Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

After four straight games of curious anonymity, Ben Simmons finally arrived—and just in time, as the Sixers desperately needed their Aussie weirdo to make like Joel Embiid’s ass and stop spewing diarrhea everywhere. Thanks to Simmons’s 21 points and bevy of rebounds and assists, Philadelphia lived to fight another day…Read more...

Jusuf Nurkić, Portland’s excellent but injured big man, has been occasionally spotted supporting his team from the sideline during the playoffs. This support sometimes makes use of fashion. During the Blazers’ Game 6 win on Thursday, the big man wore a t-shirt with a list of 10 names. Here are those names:Read more...

Turning Point USA, the nationwide alt-right campus organization, voluntarily ousted a member of its University of Nevada Las Vegas chapter early Friday morning after a viral video showed several individuals yelling “White Power” and “fuck the niggers.”

The Jacksonville Jaguars will be without linebacker Telvin Smith during the upcoming season. Smith, who is 28 years old and led the Jags in tackles with 134 last season, announced on his Instagram page that he will be stepping away from the game this season in order to “give this time back to myself, my family, & my…Read more...

Yeah, Mariners second baseman Dee Gordon was hurting after being hit on the wrist in the third inning of Thursday’s 3-1 loss to the Yankees, and yeah, he might have to miss some time. (A CT scan is scheduled for today.) But more than anything else, he was angry.

With a whopping 900 lumens of brightness, a rechargeable battery, a zoomable beam, and IP65 dust and water resistance, Anker’s LC90 flashlight is enough flashlight for just about everyone. And with those specs, it’s a steal at $20.Read more...

The Western Conference semifinal series between the Denver Nuggets and the Portland Trail Blazers has been very good. It was hectic and tight through the first four games, then Denver landed a heavy blow with a Game 5 wipeout. Thursday night the Blazers responded, surging ahead in the second quarter, expanding their…Read more...

This insane Josh Reddick catch may not have quite the stakes of Jackie Bradley Jr.’s latest ridiculous highlight, but there was plenty on the line, and anyway the catch is molto buono, my friends. Molto, molto buono. You can’t see this, but I am doing the chef’s kiss as I watch it:Read more...

Joel Embiid didn’t put up the hugest numbers in Thursday night’s Game 6, but if anything his pedestrian production underscores just how dominant Embiid can be when he’s not pooping out and coughing up various vital internal organs. Thursday night he was feeling good, and as a consequence the 76ers beat the living…Read more...

Zach Smith, Urban Meyer’s disgraced former wide receivers coach at Ohio State, was arrested again Thursday in Delaware County, Ohio, for violating the terms of a civil protection order filed by ex-wife Courtney Smith. The arrest reportedly took place at Scioto Ridge Elementary School, when Zach showed up Thursday…Read more...

The Boston Globe—hometown newspaper to billionaire Robert Kraft and the NFL team he owns—is no longer among the media outlets intervening in the criminal case against him. Kraft faces two counts of misdemeanor solicitation after he was one of two dozen men charged in a Jupiter, Florida, police investigation into…Read more...

Kyler Murray officially became a part of the Arizona Cardinals on Thursday when the first-overall pick signed his rookie contract with the team. His deal, according to multiple reports, is a standard four-year contract with a fifth-year option. He’ll be earning over $35.2 million guaranteed over that time with a $23.6…Read more...

Arsenal and Chelsea both qualified for the Europa League final today by advancing past Valencia and Eintracht Frankfurt, respectively. That means both the Europa League and Champions League finals will be contested by English clubs, officially consecrating 2019 as the year of Premier League supremacy.Read more...

The Fresno Grizzlies, Triple-A affiliate of the Washington Nationals, have unleashed upon the world this mascot, which resembles Milwaukee Bucks center Brook Lopez or possibly a leering pervert in your neighborhood. The smirk on his face is dismaying. Why’s it like that?Read more...

Maximum Security and his entourage of humans are not going to take his controversial Kentucky Derby disqualification lying down, even after those scoundrels down at the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission summarily denied the bay colt’s formal protest earlier this week. To a lesser horse, this would be the final blow in…Read more...

The good news for Warriors fans: An MRI this afternoon confirmed that Kevin Durant’s scary-looking non-contact injury Wednesday night was actually a right calf strain. The last time Durant strained his calf, he was only out for a week, which means he could return in the playoffs and should be healthy when he hits free…Read more...

There are worse problems to have as a basketball team than the lingering hangover and lousy vibes that come with a half-decade of all-devouring dominance. In the abstract, that doesn’t really sound like a problem at all—being slowly spoiled by overwhelming success is, on balance, a much better way to go than being…Read more...

It was going to be so bad, man.

As you might expect, Sean McVay has internalized the Rams’ loss to the Patriots in Super Bowl 53. L.A.’s defense put up an all-time performance by limiting Tom Brady and the Pats to a pair of field goals and a touchdown. But the Rams’ offense, which had dazzled the league all season long with all sorts of whizbang…Read more...

Goalkeeper boners come in all shapes, sizes, and crookedness, but sometimes, you just can’t compete with physics, as Club Deportivo Palestino goalie José Ignacio González found out on Tuesday night.

Aubrey Huff, former baseball player and current man who could not possibly be more “divorced but doing great,” seems to be making a post-career pivot into the “angrily recording political rants from unflattering angles” school of punditry. He’s previously raved on Twitter about how Trump is great and people protesting…Read more...

Paul Pierce played his last NBA minute over two years ago. His absence made no hearts grow fonder. Last night, while the Bucks drained the last drops of blood out of the Celtics’ season, Milwaukee’s arena lit up with a “Paul Pierce sucks” chant.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a WWE wrestler comes out to the ring to cut a promo, gets interrupted by someone, who in turn gets interrupted by someone else. This goes on until a tag match is thrown together featuring everyone in that derailed promo train. This is such a common occurrence that internet fans…Read more...

To preview the upcoming Carolina Hurricanes–Boston Bruins playoff series, Boston sports radio show Toucher & Rich had Chip Alexander, Canes beat writer for the Raleigh News and Observer, call in Wednesday to talk hockey. It wasn’t long before one of the hosts hung up on him, for a very petty reason.Read more...

This review almost certainly contains spoilers.

On this week’s edition of WWE’s flagship television program, Monday Night Raw, viewers were treated to a segment in which the tag team The Usos, theoretically the good guys, revealed that they had invented “Ucy Hot,” their own sweat-activated version of Icy Hot, and secretly deployed it to the trunks of their rivals,…Read more...

Skillet Throw Out Old Canisters of PAM Immediately | Jalopnik Missouri HOA Threatens to Foreclose on Truck Owner’s House Because They Don’t Understand Patina | io9 Updates From Game of Thrones, Child’s Play, and More | Kotaku Fallout 76 Players Can Now Set Up Their Own Stores, But Bethesda Taxes Their Goods | The…Read more...

A plant Gold Box, RoboVac exclusive, KitchenAid Mini, and a Columbia sale lead off Thursday’s best deals.

We’re all aware of what a thrilling, last-second, game-winning touchdown can do American football fans, but I submit that nothing can make a sports fan lose his or her mind quite like a stoppage-time winner in soccer. It’s such a rare thing, such an unexpected thing—you dare not even hope for it!—that you can’t blame…Read more...

As the second round came to a close I looked upon the remnants of the NHL and beheld the Four Horsemen who delivered judgment upon the match-ups. Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death each sent a team into the next life, which appears mostly to be either Worlds, or a golf course in British Columbia.

It’s the how that really stings. That Barcelona, a very good team that nonetheless suffers from several glaring deficiencies, lost in the Champions League semifinals to Liverpool, one of only two truly great teams in Europe this season and probably the one best equipped to solve the particular problems this devilishly…Read more...

Pretend you don’t know anything about hockey. Take a look at this frozen moment of action. Where is the puck? Where is the play happening, and where is it not? Who is involved in the action, and who still has the potential to affect it? Who is violating the rules? More importantly, who is violating the rules and…Read more...

The Nintendo Switch has been around long enough that we’re starting to see certified refurbs hit the market en masse. This one’s available for $275, which is only a $25 discount, but it’s sold direct from Nintendo’s own eBay storefront, and includes the standard one-year warranty.Read more...

The Warriors found themselves in a real hairy spot Wednesday night, in the second half of Game 5 of their conference semifinal series against the Houston Rockets. The Rockets were surging even before Kevin Durant went down with a lower leg injury, erasing Golden State’s early lead and drawing to within a point at the…Read more...

Wednesday’s Red Sox-Orioles game was much more eventful than you might expect from a game featuring a Red Sox team climbing back from a rotten start and, well, the Orioles, who are trash. Chris Sale took a no-hitter into the sixth inning; later, after losing the no-no, Sale took out his frustration by dusting the…Read more...

Late in the third quarter of Wednesday night’s Game 5 of Rockets-Warriors, Kevin Durant pulled up with a sudden non-contact lower leg injury, and had to leave the game. Reggie Miller, working the TNT broadcast, observed that the sequence of Durant’s injury looked strikingly similar to the Achilles tendon injury…Read more...

It would have been very on-brand for the perennial choke-artist San Jose Sharks to blow it against the 8th seed in the second-round of what might be the most wide-open NHL playoffs of all-time. But to their credit, San Jose recovered from Gabriel Landeskog’s Game 6 overtime winner and got the win they needed in Game 7…Read more...

In the third quarter of Wednesday night’s Celtics-Bucks game, the Celtics half-heartedly swarmed a Giannis Antetokounmpo-Eric Bledsoe pick and roll at the top of the key, and Giannis smartly dumped a little bounce pass to Bledsoe on the short roll, where he could attack a scrambled Celtics defense. What followed was…Read more...

At the start of the bottom of the third inning of last night’s Marlins-Cubs game, the NBC Sports Chicago broadcast cut to analyst Doug Glanville for an update. While Glanville was talking, a fan in a hoodie waved hello to the camera, flashed a peace sign, then made an upside-down OK hand gesture with his fingers.

The Lakers reportedly went through a bizarre and even troubling process to arrive at this moment in the search for their next head coach—the moment when they sit at a table and hammer out a deal with Tyronn Lue, backed by the full support of everyone in the organization. Part of that process, as reported by Marc Stein…Read more...

In the most amazing soccer comeback in the history of the world, or at least since yesterday, Tottenham pulled off a stunning come-from-behind win over Ajax today to advance to the Champions League final.Read more...

Jamal Murray in his zone has become appointment viewing. The appointment is at an ENT’s office, and the doctor’s trying to determine why steam is billowing out of your nose and the nose of Jamal Murray.

Hey! Who here likes Homeowner’s Associations? Ah, gotcha, trick question, absolutely nobody likes HOAs because they’re consistently miserable and disheartening examples of how tiny amounts of power can transform human beings into talking, blistered dicks. In case you don’t quite believe me, please consider the case of …Read more...

Today the Sacramento Kings and De’Aaron Fox invited everyone into their shared mind palace when they asked what the answer to this seemingly simple math equation. The result was chaos, and it nearly broke the Deadspin staff, although to be fair, basically any meaningless argument can break the Deadspin staff.

JayCee Cooper was looking forward to her first sanctioned USA Powerlifting meet in her home state of Minnesota when she received word, just a month before the event, that she wouldn’t be allowed to compete.

Here’s a horrifying story with a relatively happy ending: Georgia sprinter Elija Godwin, one of the fastest freshmen in the country, accidentally impaled himself on a javelin while running a backwards sprint drill on Tuesday afternoon. Incredibly, Godwin survived.Read more...

Ten eggs is a gargantuan breakfast order. Who would order 10 eggs, fried, sunny-side up, with no other items save perhaps a small stack of toast? Well, according to this morning’s episode of Fox & Friends... multiple people would. OR WOULD THEY??

Mortal Kombat 11 is a brutal game. That’s what you come for—sensational, over-the-top violence that’s inventive and gratuitous on a level that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It can be shocking in its detail and funny in its execution, but it’s always arresting. It’s also short. Fatalities, gory, physically improbable…Read more...

Gael Monfils got wrecked in the opening set of his Madrid Open second-round match today, but he worked his way back into it. By the tail end of the second set, Monfils was feeling himself enough to test out this leaping ... forehand passing shot with all his weight hurtling in the opposite direction. Like most of…Read more...

While there’s plenty of blame to go around in Barcelona for Liverpool’s hurricane-force comeback yesterday in the Champions League semifinal, there is no end to the credit and praise the Pool Boys deserve for a game perfectly planned for by Jürgen Klopp, and proficiently executed by his players. Liverpool’s monumental…Read more...