Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

For the second MLB season in a row, an A’s pitcher has thrown the first no-hitter of the season. That’s a rather unusual feat, given that the A’s rotation has been so famously dinged-up that they opted for a bullpen start in last year’s Wild Card game, but there was plenty about Mike Fiers’s no-no last night that was…Read more...

Nationals slugger Anthony Rendon has previously demonstrated his willingness to call out an MLB umpire over a bad call. When Marty Foster ejected Rendon for no good reason back in 2018, he lamented how there’s “no accountability” for umpires whose mistakes can be clearly seen from overhead and replay angles. After…Read more...

The curling team with the pants. That’s all you have to say. The imagery is instant: four grown Scandinavian men and their provocative trousers. It’s quite an accomplishment, especially for a niche Olympic sport.

An exclusive Anker deal, Greenworks tools, a Dell laptop and a Ninja air fryer lead off Wednesday’s best deals.Read more...

The best overtime game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs was the Denver-Portland game Friday night. All glory and honor to Blues-Stars Game 7 Tuesday night, which certainly did its best, combining multiple overtimes with the additional sparkle of not just sudden death but expulsion, but it remains the silver medalist for…Read more...

If you’re familiar with catastrophically incompetent Republican politics and PR doofus Liz Mair at all, first of all I’m so sorry about your brain worms problem. But also, it’s likely you recall her viral Twitter meltdown in January, when she posted an insane, racist gripe about Spanish-speaking people who rudely…Read more...

Nikola Jokic is a man of simple desires. He wants to make cool passes, “eat good,” “watch TV show,” and be stronger than the Coke. He also wants a damn microphone that he can hold in his hand without any issues.

It’s difficult to talk about women in sports without talking about the work of Nancy Hogshead-Makar. She won three gold medals as a swimmer in the 1984 Olympics, and that’s possibly the lesser part of her résumé given what she’s done since. She’s spent decades advocating for equality for women in sports, through her…Read more...

Until Patrick Maroon finally, finally beat Ben Bishop 5:50 into the second overtime and put the Blues through to the Western Conference final, no player in the history of the NHL had ever scored a Game 7 overtime winner in his hometown. It’d been close, once, when in 1979 Yvon Lambert, out of Drummondville, Quebec,…Read more...

Moms who say they don’t want anything for Mother’s Day are lying. But buying a present for the woman who gave you life doesn’t have to mean emptying out your bank account. We’ll be updating this post with the best gift-able deals, so you can get Mom something nice and still save money. Your mother didn’t raise you to…Read more...

Anker makes a lot of gadgets, but noise canceling headphones were a notable gap in the company’s lineup until very recently. So if you want to block out the world with the new Soundcore Space wireless over-ears, you can save $20 right now, no promo code required.Read more...

Some of what has made Nuggets-Trail Blazers such a fun playoff series is how evenly matched the teams appear to be. Headed into Game 5 with the series tied, neither team had won a game by more than eight points, and the last two games, a split, were decided by a grand total of seven points. One of them went to four…Read more...

Atlanta’s Max Fried is a very cool young pitcher. He got off to a great start this season, compiling a 4–1 record and a 2.11 earned run average through his first six starts, with a scrumptious 0.991 WHIP. He has also evidently run afoul of Fate, which came to collect its due in the second inning of Fried’s Tuesday…Read more...

The St. Louis Blues should have won Game 7 about four times over before regulation even ended, but finally, in double overtime, they got some reward for an absolutely dominant performance. While an instantly legendary showing from Stars goalie Ben Bishop almost allowed Dallas to survive, the Blues broke through after…Read more...

The 76ers were blown out in Game 5 Tuesday night, 125–89, by Kawhi Leonard and the Toronto Raptors. Nothing much worked for Philadelphia—the closest they came to a functional offense was Jimmy Butler willing his way to the line for 11 free throws. By the midpoint of the fourth quarter, the game had become a laugher,…Read more...

Kawhi Leonard is doing it again. He put up a 13-and-10 double-double before halftime of Game 5 of the 76ers-Raptors conference semifinal series, with three assists and a pair of steals. It’s not clear tonight that the Raptors even require all these damn heroics—they’re up 21 at the half and the Sixers look extremely…Read more...

In a motion filed Tuesday, Palm Beach County prosecutors asked the judge in Robert Kraft’s prostitution solicitation case to hold two of Kraft’s lawyers in contempt of court. The motion claims that two of the New England Patriots owner’s attorneys, Alex Spiro and William Burck, intentionally made a false statement…Read more...

The Lakers are reportedly in the process of hiring former Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Tyronn Lue to replace the fired Luke Walton. Contractual parameters are being sorted out, according to Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports. Lue’s hiring would come with the blessing of LeBron James, who of course won a championship…Read more...

In the spring of 2019, writer Giri Nathan asked an editor if he could write a blog about Joel Embiid in the style of writer Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” The Sixers player was irritable and dealing with various ailments as his team fought a tight playoff series against the Raptors. “Why the hell would…Read more...

Liverpool have shocked the world. Heading back to Anfield after losing a dispiriting 3-0 first leg in Barcelona, Liverpool needed something resembling a miracle to reach their second straight Champions League final. And they found one, somehow, winning 4-0 at home and booting Barcelona out of the competition in the…Read more...

When Donald Trump’s administration decided in April of 2017 to overturn a rule that had allowed athletes from the service academies to defer their military commitment until after their professional sports careers were over, it wasn’t for any of the starchy reasons laid out in a memo from the–Secretary of Defense James…Read more...

Ayesha Curry, her mother-in-law Sonya, and her sister-in-law Sydel joined Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Facebook show yesterday to talk about their lives as public figures and famous black women, their experiences balancing their personal ambitions with their marriages to NBA players, and what they’ve gone through along the…Read more...

After seven winless games in a row, in which the team looked worse than bad, the FC Cincinnati brain trust has mercifully fired manager Alan Koch, replacing him with assistant Yoann Damet in the interim, while conducting a proper search for a permanent replacement. The club put out a statement on Tuesday that…Read more...

When we last checked in on ultra-rich-and-famous fashion model Kendall Jenner and all-star basketball player Ben Simmons, things were going great. They were at a point in their relationship where their dates were just excuses to hang out with each other: They went to Drexel basketball games; they took trips to the…Read more...

The remarkable dispute that has gripped the leadership of America’s biggest labor union coalition peaked yesterday with a testy exchange of letters in which two top officers denigrated one another’s professional conduct in rather strenuous terms. You can read them below.Read more...

By the latter part of the fourth quarter of last night’s home game against the Milwaukee Bucks, the Boston Celtics had all but disbanded on the court. Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo was rampaging to the rim on virtually every possession; the Celtics had given up on helping each other defensively, leaving Giannis’s…Read more...

Today, we’re talking about old man farts, parking apps, Florida, road trips, cupcakes, and more.

Minutes removed from making the 2019 Australian Open semifinals, Stefanos Tsitsipas, 6-foot-4 and handsome as a lion, was talking about YouTube. With a microphone in his face and all the attention that comes with taking out Roger Federer two days earlier, Tsitsipas spoke his truth.

These here Boston Celtics seem dead, filleted and breaded and fully cooked, and their feeble attempts to bridge a series of late deficits last night strongly suggested that, one recent example of a blown 3-1 lead notwithstanding, this is a mentally broken basketball team with one single game between them and the…Read more...

When last we checked in with Britt McHenry, the former ESPN employee who found an opportunity with a Fox News web-based venture and ran with it, the Washington Post spent a lot of space to consider her as a person with depth, one who thinks carefully about the arguments she makes. Last weekend, she shared some insight…Read more...

On Tuesday, one of the great artists of defensive, shithousing soccer decided to call an end to one of the most remarkable runs of European success in recent memory. Diego Godín, the Goliath in defense and scorer of many a clutch goal, will leave Atlético Madrid at the end of the current season, reportedly to join…Read more...

Look, you’re an adult, and I understand that you’re probably not going to use NCAA-branded Apple Watch bands and AirPod cases all the time. Nor should you!

When we last discussed Dean Ambrose in this space a few months ago, news had just broken that he had given WWE his 90-day notice and would not be renewing his contract. That Ambrose was parting with WWE was, at bottom, a sound business decision; with All Elite Wrestling and other promotions bidding for talent, Ambrose…Read more...

Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s Netflix sketch series I Think You Should Leave has proven to be one of 2019’s sleeper TV hits, its quarter-hour bursts of feet-in-mouths and social situations gone surreally awry sneakily monopolizing the cultural conversation, like a wily oddball whose good car ideas gradually win them…Read more...

Rookie pitcher Chris Paddack has the misfortune of playing West Coast baseball for the routinely overlooked San Diego Padres. Such conditions can make it difficult for a young player to get noticed on the national level, but Paddack doesn’t seem like the type to let circumstance stand in his way.

In hockey as in few other sports, things rarely play out like they’re supposed to. (If they did, the Avalanche wouldn’t have made it to this series, let alone be headed for a Game 7 in San Jose after a wild 4-3 OT win on Monday night.) The storyline/scouting report for Avs-Sharks was supposed to be simple: Colorado…Read more...

It wasn’t pretty—it hasn’t been pretty, no two-minute stretch of this series has been the least bit aesthetically pleasant—but the Houston Rockets outlasted the Golden State Warriors in Game 4 to knot their conference semifinal series at two games apiece.Read more...

The Celtics are left with a couple bad omens from Game 4, which ended Monday night with Boston fans booing their team off the court at the end of a pivotal 113–101 loss. Apart, that is, from the fact that the Bucks are now in a commanding 3–1 series lead, with Game 5 back in Milwaukee, where the Bucks lost just eight…Read more...

Boston Bruins defenseman Charlie McAvoy lowered his shoulder and plowed it into the jaw of Columbus Blue Jackets forward Josh Anderson in the final 20 seconds of the second period of Monday night’s Game 6. For good measure, Anderson’s head recoiled directly into the fist of Zdeno Chára, before he crumpled to the ice.

In the bottom of the first inning of Monday’s Red Sox-Orioles game, Jonathan Villar lifted a long fly ball to left field, where J.D. Martinez tracked it to the wall. The wall seemed to sneak up on Martinez a little bit, and he was unable to make the catch, with the ball dropping and Villar racing to second for the…Read more...

In a briefly bee-infested game against the Reds today, the deeply mediocre San Francisco Giants surrendered 12 runs in the first six innings, at which point they stopped trying and started looking forward to their trip to Colorado. Infielder Pablo Sandoval served as the white flag, pitching the eighth inning and…Read more...

Thanks in large part to federal regulations meant to prevent media consolidation, Sinclair Broadcast Group, the Donald Trump-favored media company that infamously forced its local news anchors to read mindless Trumpian statements about the dangers of “fake news” on-air, has ended up further consolidating its ownership…Read more...

Horse racing had replay before everybody else. But that side of the allegedly perpetually declining sport was never in the spotlight so much as it was Saturday, when Churchill Downs stewards took their time before taking a Kentucky Derby win away from Maximum Security on a foul claim.

No matter what happened in today’s Manchester City-Leicester City match, this brain-meltingly tight Premier League title race was going to come down to the final day of the season. But with the absolute screamer Vincent Kompany scored to give Man City the win today, the Citizens managed to put all five fingers of one…Read more...

After many years of service, first as the features editor and editor-in-chief of Deadspin and later as the head of GMG’s Special Projects Desk, Tim Marchman has left us. We come now to send him off in the only way we know how: by roasting his ass.

Whether you’re a professional basketball player or whoever left that Starbucks cup on the Game of Thrones set, everybody has off nights. Well, everybody except the rejuvenated San Francisco Shock. After a messy first season, they’ve spent season two looking like an entirely different team. Yesterday, they achieved…Read more...

Borussia Dortmund’s Bundesliga title challenge probably ended on Saturday against Werder Bremen, as they gave up two goals in a five-minute span to let Die Werderaner steal a 2-2 draw that stretched Bayern Munich’s lead atop the table to four points. With two largely meaningless games left, BVB will almost certainly…Read more...

Quick, who is the only player in Europe with 15-plus goals and assists in league play this season? If you guessed Lionel Messi, congratulations, you are as predictable as a Gonzalo Higuaín miss—and also wrong. The only player to manage that feat this year is Chelsea’s Eden Hazard, a one-man hurricane for a team that,…Read more...

The NFL concussion settlement is at an inflection point. Tomorrow morning, at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia, a hearing is scheduled to discuss a series rules changes that were recently approved by Senior Judge Anita B. Brody, who has oversight of the settlement. Those changes, which govern one group of…Read more...

When it comes to bees, they get what they want. Today, they wanted to be at the Cincinnati Reds’ stadium as the team was getting ready to play against the Giants