ending Game 5 on Monday, Durant’s return seems like the only thing that could…Read more...

In the top of the second inning of today’s game between the White Sox and Royals, White Sox outfielder Eloy Jiménez latched onto a hanging curveball at the top of the zone. It didn’t even look like he put that hard of a swing on the ball, but then it just... kept... going... and going:

The Fort Myers News-Press is reporting that Tony Joiner, former standout football player at the University of Florida, has been arrested and charged with murdering his wife.

The latest string of updates about the quad injury that’s hounding Mets second baseman Robinson Cano are so familiar that it’s hard to absorb them without feeling intense déjà vu. Let me assure you that this is not news you have read before, or a memory from some past life bubbling to the surface of your conscience.…Read more...

Most countries making their debut in a tournament like the World Cup are just happy to be there. Implied in a country making it to its first major tournament is that the country in the very recent past was not very good, and its soccer infrastructure is at an incredibly early stage of its development. For most…Read more...

Valentina Shevchenko defended her UFC flyweight title against Jessica Eye last night, and she wrapped up the fight in the second round with one of the most devastating head-kick knockouts the world has ever seen:

Vanderbilt found themselves down 1-0 in the best-of-three Nashville Super Regional against Duke, and so they sent stud pitcher Kumar Rocker to the mound to start Game 2 yesterday and asked him to save the season. Rocker responded with 19 strikeouts and a no-hitter, leading Vandy to a 3-0 win.

The first Women’s World Cup match of the day, between Italy and Australia, was a spicy one. Australia took a 1-0 lead early in the first half thanks to a Sam Kerr penalty kick, but their aggressive, attacking style left them open to counter attacks from Italy all match. Italy could have had multiple goals from…Read more...

Yankees outfielder Brett Gardner has had a pretty rough season so far, so you can’t blame him for being mad about the fact that he had what looked like a sure extra-base hit taken away from him by Indians right fielder Jordan Luplow. What you can blame him for is busting his own lip open like a damn dingus!

Argentina are not very good. It’s important to get that out of the way early. Due to a host of factors not entirely in the team’s control—particularly the fact that they have only been playing together for about a year due to federation turmoil—the Albicelestes head into France with more questions than answers. And…Read more...

The USA’s top nemesis in the Women’s World Cup comes into 2019 with plenty of questions to answer, despite winning it all in 2011 and placing second in 2015. A disastrous failure to qualify for the 2016 Olympics ended the eight-year tenure of Japanese manager Norio Sasaki, and as Japan enter their first major…Read more...

This poor Greek kid discovered the dangers of being a ball boy today when Italian midfielder Nicolò Barella accidentally punted the ball straight into the kid’s face in Italy’s match against Greece:Read more...

Atlanta Dream guard Brittney Sykes led her team with 15 points in a home loss to the Las Vegas Aces on Thursday night. Afterward, Sykes presented her autographed, game-used sneakers to a certain superfan.Read more...

There’s probably no team with more regret over the 2015 World Cup than England. The Lionesses were knocked out in Canada four years ago by Japan via a cruel 92nd minute own goal by defender Laura Bassett, who sliced a clearance into her own net. That was the painful end to a World Cup where England looked, if not the…Read more...

The Jason La Canfora Orioles Minute was an irregularly recurring feature in which we checked in with the NFL reporter’s thoughts on the O’s. Then we stopped, mostly because he did. Now he tweets about soccer, so welcome to the Jason La Canfora USMNT U-20 Minute.

If the Brazilians are going to start off their World Cup on the right foot, they’re going to do it without the six-time player of the year. Brazil manager Vadao has announced that Marta will miss Sunday’s tie with Jamaica as she recovers from a left thigh injury.

When the Blues try to raise the Stanley Cup Sunday night, they’ll do so without forward Ivan Barbashev, who was given a one-game suspension by the NHL’s Department of Player Safety for a high hit on Boston’s Marcus Johansson. Given the tenor of this series and what the Blues are trying to do (and have successfully…Read more...

Not much is going right for the Mariners these days. Just this week, one player was hit by a pitch that lacerated his spleen while another fouled a ball off himself that ruptured his testicle. So it’s the least we can do to feature a Mariners highlight where no one’s internal organs explode.Read more...

FIFA’s ethics committee has found Keramuudin Karim, former President of the Afghanistan Football Federation, guilty of sexually and physically abusing multiple members of the women’s national team. Karim is now banned for life from all international and national soccer activities, and was fined the equivalent of…Read more...

From the outside, it sure looked like Brian Gaine was doing a good job. When he was hired as Texans GM in January of 2018, the Texans’ roster was so expensive and such a mess that they were giving away draft picks just to get rid of some of their worst contracts. Despite that, he signed Tyrann Mathieu on the cheap and…Read more...

Recency bias is a hateful but dominant force in the best-of-seven world, so the clear assumption to be made from Game 4 of the NBA Finals is that Game 6 seems unlikely. The Toronto Raptors are the new Golden State Warriors, and the Golden State Warriors are finally all about the trailing step, the anxious shot, and…Read more...

The Warriors as currently constituted are “merely” a great NBA team. In just about any other context, it’s peak roster construction. A couple of all-world shooters, a couple of bangers down low with shots of their own, a scattering of role players each with their own specific skills, and an overall commitment to…Read more...

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We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.Read more...

On Thursday, Nieman Lab published a friendly discussion with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg and the magazine’s recently promoted executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, in which they addressed the great progress The Atlantic has made in adding women to its staff. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending…Read more...

In the months following the Italian men’s national team’s failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Italy’s women helped redeemed the country by winning seven straight matches in their qualification run to the women’s version of the tournament. That blistering streak of form was enough for Le Azzurre to win…Read more...

Here are the regions of the United States.Read more...

There is no shortage of arguments to be made against the proliferation of replay review in soccer, and I won’t bog down this blog post with points we’ve already made on the site many times over. Besides, the argument against the VAR decision from today’s Women’s World Cup opening match between France and Korea is a…Read more...

I recently became deaf in my right ear thanks to a sudden brain hemorrhage, which is a freakish life-threatening injury that I highly recommend avoiding. The good news out of this, apart from me not being dead, is that it turns out my surviving left ear is my phone ear. I didn’t even realize it was my phone ear until…Read more...

The Eagles showed they were committed to Carson Wentz in February, when they let Nick Foles take his dick somewhere else. And by signing Wentz to a four-year extension two years before they had to, as the Eagles did Thursday night, they showed too that they’re all-in on him.Read more...

The Trenton Thunder outfielder who busted up a combined no-hitter on Tuesday night with a slick push bunt up the first baseline triggered a benches-clearing fracas as a result. It turns out he’s also triggered a bunch of weird assholes, as he has gone on to receive death threats from dickhead fans, according to an…Read more...

Last Saturday, news broke that a Brazilian woman had filed a police report in which she said soccer superstar Neymar raped her in a Paris hotel last month. Today, Neymar testified in court about a different but related criminal charge he faces because of the intimate photos of the alleged victim he posted on social…Read more...

The New York Mets: honestly who ever even knows with these guys.Read more...

“If you want to do or achieve something on the clay, inevitably, at some stage, you will go through Rafa,” Roger Federer said after his French Open quarterfinal, “because he’s that strong, and he will be there.”Read more...

Twins outfielder Max Kepler was fantastic in Thursday’s 5-4 win over Cleveland as he went 4-for-4 with three home runs and a walk. There are two ways to look at this performance, and they’re not mutually exclusive. You could say that Kepler had a hell of a night, and you could say that opposing pitcher Trevor Bauer…Read more...

Subject: Seems a bit harshRead more...

It is about two hours into my afternoon with David Oks and Henry Williams, the teenagers who persuaded former Senator Mike Gravel to run for president at the age of 88, when Oks, who is 18, mentions that he has a personal assistant who is helping him handle his emails on a volunteer basis. “He’s a high school…Read more...

I wish they had thrown that flag in the NFC title game. I wish this because the Rams’ Nickell Robey-Coleman committed obvious pass interference. But I also wish it because flagging the Rams on that play would have allowed Saints coach Sean Payton to blow the game on his own merits—something he was already well on the…Read more...

A Journelle sale, cast iron cookware, PlayStation Plus membership, and camping pads lead off a gaming deal-packed Friday.Read more...

It’s summer now, and you know what that means: time to pack up some beach clothes, a bathing suit, a cooler, a couple good books, a bag of plastic beach toys, the kids’ floaties, the kids’ bathing suits, several large towels, a beach umbrella, one of those plastic sand screws you use to plant a beach umbrella, the…Read more...

The Ryan O’Reilly trade had a real “deck chairs on the Titanic” vibe when it went down last offseason. O’Reilly, who was depressed after losing so many games up in Buffalo, went over to St. Louis in exchange for three replacement-level players and some draft picks, and as the Blues struggled to win in the first half…Read more...

Jalopnik At $29,900, Could This 2013 Model S 85 Mean It’s Finally Time to Buy a Tesla? | Lifehacker Where to Get Free Donuts on National Donut Day 2019 | Kotaku Adult Video Star Talks About The Casting Couch In The Anime Industry | io9 Updates From Birds of Prey, Stranger Things, and More | The Takeout Inside the…Read more...

One fun subplot of these NBA playoffs has been the resurgence of Raptors backup point guard Fred VanVleet. Through the first 15 games of the postseason, VanVleet was just one of the many Raptors role players struggling to find his shot while Kawhi Leonard dragged the team forward. He finally emerged from stasis in…Read more...

I’m tired. Of officials blowing big, important calls in the playoffs, mostly, but also of having to write blogs about them that try to say something more intelligent than well, it’s bad to get these calls wrong in such big moments, but also being an NHL official is a difficult job and even the best are going to screw…Read more...

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The St. Louis Blues won Thursday night in Boston, 2–1, to take a 3–2 lead in the Stanley Cup Final. If Game 5 was the last hockey game of the season in Boston, the lasting image of the home finale will be trash raining down on the ice as furious Bruins fans expressed their displeasure with the way the series’ rough…Read more...

Lots of tension in the arena tonight for Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final. Lots of wound-up hockey fans. Perhaps this sort of thing was inevitable, although you’d expect it to at least be between opposing fans. Not so! Here we have two young Boston bros talking shit and hurling beer into the face of an advancing fellow…Read more...

This was a very valiant effort from Orioles outfielder Dwight Smith Jr. The ball was driven pretty good to left by Rougned Odor; Asdrúbal Cabrera, on first base with two outs, is running on contact. By tracking this ball down, Smith might’ve kept a run off the board. But he also plowed into the wall at something like…Read more...

Former Astros ace Dallas Keuchel was the last man standing from the grueling free agency winter of hell that followed the 2018 season. Craig Kimbrel, the other glaringly overqualified but evidently unemployable pitcher, landed with the Cubs Wednesday night; Thursday night, at last, Keuchel scored a gig with the…Read more...

On May 26, Bills rookie linebacker Tyrel Dodson was arraigned in Arizona after being arrested on misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, assault/domestic violence and damage to property of less than $2,000. The arrest came after Dodson’s girlfriend called 9-1-1 and told the operator that Dodson had hit her across…Read more...