Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

This is a now-or-never final stretch for Artemi Panarin’s Columbus Blue Jackets, with at least a few of their key players on the way out after this season, and right now the team is seated on the “never” side of affairs. The Blue Jackets lost to the lowly Edmonton Oilers on Thursday night, which, coupled with a…Read more...

In the earliest hours of Thursday morning, 32-year-old Clifford Dixon was shot multiple times by a lone gunman outside an Atlanta nightclub at which he had been hosting his birthday party. Dixon was a close friend to Warriors players Kevin Durant and Quinn Cook; Durant has called Dixon his “adopted brother.”

If you’re a company whose business is making and selling pizza—really if you’re any kind of company, in any kind of business—it’s not beneficial to be most famous for your infamous erstwhile CEO. If you’re Papa John’s, and that CEO—an egotistical nightmare who just last month staged a coup to try and buy back control…Read more...

A discount on Crocs, Coleman tents, Hue Ceiling Lamps and fancy dirt lead off Friday’s best deals.

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Michigan State head coach/psycho Tom Izzo briefly lost his mind yesterday, exploding at freshman forward Aaron Henry during a timeout—after a 10-0 Spartans run, by the way—in MSU’s eventual 76-65 first-round win over Bradley. This is nothing new for Izzo (which is an indictment rather than a defense), but considering…Read more...

According to multiple reports from NFL insiders and Deadspin.com, neither you nor Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton are having sex in the month of March. Sources indicate that the news regarding Newton comes as a surprise to those around the league, but about you, not so much.

When a great player’s hype is dependent on masochists who regularly subject themselves to Ohio Valley Conference basketball, it’s not often that they actually shine on the national stage that March Madness provides. But Ja Morant showed up against fifth-seeded Marquette ready to make a splash with viewers across the…Read more...

The NFL Competition Committee, headed by Atlanta Falcons president Rich McKay and totally coincidentally including New Orleans head coach Sean Payton, recommended an expansion of replay review today, addressing among other things exactly the circumstance that recently screwed the Saints and sent the New Orleans area…Read more...

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Fifth-seeded Auburn tried its best to let 12-seed New Mexico State pull off the first big upset of this year’s NCAA tournament by consistently bungling things at the precise moment when they could’ve put the game to bed. Unfortunately, New Mexico State was even more inept when it mattered most, and failed to finish…Read more...

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

No. 2 seed Michigan State hasn’t looked great so far in their first tournament game against Bradley. The Spartans trailed at halftime, but were able to re-established some control over the game with a 10-0 run at the start of the second half. That positive stretch wasn’t good enough to save freshman forward Aaron…Read more...

Less than two weeks after Blake Snell made it known how miffed he was that his team would pay him only barely more than the league minimum the year after he won the Cy Young, the Rays pitcher has signed a much richer five-year extension with the club. He’ll get paid about eight times the $573,700 that he was set to…Read more...

Joel Embiid stuck out an elbow and a foot, possibly maliciously and definitely in the sort of passive-aggressive way that players sometimes do this stuff to each other; Marcus Smart crashed into them, and then onto the floor; Smart got up and shoved Embiid onto the floor; and Getty’s Mitchell Leff snapped the amazing…Read more...

After scoring his ass off for four years at BYU, Jimmer Fredette was selected with the 10th overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft. At the time, the current best scorer in the world was calling him the the best scorer in the world. But across five seasons, four teams, and 235 NBA games, Fredette went 41 percent from the…Read more...

The local television behemoth Sinclair Broadcast Group is infamous for its extreme right-wing politics and dedication to seeding those beliefs into its local news broadcasts. Ring of Honor, the wrestling promotion that Sinclair owns, has somehow avoided being stained by its parent company’s broader creepiness. The…Read more...

Toledo was a place where you could fight a man for money.

It’s silly to come down too hard on a rookie season on a roster as desolate and tumble-weeded as this season’s Cavs, and perhaps even dumber for a point guard, given the position’s unforgiving learning curve. Few can emerge from their teens, get plopped into an NBA starting role, and start making all the right reads…Read more...

The Washington Post released its final rankings for the 2018-2019 high school basketball season earlier this week. DeMatha, a school with perhaps the most storied program in the country, ended up in the top spot in the historically hoops-crazy D.C. region for what was officially the 28th time.Read more...

At first glance, the Wofford Terriers seem like a very specific type of college basketball team. Even if you only watch college basketball in March, you know the one: the biggest fish in a mid-major pond, a styles-make-fights oddball match-up challenge for a major program, maybe even an underdog that enters the…Read more...

SOMEWHERE IN IOWA—Here is what happened, right before everything began to go to hell:Read more...

A discount on Philips Hue bulbs, Cuisinart cast iron, and a reader-favorite keyboard lead off Thursday’s best deals.

A former sports medicine intern in the UC Berkeley Athletic Department named Paige Cornelius has accused Cal football coaches and players of sexual harassment, in a public Facebook post written on Wednesday.Read more...

The NCAA Tournament is what you make of it. So is everything else, obviously, but while the tournament is objectively just what it is—a sloppy whirlwind fortnight of stressed-out teenagers just absolutely freaking the fuck out while playing the most important basketball games of their lives—it is also capacious and…Read more...

The news circulated through the Tokyo Dome soon after first pitch. As reported by Kyodo News, Ichiro Suzuki had told the Mariners he would retire after the game. A real retirement this time; not the stepping-away of last May, when it became clear that the aged Japanese superstar didn’t have major-league stuff anymore…Read more...

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Sports Illustrated may no longer be the revered repository for serious, well-composed, compelling sports writing and photography it once was during the glory days of yore, but that doesn’t mean the shop is no longer an innovator. Careful readers of the publication’s print and online offerings have increasingly come to…Read more...

We all have times where our waistline perfectly bisects two holes on our belt. It’s a first world problem, sure, but it’s annoying! But it doesn’t have to be this way. SlideBelts’ uber-popular vegan leather ratchet belts are marked down to $29 in today’s Gold Box. That’s an all-time low, and about $10 than usual, so…Read more...

The 76ers came back from a 15-point second-half deficit to beat the visiting Celtics Wednesday night, behind a monstrous performance from the huge and unstoppable Joel Embiid. Embiid—whose conditioning, at the moment, is less than great—played more than 41 minutes, the second most he’s played in a game this season,…Read more...

The Lightning and the Capitals are playing an awesome, intense back-and-forth game tonight, and Tampa Bay took a 4-3 lead in the second period on a PP goal that was pretty much the pinnacle of what their forwards can achieve.Read more...

Early in the third quarter of Wednesday night’s Celtics-76ers game, Marcus Smart was hit with a soft whistle for contesting a pass to Joel Embiid near the top of the key, with the Celtics up 11. On the reset, perhaps out of annoyance over Smart raising a stink about the foul, or perhaps sensing that Smart was in a…Read more...

Hockey East’s investigation into an unspecifed racist comment that was made towards Providence forward Vimal Sukumaran during a game last Friday against Boston College has ended in a very unsatisfying way, as the conference says that, despite the “inappropriate language” used against Sukumaran, they can’t discipline…Read more...

Australian rules football is dealing with quite the kerfuffle this week after a network gave in to the creeps who left nasty comments on a photo of Carlton footballer Tayla Harris as she kicked a goal in Sunday’s match against the Western Bulldogs.Read more...

There was something appropriate about Fran Dunphy and Phil Martelli exiting the scene on the same day. Dunphy’s “retirement” as Temple’s head coach had been announced in advance; his final season with the Owls ended with last night’s First Four loss to Belmont. Hours earlier, Saint Joseph’s surprisingly axed…Read more...

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

Florida—yes, that state that often feels as if it’s been included in America just for the jokes, which also might slide into the ocean, aka my home state—does get some things right. Historically, it has one of strongest public record laws in the country. Sure, the legislature loves to poke holes in it year after year,…Read more...

“The Rays have the right under the collective bargaining agreement to renew me at or near the league-minimum salary,” defending American League Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell said in a statement issued on the day the Rays re-upped his contract with a $15,500 raise. Some $10,000 of that raise was mandated by the…Read more...

This is Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Tyrone Crawford getting in a big bar brawl last Friday in Panama City, Florida, according to a report from TMZ. Crawford wasn’t arrested and hasn’t been charged with a crime for the brawl that reportedly took place around midnight outside of Coyote Ugly Saloon (which has a…Read more...

No offense to the poor sap who had to pretend to be the average unpaid NCAA worker for this 30-second spot—was he paid for this?—but what a shameless piece of propaganda. At no point did this everyday student-athlete grimace after looking at his account balance, get shoved and yelled at by a short-tempered coach, or…Read more...

Down 25 points to start the final frame in Sacramento, the Nets looked dead, their fight for a more secure playoff footing just as hopeless. The Kings were supposed to be one of the few uncomplicated games remaining on their schedule; they still have to tackle the top five teams in the East in the home stretch. And…Read more...

The New Jersey high school wrestling referee, who forced a teen to cut his dreadlocks or forfeit a wrestling match in December, has begun the process of filing a lawsuit, claiming that he suffered “emotional distress” and “defamation of character” in the aftermath of the incident, according to The Inquirer, which…Read more...

After defending his UFC bantamweight championship against Cody Garbrandt last year, T.J. Dillashaw sought to shut down the flyweight division by whooping on Henry Cejudo then possibly move up to 145 pounds and fight Max Holloway. But now, instead of having three title belts, he has zero.Read more...

Bolivian club Nacional Potosí hosted Venezuelan club Zulia last night in a Copa Sudamericana match, South America’s equivalent to the Europa League. Nacional had 79 percent possession of the ball and popped off a staggering 54 shots. Zulia took just six shots all night and completed just 47 percent of their passes.…Read more...

The Oakland A’s and Seattle Mariners played a real, regular-season baseball game in Tokyo this morning, but it still had the whiff of an exhibition game. That’s probably due to the fact that it took place so far away and so long before MLB’s actual opening day, but it was also due to Ichiro Suzuki’s involvement.

Beto O’Rourke, candidate for president and naughty Great Dane who keeps jumping up on the counter, was asked about student debt last night at an event at Keene State College in New Hampshire. Other candidates’ proposals to counter student debt have so far ranged from tuition-free public colleges (Bernie Sanders) to a…Read more...

Sure, CBD products are blowing up right now, but they actually can provide major relief for people experiencing everything from aches and pains to anxiety and insomnia. So if you’ve been thinking about jumping on the CBD bandwagon, now’s your chance: Hemp Bombs, a producer of premium CBD products, is taking 25% off…Read more...

If the season ended today, the Carolina Hurricanes would be in the playoffs—and thank goodness, because this young-but-rising Canes team is easily hockey’s most fun right now. Not just because they’re good (they are) and not just because they’ve rekindled excitement in a town that hasn’t seen the postseason in a…Read more...

A discounted mesh WiFi system, Perry Ellis’s suit sale, and a wine refrigerator lead off Wednesday’s best deals.

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