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Sitting in front of his locker at the Staples Center that night in January 2007, Renaldo Major hesitated. Earlier that day, the 24-year-old guard had signed a 10-day contract with the Golden State Warriors before promptly making his NBA debut in a road game against the Clippers, scoring five points and swiping two…Read more...

When my brother died, I was too shattered to write his obituary. There is little record of his 29 years of life; it simply vanished. When I type “Yush Gupta,” Google autofills “Yush Gupta death,” a brutal reminder that even on the internet, a space where nothing is forgotten, Yush is a mirage, slowly disappearing.

Reigning MVP Christian Yelich was lost for the season after taking a foul ball to the knee two weeks ago, but the Milwaukee Brewers didn’t collapse in their quest to make the playoffs for the second year in a row. To the contrary, they shook off the loss of their best player and surged down the stretch even more…Read more...

No one represents the San Jose Earthquakes better than striker Chris Wondolowski, who decided to serve his red-card suspension on Wednesday night by embedding himself in the Earthquakes supporters section and generally acting like a lunatic. That was particularly true when San Jose scored early to take the lead in a…Read more...

It’s been more than a week since Jaguars All-Pro cornerback Jalen Ramsey requested a trade out of Jacksonville, and it doesn’t appear that he is any closer to having that request granted today than he was last Monday. This has created a lot of confusion around the team: Is Ramsey still an active member of the Jaguars,…Read more...

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In a sign that the universe still has a couple utterly unprecedented tricks hidden up its sleeves, an athlete announced Wednesday that he is eager to be back among Philadelphia sports fans because of how appreciative and encouraging they are, as a group, relative to another set of sports fans.Read more...

“Psh,” you say. “Athletes regularly leave their fans in tears. This isn’t news! Move on, find a new slant.” That is true. Please don’t remind me of Brandon Inge’s ‘09 Home Run Derby outing. What we’ve got here, though, is a case of the happy tears. The medical way of explaining this is that children’s heads are…Read more...

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, is hoping that Congress will take him up on the offer to just let him write any potential facial recognition laws that could interfere with the rollout of Amazon’s Rekognition tech, Recode reported on Wednesday.

The parent company of WWL-AM, the radio home of the New Orleans Saints and the LSU Tigers, announced the conclusion of its internal investigation into an incident in early September where the station’s official Twitter account was used to direct a homophobic slur at one of its own sports hosts. To no one’s great…Read more...

Sad, dispiriting news from the world of college marching bands: Columbia University effectively disbanded its wonderfully anarchic and mischievous marching band Wednesday, after years and years spent actively antagonizing the group and suppressing its creativity. The university communicated to the scramble band’s…Read more...

About a week after a high school coach in Arizona got caught doing the very same thing, a former Arkansas high school football coach has reportedly resigned after he was found to be leaking information about his own school’s football team to an opponent’s coach. Someone call the CDC, it’s an epidemic!Read more...

Three weeks into the regular season, Chargers running back Melvin Gordon has ended his holdout and is planning to return to the team on Thursday, according to Ian Rapoport.Read more...

New York Yankees starter Domingo Germán has been out on paid administrative leave since last Thursday, after MLB announced that the league was investigating him under the league’s domestic violence policy. That leave could last up to seven days before MLB could choose to either suspend Germán, reinstate him, or extend…Read more...

The world cycling championships have been taking place in Yorkshire, England over the past few days, and befitting an event in fall in England, it’s been rainy as hell. Riding a time trial bike in wet conditions like this is particularly difficult, and big puddles claimed several U-23 men’s riders during yesterday’s…Read more...

“Lie” is a great word. It’s a short, to-the-point noun with a universally agreed upon meaning that we all learn before we even enter kindergarten. Call someone a liar, and any English-speaker in the world will require no clarification—they’ll know that someone isn’t telling the truth.Read more...

There’s still a lot of season left, granted, but Ravens fans should be pleased with the way head coach John Harbaugh has been running things through three games. Baltimore has built an offense that seems perfectly suited to quarterback Lamar Jackson’s many gifts, and Harbaugh has shown an in-game aggressiveness that’s…Read more...

It’s the question everyone has been asking today: Is beer money sign man sorry for old racist tweets? Well, thanks to a breaking report from ESPN, we can now confirm it with confidence: “Beer money sign man sorry for old racist tweets.”

The NBA has promised to crack down on tampering and salary cap circumvention, rolling out new rules and talking a big game about ramped-up enforcement. So far the league has done really noble work, punishing the Milwaukee Bucks for noting that their own player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, will be offered a lot of money…Read more...

Ad Astra is a movie principally concerned with two questions: How do you cope with and overcome the psychological trauma of turning into your taciturn, emotionally remote father? And what if space turns out to be mostly bullshit?

First things first: hell yeah buddy, that is indeed Rick Honeycutt.Read more...

After months of feuding and ejections and protesting, MLS has come to an agreement with various supporters groups to suspend its ban on Iron Front imagery at matches for the rest of the season:Read more...

Nobody’s heard much from Markelle Fultz since he was traded to the Orlando Magic last February, which is probably for the best. Aside from getting healthy and rebuilding his shoddily rebuilt jump shot from the ground up, what Fultz needed most was some time out of the spotlight. That time appears to be over:

After dropping 28 points in a dominant Game 3 semifinals win, Las Vegas Aces center Liz Cambage flexed on her opponents, saying in her postgame interview, “If they can’t handle it, get in the weight room or get out of the post.” The Washington Mystics heeded her advice.

What do you get when you mix an obscenely racist Spanish candy, a well-meaning but ill-advised joke tweet between Premier League teammates, and a manager who clearly doesn’t know anything about the history of racist imagery? Well, you get a racism scandal perfectly suited for 2019, with only a bag of delicious…Read more...

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It’s that time of year again, hoops fans! The NFL season is in full swing, baseball’s playoffs start next week, and the NBA regular season won’t tip off for another month. You know what that means: It’s time to rank the top 100 active NBA players!

Deadspin is on the record about our belief that indirect free kicks rule, and the rocket blast that gave Creighton an overtime victory over Tulsa on Tuesday was a perfect example of why we so love these kinds of goals:

The most important thing to know about the Miami Dolphins is that their new coach, Brian Flores, treats every game like he will be held criminally liable if anything interesting happens. Dolphins fans, befitting a franchise that hasn’t won a playoff game in 20 years, have extensive experience with coaches who may be…Read more...

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One day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Democrats were launching a formal impeachment inquiry into president Donald Trump, the White House on Wednesday released the much sought-after memo describing a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. In it, the president…Read more...

For my money, there’s no better exercise during the NFL season than to look at the bottom of the standings in order to wonder, Would Jim Tomsula, right now, be better than that team’s head coach?Read more...

Much has been made of the ways in which the juiced ball and hitters valuing power over contact has mutated MLB offenses, but the game’s drastic evolution has effects all over the field. In fact, part of the reason why so many guys go up to the plate only swinging for the fences now is that they increasingly have to…Read more...

The Nationals clinched a National League Wild Card berth Tuesday, via a doubleheader sweep of the Phillies. It’s not exactly a towering accomplishment—it earns them one do-or-die game and nothing more—but it’s worth remembering that the Nationals were at one point 19–31 on the season and looking totally cooked. At any…Read more...

A funny moment occurred in the seventh inning of Tuesday night’s game between the Washington Nationals and the Philadelphia Phillies. Bryce Harper, pinch-hitting in the night game after starting the first leg of today’s doubleheader, came to the plate to face Nationals reliever and personal nemesis Hunter Strickland.…Read more...

The NBA Board of Governors tweaked the rule book last week in order to, among other things, “help eliminate the gap between the [traveling] rule as written and how it has been applied in NBA games,” according to a summary distributed by the league. The tweak defines the concept of the gather, which is a basketball…Read more...

Auston Matthews, Toronto’s 22-year-old center, has a pretrial conference scheduled for Wednesday morning in Scottsdale, Arizona, related to a strange incident alleged to have taken place in a condominium complex at 2 a.m. back in May. Matthews, who may have been intoxicated at the time, is accused of subjecting a…Read more...

I can’t remember the last time both of these games so underwhelmed.Read more...

Last Saturday’s UFC card in Mexico City ended with a wet fart of a main event. Yair Rodriguez got the walkout of a lifetime in front of thousands of hometown fans, only for his bout against Jeremy Stephens to end as a no contest in 15 seconds when Rodriguez swiped across Stephens’s face and gouged his eyes. The crowd…Read more...

At a time when it feels like any comedy, great or up-and-coming, could be cut down at any moment, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia stands tall. The FXX series, which premiered on FX in 2005, is now in its 14th season, tying the record for longest-running live-action sitcom set by The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet…Read more...

The possibility that the NBA’s dumb new tampering rules would be enforced in the dumbest possible fashion has quickly come to fruition. Per a league press release today, the Milwaukee Bucks have been fined $50,000 for “violating league rules governing the timing of discussions regarding future player contracts and…Read more...

The Chicago Bears keep a rowdy locker room after wins, and after they smoked Washington on the road Monday night, they turned the visitor’s locker room into “Club Dub.” Everyone had a good time! Head coach Matt Nagy threw his arms around a bunch! Running back Tarik Cohen accidentally showed his teammate’s penis to…Read more...

In what universe is Marcelo still one of the best defenders in the world? Not in this one, or any other where performances on the field or even the amorphous “club success” criteria apply. The only place where Marcelo could be considered a starter in a world’s best XI is one where nothing matters today as much as…Read more...

This is an excerpt from Eric Nusbaum’s new weekly Substack newsletter Sports Stories, where he’ll be writing about sports, history, and sports history. He hopes you will subscribe here, and share these stories with your friends, families, and table tennis practice partners. The version of this in the newsletter has…Read more...

Tom Brady was watching Titans-Jaguars Thursday night and, like every other person with functional eyes, did not enjoy the experience. Only he overcame his revulsion and fear of being found out, tweeting about it and saying all the holding penalties were ruining his fun.

Today, we’re talking about pickles, basketball hoop design, BIG WEDDING, and more.

Apologies to Kevin Garnett, but he’s been upstaged by Mike Francesa as the most intriguing sports-adjacent figure to appear in the upcoming movie Uncut Gems. In the anxiety-inducing trailer, radio’s drowsiest fella dons pinstripes, fits the film’s NYC milieu perfectly, and nails his line delivery: “Well I’ll tell you…Read more...

Look closely at this past Saturday’s sports page of the Washington County (Penn.) Observer-Reporter. There’s something off about that photo accompanying a recap of the game between between Peters Township and North Hills.Read more...

Malcolm Gladwell emailed me last Thursday, in response to a blog post I had written about his recent appearance on Bill Simmons’s podcast, in which he dusted off a tired defense of Joe Paterno’s role in the Jerry Sandusky abuse scandal. He offered to send me a copy of his new book, which he said might “modify [my]…Read more...