Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

A major Google Home Hub sale at Walmart, Ecovacs, and a $44 JetBlue sale lead off Wednesday’s best deals.

This should go without saying, but if you are part of a group of traveling soccer fans, please do not push elderly people into fountains. That’s a lesson not learned by a group of Liverpool fans in Barcelona for the Champions League semifinal, who played true to stereotypes by rampaging through the Catalan city,…Read more...

Philly had boxed or maybe promoted boxers, or possibly just wanted to be thought of as someone who was associated with boxing and boxing promoters in some sort of way. He remains the only person ever to produce a quarter from behind my ear, a magic trick that once defined the absolute outer boundary of traditional…Read more...

The truly frustrating thing about Brad Marchand is that he’d be a star without all the bullshit. He’s on the top line of the team with the best odds to win the Cup because he’s really, really good at hockey, not because of the other stuff. It’s just that the other stuff—“pest” feels insufficient to describe someone…Read more...

The Warriors took Game 2 of their second-round series with the Houston Rockets, 115–109. Golden State didn’t play especially well, and the Rockets were able to hang around and give the impression of putting up a fight, but only in the way that a small child can be said to put up a fight while you put your hand on…Read more...

At the AFL-CIO, the 12.5 million-member strong coalition of unions, a strange conflict over alleged spending misconduct has divided the top leadership and sparked a power struggle that is now certain to play out—dramatically—in public.Read more...

Basketball fans had every reason to expect Game 2 of the Rockets-Warriors Western Conference semifinal series to be ugly, with the Rockets working the officials in embarrassing fashion and franchise enemy Scott Foster assigned to the refereeing crew. But this was not the start that anyone imagined!Read more...

Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton went nuts Tuesday night, and the Bucks cruised to an impressive Game 2 blowout win over the Boston Celtics, 123–102, in Milwaukee. Giannis devouring puny mortals is expected, but Middleton playing like a bloodthirsty maniac in a crucial playoff game is very, very good news…Read more...

The perennially overhyped Washington Nationals loaded the bases against Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright in the second inning of Tuesday night’s game in D.C. The bad news for Nationals fans is, they did it on an intentional walk of eighth batter Wilmer Difo, which put pitcher Aníbal Sánchez at the plate with two…Read more...

Through 15 minutes, it looked like Ajax were playing a particularly easy group stage match rather than the away leg of the Champions League semifinal. The Dutch Boys showed up at Tottenham’s brand new stadium and promptly put the undermanned London club in a variety of submission moves, moving the ball around the…Read more...

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

Today, we’re talking about Woj, golf nets, bank cafes, Ichiro, pizza rolls, and more.

A tennis player brought his phone onto the court to document something, and somehow that player wasn’t vlogging sensation Stefanos Tsitsipas.Read more...

The L.A. Olympics is nine years away and the budget’s already going up. The organizing committee for the 2028 Games announced today that the estimated cost of hosting has gone up from $6.2 billion to $6.9 billion. L.A. 2028 officials said that the $700 million increase was added to the budget to account for inflation…Read more...

I’m not sure any novelty sports apparel will ever top the MiLB Copa De La Diversión hats we highlighted last week, but these NBA shirts are on fire nonetheless.

Spoiler culture—the capital-D Discourse surrounding how much of the plot you should know before heading into a piece of media—reached its apotheosis with the releases of Avengers: Endgame and the Game of Thrones episode “The Long Night.” The furor around spoilers is such that it is entirely believable that a man…Read more...

San Diego sports radio station The Mighty 1090 had been off the airwaves and in an online-only format since April 10, courtesy of its parent company Broadcast Company of the Americas. Its future was extremely uncertain. On Monday, it was killed off for good in the middle of the day.Read more...

Since the Kansas City Chiefs indefinitely suspended Tyreek Hill last week for his alleged role in breaking his 3-year-old son’s arm and for threatening his fiancée in a leaked audio recording, the NFL Knowers have dutifully donned their thinking caps and pondered solutions. What the actual problem being solved is…Read more...

Multiple reporters have passed along the news that ESPN The Magazine will soon be no more. Sports Business Daily says the last issue will hit newsstands in September.

Update 4/30: Today’s the last day to get in on the 120,000 point welcome bonus! More details below.Read more...

From a skeptic’s perch, Nikola Jokic was a prime candidate for fraudulence come springtime. His youth, his floamy physique, the unprecedented weirdness of his game, his occasional habit of going passive when he should’ve gotten more shots up, his leadership of a No. 2 seeded Nuggets squad that never quite felt like…Read more...

It is not a good practice, just as a general rule, to steal Big Ideas from widely maligned and mostly forgotten MTV stunt-programming. But people that play by the general rules or adhere to best practices or “have actual ideas of their own” seldom make history, and I was not going to spend my one hypothetical day as…Read more...

When last we checked in on Bolton Wanderers, the storied English soccer club was on the verge of ruin after years of mismanagement and ownership incompetence. Not much has changed since: while the nearly bankrupt club has found a potential new owner willing to buy the team, the deal still has yet to be finalized and…Read more...

The Amazon Prime Store Card and Amazon Prime Rewards Visa are worth having just to get 5% cash back on Amazon purchases, but for a limited time, that offer is getting bumped to a whopping 15% back on select outdoor items, just in time for your spring camping trips and cookouts.

Discounted Sonos One speakers, Insomnia Coffee, and a sale on graduation party supplies lead off Tuesday’s best deals.

Everything was going to be decided within the next five minutes. Three mushers and their dog teams were on top of Eagle Summit, a 3,685-foot tall gap that runs through the White Mountains in central Alaska. They were stuck in a blizzard, huddled together with their dogs as winds up to 40 miles an hour mercilessly…Read more...

Let us stipulate that diving, or flopping, is not so common in hockey as it is in some other sports we could name, nor is it generally treated with anything but outright contempt. It does exist, and it does, unfortunately often, work, but it’s not regarded with the grudging respect for its value it receives in those…Read more...

It was possible to miss this in realtime. I did. For one thing, it happened quickly, and devolved quickly into distracting chaos. For another, even if your eyes gathered the information and transmitted it whole to your brain, your brain may have processed it as an error and erased it, because it is just impossible to…Read more...

Late in the first half of Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinal series between Portland and Denver, Jamal Murray swiped a Blazers inbounds pass and tore ass the other way, in a two-on-two break with teammate Malik Beasley streaking ahead of him. With two skilled and athletic guards pushing ahead, and just the…Read more...

Joel Embiid was listed as probable headed into Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinal series between the 76ers and Raptors, with a case of gastroenteritis. It’s a stomach virus, and is experienced as a lot of stomach pain and diarrhea, which is definitely not the condition you want to be in while playing…Read more...

Baseball fans are going to be treated to some gruesome numbers this season, courtesy of the bottom five or so teams in baseball, mired in that group of organizations that have no intention of being good in 2019. But the Orioles, man, those poor suckers are rowing out to heretofore unknown new horizons of badness,…Read more...

The major question coming out of Game 1 of the ballyhooed Celtics-Bucks series is how the Bucks plan to recover after having home-court advantage yanked away in a discouraging loss. The long and short of it is, the Bucks, from head coach Mike Budenholzer on down, do not feel that strategic adjustments are…Read more...

It’s not enough that the Houston Rockets have to whine that they lost Game 1 because the refs didn’t take their signature gaming of the “landing zone” rule as seriously as usual. They elected to follow that snit with what is perhaps the most pathetically lame sports media leak of all time, as ESPN miraculously got its…Read more...

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

Al Horford is good. This is a sentence that’s never punctuated with an exclamation point between the months of October and March. Then, once again, you see him stopping the least stoppable players in the Eastern Conference, and making all the right decisions on the other side of the floor, and it’s tempting to add…Read more...

22 movies. It all started with Iron Man in 2008, and for the last decade the MCU has been plodding its way towards a conclusion that was saddled with the responsibility of bringing a saga dozens of hours long to a satisfying conclusion. Whether the grand finale that is Avengers: Endgame managed to satisfy you probably…Read more...

Two Washburn University football players were shot outside of a party in Topeka, Kansas early Sunday morning, according to the Topeka PD. Junior defensive back Dwane Simmons was pronounced dead at the scene, while his teammate Corey Ballentine suffered non-life threatening injuries. Hours before the shooting,…Read more...

Cersei was right! That’s the main takeaway from “The Long Night,” the deliriously silly and nonsensical third episode of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, which aired last night. Not only is Cersei Lannister smarter than everybody else in Westeros, she has definitively proven that you can know all you…Read more...

Western Rise is a well-established brand that already makes some of our favorite t-shirts, henleys, pants, and oxford shirts, but even with so many products already out on the market, they still like to launch new products on Kickstarter, at significant preorder discounts. Their latest, the Limitless Merino Wool Shirt…Read more...

The following video is a narrative treat worthy of the same analysis and praise as Avengers: Endgame or last night’s episode of Game of Thrones. Okay, maybe that’s going a little far. Some deer run onto a baseball field. It’s pretty cute and you’re going to enjoy it, dammit.

Sometime in the next few days, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb—aka the guy who took Mike Pence’s job when Pence ascended to the Old Executive Office Building—is expected to sign a bill extending the Indiana Pacers’ lease in Indianapolis through 2044. In exchange for agreeing to have his team play where it always has, Pacers…Read more...

Last weekend, regional Philippine MMA promotion Universal Reality Combat Championship showcased several of the Philippines’ most promising fighters fighting the normal way, and then also six other dudes fighting three-on-three. It was not as action-packed as you might imagine.

Brad Gilbert, tennis world fixture, ESPN analyst, and high-volume tweeter, announced yesterday that he will run for a position on the ATP Board of Directors currently occupied by Justin Gimelstob.Read more...

There was a stretch of time on Sunday, just as there have been a handful of moments over the last month, where it seemed like Manchester City would finally drop points. Burnley, at their Turf Moor home, were paragons of the “bend but don’t break” philosophy, experts in the dark arts of shithousery. City looked…Read more...

In case you ever decide to hate sports without the crutch of a rooting interest, financial, familial, or simply laundry-based, here’s your ticket. The pre–NBA Finals NBA Finals are already a drunken bar argument, and they’re only going to get worse. The Houston Rockets ... the Golden State Warriors ... Total 24/7…Read more...

A team playing its ninth game in 18 days on Sunday afternoon, the Hurricanes, were struck by disaster in the very first minute of Game 2 against the Islanders. Carolina defenseman Trevor van Riemsdyk got checked hard against the boards by New York’s Cal Clutterbuck, knocking him out for the whole game and, according…Read more...

New York Giants GM Dave Gettleman apparently did not enjoy watching the majority of NFL fans and media make fun of him for selecting Duke quarterback Daniel Jones with the sixth overall pick of the 2019 NFL Draft. He’s responded to the criticism by going on a media campaign of his own, sitting down for interviews with…Read more...

The Sharks watched, amused, as some rough officiating in the first round led to their improbable Game 7 comeback, and as the league quietly apologized to the still-salty Golden Knights. Not that it did Vegas any good; they’re still golfing.(The Sharks’ general reaction to that kerfuffle could be summed up in this tweetRead more...

Drive over to Amazon today and you can zoom, zoom away with some stellar deals on popular Anker car accessories from the Gold Box.

In an ironic twist, it was James Harden that spoke up about officiating problems in Game 1 of the Rockets-Warriors series. He told reporters after the game that “he just wants a fair chance” and that he’s willing to live with whatever results come from the game as long as it’s called “the way it’s supposed to be…Read more...