Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

The fundamental idea undergirding the pervading ideology of Premier League exceptionalism is that the English league is uniquely competitive. All the manifestations of this exceptionalism—from the holding of the Premier League title above all other domestic league trophies and nearly on par with the European Cup, to…Read more...

It’s not too difficult to figure out what’s plaguing the Golden State Warriors as their first-round series against the Los Angeles Clippers drags on to surprising lengths. According to Klay Thompson, the champs were already looking forward to the Rockets, assuming a tidy Game 5 win. According to Kevin Durant, they…Read more...

Chicago White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson is having a very good April, give or take a gratuitous insult to his buttocks. He’s hitting .383, which is second in the AL, and has stolen nine bases, whichleads the league. He has popped four home runs, too, which is the issue, here. After one of those homers, a two-run blast…Read more...

Mike Trout went 0-for-3 in Wednesday’s game against the Yankees, but he still drew a walk, which meant that in all 22 of the Angels’ games he’s played in this season, the outfielder has gotten on base. While it’s still worth gawking at his .510 OBP, feel free to also gawk at how he made this center-field catch look…Read more...

In the autumn of 2012, I began working at a pricey midtown Manhattan steakhouse. At one of my first tables sat Geno Auriemma, the women’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut. Eleven years earlier, I had embedded with him and his players for six months for a book I’d write. I’d held a notepad countless…Read more...

Kotaku Days Gone: The Kotaku Review | Gizmodo If You Care About Privacy, Throw Your Amazon Alexa Devices Into the Sea | Jalopnik Tesla Posts $700 Million First-Quarter Loss as CEO Elon Musk Says It Will Offer Insurance | Vitals Don’t Trust the Calorie Count on the Elliptical Machine | The Takeout Presenting the…Read more...

Raise your hand if you expected this series to be over by now. Sure, the Clippers are fun and feisty and Lou Williams is a delight forever, but their opponent is Golden State, destroyers of world and shuckers of corn. And yet, whether out of boredom or exhaustion or just annoyance, the Warriors haven’t quite looked…Read more...

A Cole Haan sale, Ninja Foodi, KitchenAid kettle, and a Little Giant Ladder lead off Thursday’s best deals.Read more...

The Carolina Hurricanes pulled off the last in a string of crazy first-round playoff series upsets on Wednesday night, disrespecting the far more experienced Capitals by wearing them down over two overtimes for a 4-3 win. It was going to be extremely tough for the ’Canes and the Caps to match the hijinks of the…Read more...

The video, like so many videos ostensibly talking about how to save the world, begins with two white men in crisp white shirts and ties. One of the men is a reporter, the other is then-vice president Joe Biden. They sit facing each other on an Amtrak train, outlines of Anywhere, America, zipping past in the window.Read more...

The Braves became the target of many people’s ire earlier this month when they signed Ozzie Albies to a seven-year, $35 million contract extension that will, if Albies turns into the kind of player he looks destined to become, go down as one of the most appallingly team-friendly contracts in baseball history. Plenty…Read more...

All your brackets are dead. Every prediction model is forfeit. Does the regular season have any meaning whatsoever? (Does life?) Does chance play too great a role in this slippery sport? Does the best team ever win the Stanley Cup?

The Ninja Foodi, designed in part by friend of the site Justin Warner, wants to be the One True Buzzy Kitchen Appliance. It’s a big, hulking thing, but it can do just about everything, as our researcher Corey Foster wrote in an (upcoming) Inventory post:

When the Warriors dropped Game 2 of their first-round playoff series against the Los Angeles Clippers, it seemed like it might’ve been because they were overconfident, lackadaisical, and maybe even a little tuned-out. This would seem to have been confirmed by their subsequent 27-point demolition of the Clippers in Los…Read more...

Brawny Phillies slugger Rhys Hoskins smashed a moonshot homer to left in the top of the ninth inning of Philadelphia’s 6–0 win over the Mets Tuesday night. The dinger came at the expense of Mets reliever Jacob Rhame, who then had to endure Hoskins taking a looooooong time to round the bases:Read more...

The Carolina Hurricanes refused to play their part in their opening-round series against the defending champion Washington Capitals. Arriving in the playoffs for the first time since 2009, the Hurricanes were not the inexperienced youngsters who got taught a lesson about the difficulties of the postseason by the…Read more...

The Utah Jazz needed a few games to get there, but they finally worked their way into fighting range of the Houston Rockets over the course of their first-round playoff series. The hilarious strategy of defending James Harden’s butt started to yield dividends, and a Rockets offense that scored 122 and 118 points in…Read more...

Huzzah, baseball friends! Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who has been the best and most exciting and most popular player in the Toronto Blue Jays organization for more than a year, is now finally good enough to join the Toronto Blue Jays:Read more...

There can’t be many experiences in sports more bewildering and humiliating than the yips, and any player going through something yip-like deserves sympathy, if not pity. In the case of Nationals reliever Trevor Rosenthal, it especially sucks to think that his current season-long inability to throw strikes is a…Read more...

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

At a press conference today in Kansas, Johnson County DA Stephen Howe told reporters that his office would not file any criminal charges against Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Tyreek Hill or his fiancée, Crystal Espinal. According to KCTV5, Hill had been implicated in two police reports filed in March by Espinal,…Read more...

Portland Trail Blazers center Jusuf Nurkic suffered a horror injury less than a month ago, and even though he remains pretty immobile with a super busted leg, he still showed up to support his teammates Tuesday night. Nurkic wasn’t part of the dogpile after Damian Lillard’s heroic game-winner, but he still celebrated…Read more...

In a bind? Jump start your own car and bypass the whole “wait for the pity of strangers” thing with these discounted iClever jump starters. The neat thing about both these models are that they can charge your devices through USB, too.Read more...

Sports Illustrated’s Kalyn Kahler has a long, detailed story out today over at the MMQB about the pitfalls and importance of scrubbing old tweets from NFL prospects ahead of the draft. There’s a lot of work that goes into preventing another Josh Allen situation. Sometimes, it’s fruitless, and other times, it’s over…Read more...

Baseball’s reliance on increasingly advanced stats can be alienating for those who don’t spend a large chunk of their summers deep in FanGraphs databases and Statcast k-holes. But sometimes, all you need is to look at a box score and see one player going buckwild to understand what happened.Read more...

“Their chemistry is almost romantic,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said after an 18-point rout of the Spurs in Game 5 on Tuesday. “They care about each other, they love each other. They play for each other. That’s when we’re at our best.”Read more...

The New York Times publishing public-relations material serving the interests of Justin Gimelstob—a powerful figure in tennis whose conduct has over the years ranged from overtly misogynistic to violent and deranged, and who most recently made news by pleading no contest to charges that he hit a man in the head dozens…Read more...

It’s been quite the whirlwind week for Venezuelan soccer player Bendix Parra. Last Tuesday, he was a starter in one of the biggest matches in the history of his club, Paraguay’s Independiente. This Tuesday, he found himself unemployed when Independiente tore up his contract. All of this for one especially awful…Read more...

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s here. Again. And I cannot hold my shit together. Again.

“Men just want to find a fit and then not change from that,” Chris Riccobono, founder of the menswear brand Untuckit (or, as the brand styles it, UNTUCKit), says. “They don’t really want to have to overthink their outfit.”Read more...

An Original Penguin Sale, baby clothes, $49 Southwest flights, a USB-C hub, and board games lead off Wednesday’s best deals.Read more...

A downcast Jared Dudley should not be the image that endures from Brooklyn’s brief and dramatic stay in the first round of the NBA Playoffs. Dudley’s feud with Ben Simmons was entertaining blog fodder (guilty!), but it also clouded a delightful truth: despite a 4-1 series loss against the Sixers that ended with a…Read more...

io9 Avengers: Endgame Is Overwhelmingly Epic and Immensely Satisfying | Kotaku Persona 5 The Royal Adds New Phantom Thief, Comes Stateside Next Year | Jalopnik Flooding Is So Bad in Dallas That Cars at the Airport Are Under Water | Offspring You Should Wrestle With Your Kid | The Takeout The Takeout’s fantasy…Read more...

When God (or whatever you decide is the name of the invisible being you keep nagging for favors for your favorite sports team) stops letting the nutters run the world and starts listening to the constituents, we will get Thunder-Blazers and Knights-Sharks on a loop that never ends, with a crawl across the bottom of…Read more...

Damian Lillard pulled up from 37 feet and waved goodbye to the Oklahoma City Thunder. We all saw it. We all lost our minds, and perhaps in a fit of jubilation (or despair, depending on where you live) did or said something we regret this morning. Nobody handled the aftermath of one of the greatest shots in playoff…Read more...

Let’s get this out of the way right at the outset: Yes, the Vegas Golden Knights could have avoided all of this controversy—and their elimination—by simply not allowing allowing four goals in 4:01. One of the weirdest and wildest comebacks in recent memory, a Game 7 eventually won by the Sharks 5-4 in overtime, did…Read more...

Choose your own adventure with this huge Amazon Board game sale. There are literally dozens of games included discounted, today only. Super fun games like Carcassonne, Sushi Go, Dead of Winter, Subatomic, Castles of Burgundy, and Pandemic are all discounted.Read more...

Not all dingers are created equal. Some rocket out of the park at 118 miles an hour and are never seen again; some are routine fly balls that get pushed a few inches beyond the wall by a helpful wind. Some stay in the yard, like cowards. This one, from Austin Hedges of the San Diego Padres, had no business leaving the…Read more...

The Vegas Golden Knights were cruising through the first 50 minutes of their Game 7 against the Sharks on Tuesday night, and then Joe Pavelski started bleeding on the ice. The Knights were up 3-0 and had completely sucked the life out of San Jose’s crowd, but with 10:47 remaining, a major cross-checking penalty on…Read more...

Damian Lillard opened Tuesday night’s Game 5 with a 19-point first quarter, keeping the Blazers close while Oklahoma City made everything thrown even vaguely in the direction of the basket. Lillard finished the first half with 34 points. He opened the second half with an utterly preposterous 30-foot step-back three.…Read more...

The NCAA has recently made it marginally easier for Division I athletes to transfer schools without losing a year of eligibility. The summiting of this particular mountaintop will see athletes transferring according to their own priorities with absolute freedom, but the NCAA will fight that tooth and nail to the…Read more...

Whether or not you believe in omens or fate or curses or a God who hates Canada, it’s never a good sign when a goalie loses his corporeality for a few crucial seconds in the first period of a Game 7 that a whole country is desperately clinging to as a final hope. With Winnipeg and Calgary both dispatched by their…Read more...

One of the cooler moments televised baseball has to offer is a liner to left with a reasonably quick runner on second base. The camera cuts to the standard view of a ball in play, and you get a good look at everything happening all at once: the ball cruising through the left side and into the outfield; the outfielder…Read more...

Reporter Kelli Tennant held a press conference Tuesday afternoon to address her lawsuit against Sacramento Kings head coach Luke Walton, who she says sexually assaulted her in a hotel room in late 2014. Tennant’s account included few new details beyond what was reported Monday night—Walton allegedly invited her to his…Read more...

The Golden Knights have squandered a 3-1 series lead against the Sharks and must now win Game 7 in San Jose tonight to advance, so it’s understandable if everyone on both sides is a little on edge. Even Sharks coach Peter DeBoer and Knights coach Gerard Gallant are squabbling in public.

When a tennis shot is shanked, shallow, spinless, or otherwise borked, the culprit is often a too-tight arm. The more an amateur tries to muscle the ball, the less they’ll actually accomplish. Power comes from relaxed muscles working in unison. There might not exist a material in the tennis universe looser than Fabio…Read more...

Justin Gimelstob—the former tennis player and current coach, Tennis Channel commentator, ATP board member, and owner of a television production company who infamously weathered a shitstorm of his own making back in 2008 for being a sexist dick—is one of the most powerful people in tennis. For years, this power has…Read more...

On Monday, a second trial to deal with the charges from college basketball’s bribery scandal began in U.S. District Court. Former financial advisor Christian Dawkins and former Adidas consultant Merl Code both returned as defendants after being convicted in the first trial, and they are charged here with counts…Read more...

Today, we’re talking about science fiction, playoff seeding, mortadella, microwaves, and more.

A Palm Beach County (Fla.) judge gave Robert Kraft some, but not all, of what he wanted today, in regards to video evidence in the New England Patriots owner’s criminal case for solicitation. County Court Judge Leonard Hanser blocked the video from being released by any agencies, saying he was concerned that its…Read more...