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There is a simple, financial answer to the question posed in the headline of this article: Lionel Messi is reportedly worth €450,000 per contractually-arranged international friendly. That is how much the Argentinian Football Federation (AFA) lost out on after Messi’s recent groin injury kept him out of the Albiceleste…Read more...

Not long after the 2017 World Series ended in a dogpile of happy Houston Astros, Bart Wilhelm began planning his first big trip of the 2018 season. For more than half a decade, Wilhelm has been “chasing” Minor League ballparks, with the goal of attending a game in all 159 of them. Wilhelm began the 2018 season 26…Read more...

Rowing is one of the best workouts you can perform at home, so if you’ve got the space for it, you can save about $80 on a highly-rated machine.

Sports Illustrated published its season previews for every MLB team today, and the entry for the Philadelphia Phillies features a trip back to a time when an anonymous scout dog-whistling a non-white player was a regular genre in sportswriting.

As Big Baller Brand apparently unravels amid an embezzlement scandal, Lonzo Ball looks ready to shift loyalties. The Lakers guard has already covered up his BBB logo tattoo with a pair of impossibly shaped dice. Once you see those bones, they’re unforgettable, and unmistakably familiar, too. Their dimensions, their…Read more...

An Express sale, kitty Gold Box, gaming mouse, strip lighting, and a drying rack kick off Wednesday’s best deals.Read more...

The Iditarod is at a crossroads. The thousand-mile sled dog race through Alaska is bound as much by tradition as by the rigging between dog-sledders, or mushers, and their dog teams, who must lead each other through some of North America’s wildest land. It’s the sort of tradition one would expect to fade into legend,…Read more...

Twenty-six head coaches showed up for the class photo at this week’s NFL meetings in Phoenix. Look at all those bright, squinting faces! (Here’s the hi-res version.) This year’s absences: Bruce Arians, Pete Carroll, Sean Payton, Mike Tomlin, Adam Gase, and Sean McVay, who said he didn’t mean to miss picture day.Read more...

MLB’s attendance, you might have heard, was down last year, around four percent by season’s end. The league’s front office, represented by anthropomorphized wet blanket Rob Manfred, has operated under the assumption that pace of play is the issue, arguing that “putting the best entertainment product on the field”…Read more...

LED strip lights can add a ton of personality to seemingly boring spaces, and you can install a smart one for just $15 today.

On Tuesday, Marvel released promotional character posters for the final film in its series. After about 10 years and 22 movies, it all ends (before probably beginning again) on April 26 with Avengers: Endgame. The posters, which say “Avenge the Fallen,” feature both the alive-superheroes and those who Raptured when…Read more...

After an exceedingly depressing offseason, in which months passed without anything happening and top free agents remain unsigned and two-thirds of the league evinced no interest in winning, it is time to feel good. Feel good about the weather warming, feel good that it’s just one day until real, actual baseball. And…Read more...

Michael Avenatti wanted money, it appears. Maybe he thought he needed it. That much is clear from the two sets of federal charging documents filed against him Monday, one in New York and another in California. In the California case, a 197-page document outlines how authorities believe Avenatti misrepresented tax…Read more...

There are a lot of good headphones out there, but there’s only one Nuraphone. As we covered on The Inventory, Nuraphone performs a completely automated listening test to map the way your ears perceive sound, and then tailors your audio accordingly so that you hear your music the way it’s meant to be heard. At its…Read more...

Big Baller Brand, the nascent apparel company owned and operated by Lonzo and LaVar Ball, started to come apart in earnest absolutely no later than last week, when it was reported by Ramona Shelburne and Paula Lavigne of ESPN that Alan Foster, a partner in the venture, had been ousted for allegedly embezzling $1.5…Read more...

NBA floors must be getting extremely slippery as the regular season winds down. First Chris Paul chased D.J. Wilson off the court with a step-back move in Houston’s loss to Milwaukee earlier tonight, and here we have Lance Stephenson sending Jeff Green flailing to hell with a fierce dribble sequence near the top of…Read more...

It’s easy to watch this video of Chris Paul executing a sharp step-back crossover dribble, and Bucks defender D.J. Wilson careening off into the distance like God reached down and violently tilted the court under his feet, and assume that Wilson was somehow “owned.” That because Wilson’s wild, stumbling exit came …Read more...

That replay review would be expanded to include pass interference ahead of the 2019-2020 NFL season seemed inevitable. The question, then, was whether it would be expanded in such a way that it could hope to address the kind of situation that befouled the NFC Championship game in January, when the Saints were screwed…Read more...

Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder Steven Souza Jr. suffered some catastrophic tears in his left knee Monday night in one of his team’s final exhibition games before the start of the season, after he slipped on home plate while scoring a run. He’ll be forced to miss the 2019 season.Read more...

On Tuesday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos met with the members of the House subcommittee to defend her department’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year. It was, like most of what happens in government, a ritualistic offering—the proposed budget is a proposal that reflects the administration’s priorities and…Read more...

Gizmodo Vice President Pence Gives NASA Five Years to Put Americans Back on the Moon—or Else | Kotaku The Dreams Of A Man Asleep For Three Weeks | Jalopnik This Is What 300.4 MPH Looks Like | Offspring Should You Let Your Kids Eat Their Boogers? | The Takeout Ask The Salty Waitress: A restaurant owner asked me to take…Read more...

PHOENIX — The NFL’s owners are gathered at a fancypants resort here for their annual league meetings. On the agenda are numerous proposals for rules changes, and this morning was the breakfast at which the head coaches got hit with rapid-fire questions for an hour before reporters tore into the buffet like a pack of…Read more...

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

UFC fighter Conor McGregor is under investigation by Irish police for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman in a Dublin hotel in December, according to the New York Times’s Tariq Panja. McGregor hasn’t been charged with a crime, though he was arrested and questioned by Irish authorities on Jan. 17. Shortly before the…Read more...

On Friday, NFL agent Ben Dogra filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Ravens backup Robert Griffin III, alleging that Griffin owes Dogra exactly $658,975.57. The complaint—which you can find below and was first reported on by Yahoo Sports—alleges that Griffin continually shorted Dogra on his 15 percent cut of…Read more...

It’s something like an understatement to say that junior big man Brandon Clarke went off against Baylor during Gonzaga’s second-round 83-71 win on Saturday. He did go off, though, and was the single biggest reason the Zags cruised into the Sweet 16. Clarke blew away all other scorers with 36 points on 15-of-18…Read more...

Today, we’re talking about Scott Van Pelt, rich assholes in space, flipping the bird, and more.

Last-place Saudi Pro League club Ohod will probably get relegated from the first division at the end of the season, so the draw they squeaked out on Saturday against Saudi giants and title favorites Al-Hilal probably won’t affect their ultimate fate much. However, that doesn’t mean that snatching two points off the…Read more...

The phrase “living rent-free in your head” has lived rent-free in my head for some time. It feels symptomatic of the deep rot at the core of almost all human interaction online. These days it spews out of the mouths of the craven and the righteous, the world-famous and the anonymously online. Depressingly, it’s just…Read more...

There’s no reason to watch the Phoenix Suns lose on purpose this season except to see how number-one pick DeAndre Ayton is doing (fine, mostly) or watch Devin Booker go all-out for another impressive yet futile solo scoring display. Booker went off again Monday night in Utah, although his own teammate Jimmer Fredette…Read more...

It’s right there in the name: Greats are...great sneakers. In fact, they’re one of The Inventory’s favorite white sneakers, and, uh, I own two pairs of them and am open to buying more. Such stellar quality and style comes at a price usually —but not today. Right now, men and women can get themselves a pair of Royale…Read more...

For an offseason defined by a glacial market, collusion-adjacent bad vibes, and the inexplicable unemployment of a number of useful big league free agents with opening day now in sight, the last week or so has been very busy. Instead of entering what is clearly a badly malfunctioning free agent marketplace, a number…Read more...

The turkey vulture, which lacks the bird voice organ known as a syrinx, is a generally mute bird, with vocalizations limited to grunts and hisses. So maybe it was just professional jealousy that sent one Connecticut turkey vulture hurtling into the ESPN office of Stephen A. Smith, a bird known not just for grunting…Read more...

The MLB front office announced today that commissioner Robert Manfred has suspended San Francisco Giants CEO and minority owner Larry Baer until July 1 of this year—essentially half the baseball season—without pay for the altercation with his wife that was caught on video and published by TMZ earlier this month.Read more...

On March 22, 2018, I was rushed to the hospital for life-saving surgery. Due to complications with the procedure, I didn’t regain full, coherent consciousness until the second week in April. For three weeks I was stuck inside my own mind, subject to a seemingly unending series of dreams. Dreams covering on a variety…Read more...

A Backcountry discount, weighted blanket sale, KitchenAid Mixer, and a Bosch drill kit kick off Tuesday’s best deals.Read more...

Jalopnik This Lamborghini Crash Everyone’s Talking About Is Utterly Baffling | io9 Another Familiar Face Is Confirmed for Bill & Ted 3 | Kotaku Battlefield V’s New Battle Royale Can’t Stand With The Competition | Two Cents The Apple Card Is an Average Rewards Card | The Takeout Florida man burns pile of weed in yard |Read more...

Last August, the NCAA unveiled the NET ranking, a comprehensive synthesis of numbers designed to supplant the much-derided RPI as the definitive metric for comparing the resumes of college basketball teams. Despite some early statistical noise, the NET’s wealth of data ultimately produced a bracket that … looks pretty…Read more...

On Monday—a curiously long time after winning the Stanley Cup, given that the team in question didn’t need to wait for a road trip to Washington—the Capitals visited the White House. More notable was who didn’t make the trip.Read more...

Late in the second overtime of Portland’s win over the Brooklyn Nets, Trail Blazers center Jusuf Nurkic landed awkwardly on his left foot after jumping for an offensive rebound, and his lower leg folded horrifyingly under him. This was one of those injuries where players on both teams sprinted away from him, and his…Read more...

The Oklahoma City Thunder went into the All-Star break having won 11 of 13 games, including victories over the 76ers, the Bucks, the Rockets, and twice over the Blazers. They went a season-best 18 games over .500 with an overtime win over Utah on February 22; since then, they’ve lost 11 of 16, and have dropped all the…Read more...

The New York Mets took some heat from star pitcher Noah Syndergaard for scheduling an inexplicable workout in Syracuse between the end of spring training in St. Lucie, Florida, and their regular season opener in Washington, D.C. The trip necessitated a three-hour bus ride to Sarasota, and then a late flight to…Read more...

A goal from center ice in a non-empty-net situation undoubtedly reflects very, very poorly on the goalie who let it by. Here New Jersey Devils goalie Cory Schneider seems flummoxed by Sam Reinhart’s swerving, bouncing 85-footer, and makes a limp stab at the puck on its way by, which has got to be just massively…Read more...

So it was not a great weekend for the Boston Celtics, once upon a time and now not at all the presumptive class of the Eastern Conference. In fact it was a very bad one!Read more...

UC Irvine head coach Russell Turner gave a peek behind his coaching strategy after the Anteaters’ 73-54 loss to Oregon in Sunday’s second-round game, and he inadvertently revealed that he’s as creative as a Facebook denizen who loves sports meme pages and calls the Dallas Cowboys the “Cowgirls.”Read more...

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

This unintentional piece of slapstick comes from last month’s Costa Rica National Motorbike Championships. Riders Jorge Martinez and Marion Calvo were jockeying for position during the race when Martinez lost control of his bike. Somehow, he ended up joining Calvo, who pulled over and was just as infuriated. The two…Read more...

The serve remains the biggest offensive weapon in the game of tennis. If a player can’t find a way to solve a dangerous server, they’ll struggle to find any traction in a match. So that returner has to find a counter of some kind.

UCF was so, so close to upsetting Duke in Sunday’s second-round game, but the Knights fell, 77-76, and were instantly, visibly crushed by how they lost. (As Aubrey Dawkins’s putback attempt rimmed out and time expired, you can see Terrell Allen, No. 2, put his hands on his head as he falls to the floor in shock.) The…Read more...

After Saturday night’s knockout of Bogdan Dinu, Bulgarian heavyweight boxer Kubrat Pulev spoke to Vegas Sports Daily reporter Jennifer Ravalo for a short interview. He ended the session by holding Ravalo’s face, kissing her on the lips, and walking away.